The Accidental Archive
Feb 21, 2022. A biomythographic examination of name tags, ticket stubs, and patches, pins and post-it notes.
My mother had an abhorrence of things that were not there for a reason.
I grew up surrounded by carefully placed, well-lit, curious objects which I was not allowed to touch, (but which I did anyway), I would turn them over, pretend they were mine, touch them as though I loved them like she did: because they held special, secret significance for me. The only trick was that I had no idea what they were, where they came from, or why they were precious to her. I knew they came from different places, but I could never stick a name to a face, not even then, and I remained stubbornly in the dark about their origins. Perhaps I liked the sustained sense of mystery.
Our shelves were full, but not crammed with these things. This was an archive, and not accidental, carefully curated. It included historical objects from my dad’s family, (but only a few, stubbornly highlighted in the collection of a new marriage) and none from her own. The balance was collected in the in between, in the gap left between one family and the next, during a time when she was unknowable, thirty-five and full of desire. I had no idea what the parameters of its curation or collection were.
Trying to recall the individual elements of this very on-purpose archive, I can only remember their exoticness and their do-not touchness. The boundaries and outlines of the objects are gone from my memory and in their place, museum down-lights in the glass case of my mind, though that’s not at all how it was.
These things were carefully selected for end tables, meant to spark conversation during boring adult cocktail parties with Herbie Mann playing in the back ground, and my step-father’s business contacts drinking my mother’s excellent homemade limmoncello, taught to her by a chef on the Amalfi Coast. I remember thinking one day, I would travel like she did, I would book a hotel room, and know how to do that, and have the money for it, and walk into my room and toss my bag on the bed, leaving a hint of Chanel #5 in the confident breeze as I passed.
I remember one time being on a trip with my mom to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I was maybe nine. I was attempting to browse through the hordes of stuffed animals and books and science experiments and take-home crafts, with a certain ju no se qua, and not like a kid who wanted, desperately, anything and everything, who wanted today to have been important enough to warrant marking with an object I brought home. I was holding a shell sculpture bear thing, the crappy kind of memento that are certainly put together by exploitative labor across the border. My mom walked around the corner and took a look at it. She screwed her face all the way up and made the same kind of face she made 100% of the time when she asked me for a sip of my soda.
Gimme a sip of that.
I, surprised, and somehow honored, my mother, my thin, beautiful, elegant mother, she of the exquisite taste, she wants some of my Dr. Pepper.
Delicate slurp, just enough vigor to be spicy, not so much that its unladylike.
Immediate face, just like she’d liked a spoonful of salt
“god that’s awful how can you drink that. Bleh.”
This is the same face she’s pulling at the little -whatever, doll, bear, necklace shell thingy I’m holding and turning over in my hand.
“what?” I ask.
“I just can’t stand dustables, that’s all.”
She looked at me. “You know, Something you buy and all you do with it is dust it. What’s the point?” She left me standing there, and the bear in my hand was suddenly poorly made, I could see the blobs of hot glue sticking out from behind the shells. Jesus my mother was a snob. I knew she had grown up with eight siblings in the 50s in Dekatur, Illinois, and that she cut the mold off the cheese and served the rest. She knew how to mend socks, and shoes, and spend her money on a good coat, something stylish that would last, and save on the layer below it. My mother was a hawk-eyed thrifter, and later an accomplished browser of antique fairs. She could always find the gem amongst the junk.
So then what we had at home weren’t dustables, though she dusted them, and I got in trouble when I dusted around them but didn’t pick them up and dust under them as well. (The one time I was allowed to touch, though I touched so much more than I would have had I been allowed.)
The mother of the collection in our home, of those seemingly exalted items was exotic to me, I hadn’t been with her when she collected but few of them, and I longed to be the one to find the… what was it? Talisman of the trip. The thing she couldn’t not bring home. I hadn’t started yet, I had this feeling you couldn’t start a collection like that until you could get there on your own, wherever there was.
Eventually, as I shouldered my backpack and headed out into the world in my cut-off blue jeans, I had a loose understanding of how to find objects of value: they had to be something which came into your possession “naturally” (as in the course of events), held significance of experience, was an authentic representation of the culture it was from, was not mass produced, was worth carrying a great distance on your back for an unknowable number of months, no matter its weight. Economy of size and weight was important – only one or two items in the whole collection were important enough – attached to unique enough circumstances – to imbue them with value. To warrant being carried heavy like a child who has gone boneless through endless journey by boat, land , sea and air.
In the course of starting my own collection, I finally, eventually, walked across Nepal with a Tibetan tea stomper that had been in the family of my friend Jangbu for over a hundred years, gifted to me by his auntie in exchange for some body work I had done on her husband who could not turn his head or lift his arm. Lakpa went back to work the next day, and in exchange, I asked that they help me find someone in the village who would be interested in helping me make a tea stomper. They handed me theirs, and I knew I had something to deposit at the feet of my mother like a cat. That realization makes me nauseous now for the disrespect it delivers with it – the beautiful connection I had with Lakpa and his wife, something real, was turned into a prize, an offering.
Did I do it? Did I do it right? Is it special enough? Am I?
I have, indeed opened the door to a hotel room, but I never tossed my bag breezily, I put it in whatever lock-up was available in the 30 rupiah per night room I was renting, and I smelled more like sunscreen and salt than Chanel No. 5 for most of my years.
Now I smell like my own funky combination of wax, oil paint, weed, and, yes Chanel No. 5, - it’s true, I ended up wearing her scent, but she doesn’t wear it any more. It’s the ghost of the artist she once was, traveling, building her archive, making work. She’s a realtor now, an elegant realtor, 82 years old. But there’s no more Chanel.
The tea-stomper.
When I give it to her is the first time I realize that I am – we all are – unknowable, and no archive or collection will ever fill in the gaps, no archive can ever be big enough, complete enough. No amount of writing, or talking or communicating will ever make me seen as me. I know I can sit down with the person who knows me best in the whole world, we both speak the same language natively, and we can come together with the best of intentions, meaning to connect and STILL they can never know, really, what it is to be me, and for me to know him.
This troubled me for quite a time, and now I know it’s the secret of my practice – all of these things are stored in a knowledge ball, an archive of experience, accessible only to me. Like a giant tinfoil ball under the sink in my auntie’s kitchen, only she added to it, and only she peeled stuff away from it (why did she do that, save tinfoil, and rubber bands, anything that could go into a ball, but nothing else?), and accessed and unwound later, sifted through, torn a bit and mashed back together.
If loving looking at a piece of art is like loving watching someone speak a language you don’t understand a word of, but you really enjoy the experience of it, then making art is the act of gladly and unapologetically speaking in a language that NO ONE understands, or ever could, or ever will, and you speak it bravely and boldly out of the accidental archive of your life’s experiences.
You drag your brush through the pot of having walked across Nepal with a tea stomper strapped and awkwardly sliding off your pack, and also through the blue pigment maybe. Practice, I think is the accidental archive of life, everything. Everything you see, feel, experience, learn, misunderstand, accumulate, try, fail, love and hate all of it, the trauma, the joy, it all gets pushed through the sieve of your practice and becomes pigment of its own. Not so that anyone can ever understand you, really.
You sing joyously in your own language and people stop, and something about the song resonates. Maybe they fancy they understand moments of it. But they will never be made to feel this way, or that way, and they will never understand me completely, what it is to be me, or feel this way, or that, or have experienced what I feel.
What I’m trying to say is that you can’t sit down, finally relieved, there, I did it, its really clear that this thing I went through, which left me raw and screaming into the wind, someone understands what that must have been like for me, what it must be like to be me, have been me, lived through that. But there we all are, aren’t we?
No matter how well I told the story of this fucking tea stomper, bumping across the backs of my legs over the 37 days it took for us to get to Lukla air strip, where we dropped off the mountain in a heavy old Russian supply plane at a limping glide, she never really understood how special that object was, she could never love it like I had She couldn’t see it the way I could, to her it was something beautiful I had brought from far away, and perhaps sacrificed from my own collection for her. To me, it was Lakpa letting me touch him and trusting me, and drinking chang after, and learning to stomp, and how the water swells the barrel so it seals, and how it will stop working if I don’t keep it wet. To her… a gift, yes, a unique, unusual, thoughtful, beautiful object, but it could never ever be, it could never unfold itself and tell the story of its life before me to me, and I could never tell the story of its life after me to her.
Dustable. It verges on dustable in her house, though the dustable merges with the museum there – now she has culled the herd and only the most interesting are left: a low Moroccan chair, a painting by Bruno Zupan, a beautiful inlaid box from India, and the tea stomper, minus its handle – the airlines lost it when she flew back home with it, no reimbursement, no nuthin. Walked across Nepal to prove to my mother I existed by laying this treasure at her feet and the fucking airlines LOST part of it. Oops. Sorry. Like it was an umbrella and not proof of life.
I was building an archive of my own, but the secret – the life that wasn’t on her shelves any more was now on mine: my father died when I was 15 and the weight of his legacy is measured in crumpled box edges, fields of them. My attic looked like that scene the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc. This was the archive of my father’s life, and the legacy of the once-grand American family my mother married into. Boxes of important heirlooms, each with their own story, (many of them from England, where we are from, Charles Henry Howe was his name, and it was not lost on me when I walked into Northcote Antiques in Clapham Junction when we first arrived, and saw the MOUNTAIN of monogramed cutlery, that a) I had been safeguarding a legacy not as unique and homespun or as important or rarified as I had been led to believe and b) had and of that shit survived me needing to pawn it so I could send my kid to preschool, it would be a bit Coals to Newcastle wouldn’t it?
This then was the story meant to be remembered, (but I have ADD!) and connected to the continuance of these items as proof that our family, our lineage existed. It took a studio fire to break the spell of the collection, the incredible importance of each object: once they laid in the burn pile in our back yard, it was a pile of stuff, once loved. Still loved, but changed, and charred. I dragged what looked interesting out, but was too heartbroken to save and carry this archive forward. All I have left now is this Super 8 film camera from the 60s, and a memory of my father’s enormous sense of humor, and inclusive love of experience, which is much more intimate anyway than the cloisonné dogs his mother collected.
So I had the framework for how to make a collection of my own, and a lack of collection, and a lack of means to find my collection. I was in art school. A teacher of mine, Tony Zepeda, who used to pull prints for Robert Rauschenberg, looked at me one night when we were working late in the print shop completing a series of photograveure prints for a famous LA artist, and said: “I don’t know why these kids think they have anything to make art about. Richard (the artist who we were pulling prints for) is in a wheelchair and fighting through (name of exotic disease I forget because I was 30 and focused on other things like myself.) These kids in this fucking school are 20 and they think they have something to say?! Go! Live! Have a life! Learn what loss is. See some goddamn things. They haven’t seen anything yet. How can they make art when they haven’t seen anything??”
And then he looked at me “Wait, how old are you?”
“30.”
“Oh. Okay then. You’ve lived maybe. But probably not. You, too. Go live.”
So an edict. I’m not a successful adult unless I have been places that I couldn’t look up before hand, figured something out for myself, had an organic experience, wound up with an object, known enough to caretake it and bring it home, suffered loss, and grown from it. Clearly I had some traveling to do.
Over the next 20 years, I would leave art making, and my relationship, and, with this edict between my teeth, take my kids with me all over the world. I was searching for my on-purpose archive of “items” which proved I had lived with purpose, and had been paying attention. Along the way, I learned to make friends indiscriminately and then weed my friend garden. To say yes first and then “what are we doing” second. And my collection grew. Tattoos became the practical way to collect for a long time, as I never forgot the lessons of that tea stomper. Less bulky, you see, tattoos. I’m not going to leave a shoulder blade in baggage claim, lost amongst the Samsonite desert. I didn’t realize I was gathering paint pots, my language, collecting an archive which could be accessed at any time and pushed through the sieve of my practice.
Because I move a lot, I am a vigorous and ruthless editor of things. Of everything. There are some objects that I gave away which I miss, things I really should still have, that I jettisoned in a fit of proving to myself I practiced non-attachment.
What a huge amount of will that was, the building of that archive, written across the skin of my body, protected in the skin of my home, carefully bundled in my backpack in cloths and transported to the new temporary home.
I don’t have any of it, almost, anymore. Fires, floods, moves, kids reaching up onto the high shelf, cats knocking things over, it all comes and goes, as Tony Zepeda used to say, “Its all just stuff. But we should take care of our stuff while we have it. But really, its just stuff. That’s stuff, and that’s stuff and this is stuff. But the thing, really, to remember is this is MY stuff. And I like it, so CLEAN THE FUCKING ROLLERS PROPERLY. And don’t ruin my stuff. But remember, it’s all just stuff.”
Last year, having sold most of what we owned except for a pared down and carefully selected set of boxes full of studio stuff, and moved to London, I found my accidental archive. There was a huge storm, and, not being from England, we’d stored all of my art books from the studio, along with boxes marked “Kate treasures” and “Desk stuff” in the basement. And it rained. And rained and rained and rained and flooded. Lara Davies came over and put on a respirator and went down into the basement with Ellen, and pulled up all of the boxes, filled with brackish water, the smell was intense.
Again, hierarchy was lost, order was put to pain. Everything was the same importance – my last photo of my dad curling in the damp next to ski socks I’ll never wear again. This is what Rupture does, it spills forth from an over fullness and declinations, lines, barriers, hierarchies are lost and everything’s value is the same.
After the storm, and the drying, we brought everything to the studio and laid it all out on the patio. 2/3 of it was trashed, and what survived was this packet of things I notice are the accidental archive of that which is sticky, that which transcends my desire to fill my life with proof I’ve lived it and lived it meaningfully, objects others can look at and wonder at the journey that must have been undertaken in order to come into possession of that.
We sound like plunderers, and we were, I suppose, the kids and me. We plundered life for rich experiences, and brought home the objects, but what stayed, after all of it, were the things that someone cleaning out my house if I never returned might just throw away. They’ve become the markers that matter, the memory triggers for things that didn’t even matter, but have hung around anyway. This collection lived most of its life in a plastic bag in my bottom left hand desk drawer, and moved from drawer to drawer each time I moved house, and has now migrated onto my shelf as though they are those precious objects of my mother’s collection, simply because I have no desk drawer anymore.
As the water dried, and the photos curled and I looked at the odd collection that insists on staying together, I realized this archive of my life, memories tacked down by cards, nametags and certificates, it is the detritus of my life that makes the stuff of my practice.
My mother had an abhorrence of things that were not there for a reason, and she passed that on to me – and now, the things that are to be collected have many of the same properties – gained through hard work, unusual, authentic, impactful to me and loaded with meaning – but aren’t objects to be put on a shelf, that trip is done, here is a mark of that journey – but more of a voracious, rapacious accumulation of possibilities and potentialities.
It’s from there that I make work: I’m obsessed with what might happen next, and I think my work sits fat and about to rupture: potentiality at its most fecund, straining to be unbound from the archive of its tinfoil knowledge ball and spoken in words I don’t bother hoping anyone can understand.