Activating the Artist's Archive:
David Wojnarowicz

Words by John Henry

Photographs of the contents of Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box for VICE Magazine by Matthew Leifheit.

Dream scenario for an archivist: one, having a job; two, having job security and decent pay at said job; three, working at an institution you admire; four, being assigned a collection that you are interested in and passionate about; five, finding a well-organized treasure trove of material seemingly left specifically for you to discover that is discrete and meaningful to the collection and institution at large as well as the greater archival community. Wow, right!? Arrange it, describe it, catalog it, put it all together in a finding aid, and maybe even publish your work and findings.

I'll make a controversial, broad-strokes statement and say that many artists are not actively archiving throughout their career and that the “archival turn” happens posthumously, when an estate or managing entity takes control. Many artists work in a manner that is referential or draws upon their past work, but it isn't until their materials leave the studio and enter a climate-controlled land of acid-free boxes, undergoing arrangement and description, that they are truly Archival.

As a student in a dual-degree Art History and MLIS program focused on Art and Archives at Pratt Institute in New York, I was overwhelmingly excited when NYU’s Fales Library gave VICE Magazine access to  write an article on David Wojnarowicz's “Magic Box” in 2014. I was aware of its existence within the David Wojnarowicz Papers (MSS.092), but now that I was in grad school and the library was an email and a short walk away, my archival “spidey sense” was tingling. 

Fales Library acquired the David Wojnarowicz Papers in 1997 and it has since been a centerpiece of its Downtown Collection, established in 1994, which documents the downtown arts scene that evolved in SoHo and the Lower East Side during the 1970s and through the early 1990s.  The Magic Box was found among a collection of journals, correspondence, manuscripts, ephemera, photography, artwork, film, video and audio works. Originally stowed beneath the artist's bed at the time of his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992, the Magic Box was a wooden fruit shipping crate, labeled as such by Wojnarowicz with a piece of masking tape, that contained fifty-eight unique objects. For any archivist, this literally was a magic box or treasure trove of important objects to be handled with great care and attention. I devoured the article and the idea as I was a teensy bit jealous. The archivist(s) who processed the Magic Box and its contents clearly did fantastic work and devoted the appropriate time and attention to cataloging each object, the box itself, and the context in which it existed. In short, they respected des fonds and thoroughly documented everything.

By their nature, installations are durational, so I was not working directly with objects and documents in the same context as they were originally shown. The archival work was wholly digital and consisted of dissecting reference photographs, journal entries, exhibition checklists, and written reviews of them. Creating a processing plan and outlining a specific exhibition history of installation and ephemeral artworks allowed me to elaborate on their composition. Using Omeka, I created records using the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set for each installation (Collection Level) and the objects therein (Item Level) assembled by Wojnarowicz throughout several periods in his career as an artist (Exhibit Level). My research and connections were embedded with thorough descriptions and metadata. This work brought about the focus of my thesis research on the installation work. With these two projects, I essentially did the archival labor to build a platform to access and discover the interconnectedness across Wojnarowicz’s body of work and distill my findings through the lens of art historical interpretation. This baseline arrangement and cataloging was critical as his installations are emblematic of his career, biography, and the cultural milieu.

NYU was simultaneously developing the first instance of their Artist Archives Initiative, focusing on the David Wojnarowicz Papers. As someone who was doing similar work, I was invited to beta-test The David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base and act as a consulting Student Researcher! Using a wiki-based platform, the AAI team populated their new resource with data, text, images, audio, and newly created content. An ambitious project in digital art history, Fales was carving out space for a tool that not only facilitated scholarly research but also was more accessible to a wider community and was open to contributions and dialogue. The David Wojnarowicz Papers were not being migrated to the David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base; they were separate entities. Consulting the traditional finding aid and requesting items from the archive, I helped point out connections and made recommendations to make the AAI project more intuitive and robust. Accessibility and user experience was a major driving force of the project. The scalability and application of this structure was an exciting model that other institutions could look to when developing similar projects.

My research and writing on Wojnarowicz's installation and ephemeral art made something clear to me: the artist's archive was not confined to a convenient Magic Box or collection finding aid. Rather, it was embedded within his life and full body of work. One could connect elements, ideas, and objects to create a crisscrossing web of interconnectedness during the decade and half or so of his artist output. I realized that the Magic Box was not a skeleton key to his career in art but instead a respite from the brutality of navigating life itself and success as an artist amid the dynamic landscape of the 1980s/90s art and political world for a human being fighting against the odds of AIDS and artistic/cultural freedom. To be fair, Hugh Ryan came to this conclusion about the Magic Box in his VICE article, but it resonated with me in a profound way, having gone through my own journey.

In the end, I believe I learned just as much or maybe more about the importance of archival labor and standards as I did about this fascinating aspect of Wojnarowicz’s work. As is evident in the Magic Box, artists often have archival tendencies, even if they might eschew such a label and downplay their organizational impulses. And in the same vein, archivists (especially those working with artists or artists estates) would benefit greatly from pulling back every now and again from the mylar and inventory lists to consider their right-brain flights of fancy connecting the objects in front of them and the less immediate ideas floating around the air. Artists love to stow things away in obscure places and archivists love to root around in the dark corners of the overlooked – it’s kind of the perfect match. It is up to the artist to create the building blocks of their legacy, the gallerist to monetize and make it relevant, the curator to cultivate and legitimize its importance, the art historian to help perpetuate it contextually, and the archivist to steward everything into the future.