Join us for our eighth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives.

Our next book selection is The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memories in the Americas by Diana Taylor

Publisher’s Description: In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice.

The group will meet on Wednesday, June 29, from 6:30-8 pm at Alcove Cafe & Bakery (1929 Hillhurst Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Available on Amazon

Join us for our seventh reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club — where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault.

Publisher's Description: With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into the seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and saw analogies between the stars in the heaven and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.

The group will meet on Wednesday, May 4, from 6:30-8pm at Canter’s Deli (419 N. Fairfax). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email hello@laacollective.org to reserve a spot.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Join us for our sixth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy by Sven Spieker

Publisher’s Description: The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive’s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp’s “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.

Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.

About the Author: Sven Spieker teaches in the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to Central and Eastern European visual culture.

The group will meet on Wednesday, March 16, from 6:30-8pm at Alcove Cafe & Bakery (1929 Hillhurst Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Join us for our fifth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia by Michelle Caswell

Publisher’s Description: Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

Along with being a LAAC Advisory Board Member, Michelle Caswell is an assistant professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

The group will meet on Wednesday, January 13th from 6:30-8 pm at Canter’s Restaurant (419 N. Fairfax Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot. 

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Join us for the fourth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is Archive Stories edited by Antoinette Burton

Publisher’s Description: Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there.

Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member.

The group will meet on Wednesday, November 4, from 6:30-8 pm at Alcove Cafe & Bakery (1929 Hillhurst Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.