[wptpa id=”22″]<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The project challenges what we think of when it comes to an archive. And this is precisely where \u201ca\u201d or perhaps \u201cmany\u201d subtractions reside: LACA\u2019s only collection acquisitions are art-related works or non-works made in Los Angeles \u201cafter its foundation\u201d in 2013. So it\u2019s an archive of the present, of flowing time. As one journalist in Hyperallergic, a \u201cworldwide\u201d American forum for contemporary art, puts it: \u201cWhile the purpose of an archive is ostensibly to preserve the material culture of the past, LACA\u2019s focus is on collecting and historicizing the present1<\/a><\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same article, the author quotes Hailey Loman: \u201cI wanted you to have a space that you could walk into and immediately know it was for research. Not a white cube.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n On the other hand, as Hailey Loman states, the LACA as an archive \u201cis interested in what can be forgotten, what\u2019s ok to not remember.\u201d The very stuff of this chronicle.<\/p>\n 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 \u201carchive\u201d, you might find this to be contradictory, since the word typically means \u201ca collection of documents related to the history of a collective, family or individual.\u201d 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\u2014even if it means losing part of it.<\/p>\n Another American organization, registered in New York state and active since 2009, is the<\/p>\n 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\u2019s short history, the Institute is interested in \u201ccadavers\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cNo Longer Art\u201d), 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 \u201ctotal loss art\u201d now marginalized due to their complete loss of monetary value. This parallel between being taken \u201coff the market\u201d and the US notion of \u201crewilding\u201d is certainly of interest to us. In keeping with anarcho-primitivist theoretician John Zerzan\u2019s use of the term, Green Anarchy magazine from 2004 adopts the term \u201crewilding\u201d as a call to \u201cbreak away from industrial society and all its forms of \u2018domestication\u2019, and prepare for its inevitable collapse by adopting the supposed way of life of pre-agricultural human societies\u201d (as quoted in the book \u00c9copunk<\/em> published in French in 20162<\/a><\/sup>).<\/p>\n But we\u2019ve 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<\/em>, 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 \u2018counter-culture\u2019. \u201cReturn to what escapes us. Play on division, on breakdown. Let go of the imagined complete and powerful3<\/a><\/sup>.\u201d In sum, challenges that involve art and political ecology in equal measure.<\/p>\n THIS WAS: The dissolution of an archive through the living is subtraction. Tracking down artworks that have lost all financial value is subtraction.<\/strong><\/p>\n Translation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\n Cover: \u00a9 Ana\u00efs Enjalbert<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [wptpa id=”22″] 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 \u201ca\u201d or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":15764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1854],"corpus":[1179],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1627],"class_list":["post-14498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-counterculture","corpus-subtraction-chronicles","post_types-chronique-en","authors-jean-baptiste-farkas-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14498"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=14498"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=14498"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=14498"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=14498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}