Archival collections

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Rembert Hueser

NANCY ANN COYNE: ARCHIVING MEMORY

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, ELMER L. ANDERSEN LIBRARY

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

FEBRUARY 7-SEPTEMBER 30, 2005

Why her parents "shlepped" around a book of family photographs after fleeing from Austria, Erika Rosenkranz does not know for certain. "I suppose we wanted to keep our identity close at hand, always there," read Rosenkranz's words in the caption for With Mother in Vienna, a life-size, transparent photograph from 1936, part of Nancy Ann Coyne's installation "Archiving Memory." Displayed in the Elmer L. Andersen Library of the University of Minnesota, this thirty-five foot high "family album" is a public art exhibit--the name of this family being "Austrian Holocaust survivors and Nazi resisters."

In "Archiving Memory," a collaboration with Conway Schulte architects, a total of twelve life-size photographs of everyday people were placed in the library's windows. What are the photographs looking for? And how does one "flip through" a building of photos? One must first consider what direction the photos are facing. The windows now covered with the photographs of Austrians forced into exile are facing Willey Hall, home of the Minnesota Population Center, which specializes in historical demography, population geography, and family demography, and a small, infrequently used passageway between the two buildings that appears almost contemplative amidst the bustle of this large research university. When one walks inside the Andersen Library along the curved, limestone wall of the galleries, one can see through the photos to the people passing by outside; the transparencies have become a filter between inside and out. Inside, the row of four photos on each story of the building and their projected doubles on the floor, whose intensity is dependent on the light of the day, have as their opposites various archival suites and special collections units located across the open space of the atrium, behind oak panels and glass. Serving as interdependent contexts, the transparencies, their doubles, and the empty spaces created by the building and the collections, create a series of constellations.

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From these constellations various types of stories emerge. On the first floor, family photographs from 1936 to 1939 (among them a photograph of nine-year-old Erika) face the Children's Literature Research Collective. On the second floor, family photographs from 1940 to 1943 (when the National Socialists began organizing deportations and industrial mass murder) face the collection of papers of Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century inventor of computer memory, which is "dedicated to promoting study of the history of information technology and information processing and their impact on society." On the third floor, family photographs from 1944 to 1947 face the Immigration History Research Center and the Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

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Coyne's family album of forced exiles, which includes both studio and amateur photography--combined with textual snippets of oral histories--has opened up the impressive bunker of the Andersen Library from its margins. The exhibit asserts that it is the use of an archive that defines the archive. Following Irit Rogoff's readings of the function of "luggage" within contemporary art gallery exhibitions, of "that which has been left behind," these projected photographs "require a certain taxonomy, decoding, and differentiation so that they might inhabit a place away from the instinctive, empathetic responses that they are assumed to elicit--if they are to maintain their potency within the visual signification of geographic complexities." (1)

Rosenkranz knew very well that her photographs that are "close at hand, always there" could not guarantee her an identity. What the photographs signify instead are various absences; they are both "not there" and "not that," to paraphrase philosopher Jacques Derrida. Contrary to popular belief, the excess of the archive, in its inability to control its countless operations, does not have to obstruct the significance of Holocaust remembrance. Rather, it can be understood as a chance for initiating more precise, surprising, and motivated con-textualizations--an approach that goes beyond those adhering to a mere logic of reconstruction.

Christian Boltanski's series of gelatin silver photographs, "The 62 Members of the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955" (1972) does just this by suggesting how one might deal with absences in a constructive and playful way. His album presents re-created pictures of children that were members of the Mickey Mouse Club with only their membership number underneath. This work is able to "provocatively address ... the importance and possibility of dealing with the Holocaust in a nonreferential or nonhistorical way," (2) precisely because the combination of nameless faces with numbers has as its referent a post-Holocaust historical index that the viewer can engage with. One does not have to repeat the same imagery all over again.