SUBTRACTION CHRONICLES
Episode 10 – Salvaging Sunk Costs

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Located in Chinatown, the LACA, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, is a fund created by two young Americans, Hailey Loman and Eric Kim. Like most alternative and innovative US-based structures, LACA is a non-profit.

The project challenges what we think of when it comes to an archive. And this is precisely where “a” or perhaps “many” subtractions reside: LACA’s only collection acquisitions are art-related works or non-works made in Los Angeles “after its foundation” in 2013. So it’s an archive of the present, of flowing time. As one journalist in Hyperallergic, a “worldwide” American forum for contemporary art, puts it: “While the purpose of an archive is ostensibly to preserve the material culture of the past, LACA’s focus is on collecting and historicizing the present¹.”

In the same article, the author quotes Hailey Loman: “I wanted you to have a space that you could walk into and immediately know it was for research. Not a white cube.” The archive compiles unexpected materials, for instance, pay stubs received by writer Carol Cheh during her many years writing for LA Weekly, a magazine that comes out every Thursday in Los Angeles.

On the other hand, as Hailey Loman states, the LACA as an archive “is interested in what can be forgotten, what’s ok to not remember.” The very stuff of this chronicle.

Finally, everyone involved in working for the collection; researchers, artists, art enthusiasts, is asked to incorporate archive elements to their own projects or research whenever possible, allowing these elements to dissolve and get absorbed by their creative processes. If you take the strictest sense of the term “archive”, you might find this to be contradictory, since the word typically means “a collection of documents related to the history of a collective, family or individual.” Preservation presupposes that what is conserved be brought to a halt, maintained. Preservation requires inertia. Yet LACA brings these pieces back to life. Allowing nearly anyone to redefine the collection itself—even if it means losing part of it.

Another American organization, registered in New York state and active since 2009, is the

Salvage Art Institute founded by artist and researcher Elka Krajewska. The Institute works with art objects no longer in circulation on the art market because they have been irreversibly damaged during exhibition, in transit or following a disaster in the places they were stored. As stated on the website’s short history, the Institute is interested in “cadavers”.

These salvaged works constitute a legal loophole that the Salvage Art Institute fully exploits from both a theoretical and pragmatic point of view. But why save them? An artwork can be labeled salvage, to use the industry term, from the moment a total loss of financial value has been declared and this loss recouped. From then on, that is, when it no longer belongs to the art world (it is “No Longer Art”), the Institute shows interest. Building off of these artworks that become the property of major insurance companies like A.X.A. after being taken out of circulation, SAI endeavors to develop a discussion space focused on “total loss art” now marginalized due to their complete loss of monetary value. This parallel between being taken “off the market” and the US notion of “rewilding” is certainly of interest to us. In keeping with anarcho-primitivist theoretician John Zerzan’s use of the term, Green Anarchy magazine from 2004 adopts the term “rewilding” as a call to “break away from industrial society and all its forms of ‘domestication’, and prepare for its inevitable collapse by adopting the supposed way of life of pre-agricultural human societies” (as quoted in the book Écopunk published in French in 2016²).

But we’ve strayed from our topic: LACA and SAI. Two examples of how research is increasingly important to art, in the USA but also elsewhere. Hailey Loman and Elka Krajewska use these objects as starting points for speculating on and engaging in new theoretical issues. But most importantly, be it through an archive collection or institute, these platforms become malleable and evolving organs for knowledge. In an art world oversaturated by art objects where all things are basically equal, the increasing presence of research reminds us that art, before becoming a matrix for producing rare and expensive things, reveals the limits of our minds. Archiving the present and using that archive in the name of art, or concerning oneself with objects that have been banned from the art market, are two ways of distancing oneself from the more regrettable side of art. To extrapolate: being an artist and researcher in the USA in 2019 certainly contributes to what was once referred to as the ‘counter-culture’. “Return to what escapes us. Play on division, on breakdown. Let go of the imagined complete and powerful³.” In sum, challenges that involve art and political ecology in equal measure.

THIS WAS: The dissolution of an archive through the living is subtraction. Tracking down artworks that have lost all financial value is subtraction.

Translation by Maya Dalinsky

Cover: © Anaïs Enjalbert