As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B archive, writers-in-residence Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa are engaging creatively with the Franko B archive as it is catalogued, conserved and made accessible. Their blog posts reflect on the complex set of challenges the Franko B archive poses, the archival process and Franko B’s artistic practice, which explores issues such as the limits of the body and the human condition, dealing with pain, suffering, abuse of power, empathy, eroticism, and sexuality in contemporary culture.

This post was inspired by a visit to Textile Conservation Ltd, a private studio in Bristol overseen by Alison Lister. It is mostly written by Maddy Costa, but with texts by Mary Paterson stitched into its fabric, a nod to the spirit and collaborative ethos of Lister’s work. Mary’s texts are from our publication Challenging Archives, which is being printed in a small run of 500, and will be available from 6 March 2020. In repurposing Mary’s words, it is possible that I’ve shifted them from her original meaning, misinterpreted or cut them into new shapes.

Together Mary and I will be looking further at how Franko’s archive can be a a tool for creative research and inspiration, at a workshop in Bristol on the evening of Tuesday 10 March 2020. Further details, including the booking link, can be found here.

1

the blood keeps moving

It’s not often that textile conservator Alison Lister is asked to preserve blood. “Unless,” she says, with a shadow of a smile, “it’s needed for evidentiary purposes.”

The blood on the piece of canvas Lister stands beside as she says this is evidence of a kind. It was shed by Franko B during a performance of I Miss You (1999-2005), and it is – in Lister’s words – “actively to be kept”. This is difficult, because the blood itself keeps active. Already it is a different colour from what it was five or ten years ago, dried to a deep, deoxygenated brown, so dark it’s almost black. And the chemical processes of the blood are still ongoing. Blood is moving in the canvas right now, dissolving its threads, eating its innards. “Eventually,” says Lister, crisp in a pristine white lab coat, “the blood will work its way through the material completely.”

How long that will take, she adds, is impossible to say.

I Miss You is, perhaps, Franko B’s most iconic work. During ten performances over six years, the artist covered his body with white paint and covered a long strip of floor with white canvas. He walked up and down the canvas, like a model at a catwalk show. The audience was packed in tightly on either side. One vein on each of Franko B’s arms was sliced with a small blade, and he was bleeding. Mary, who wrote those words, never saw one of these performances, but has held Franko’s body in another of his works, felt the sweaty exhaustion of it watching Milk & Blood, and has a mental image of I Miss You that begins to feel like memory. Maddy, who wrote these words, has a different set of memories: of school holidays spent in the clothing factories where her parents worked, cutting, sewing, pressing, trimming loose threads from each garment, soon learning enough to set up a factory of their own. These differences follow us through the doors of Lister’s studio, on the outskirts of Bristol, and condition how we experience her work, what we notice, what we remember.

After performances of I Miss You, Franko B gave the canvas catwalks to designers and asked them to fashion a wearable garment, according to their own taste and whims. For Julian Warren, archivist at the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, these are now art works in their own right: not remains of the moment, but beyond the moment. Among the items stretched out on a table in Lister’s studio are a T-shaped jacket or tabard, and a long flared kilt; items boxed and awaiting attention included a heavy hooded jacket and a pair of stumpy platform boots. Lister’s task is to preserve them for the archive: which in this case means accepting one kind of deterioration while preventing another. She speaks of packing each garment “in a way that it’s not a danger to itself – for instance, not having the metal elements touching anything”, and ideally as flat as possible, padding any folds into a soft curve, because a sharp crease would wear into a tear over time.

She also needs to “avoid blood crossing to other bits of fabric”, a phrase that connotes a fear of contamination – startling, given that the fear of contamination that Franko challenges and decries with his bleeding works, the fear of gay men and blood potentially contaminated by Aids. Blood corrodes – but once it’s dried it’s not a health hazard, says Lister. The only danger here, the one Lister is taking such care to avoid, is to Franko’s legacy, to possible future encounters with his work.

The blood keeps moving. Its existence is mutable. It is part of the choreography of time.

2

textiles are intimate with bodies / made to be laid next to the skin, draped across your shoulders, held close for comfort / warmth / identity

Lister’s studio is bright, almost oppressively so, overhead strip lighting bearing down on a motley array of intricate fabric pieces, each an emblem of a bigger story. But the room is also serene: classical music whispers in the background, and when a textile item is not being worked on it is protected beneath a drape of snow-white sheets. There are four workspaces: pieces from Franko B’s archive occupy one; at another, Lister’s assistant is tending to a pair of Napoleonic epaulettes; opposite her is a handkerchief hand-embroidered by a first world war solider; to her left stands a dress model wearing the costume that adorned artist Andrew Logan at the first ever Alternative Miss World, its two halves – one conventionally masculine, a suit; the other conventionally feminine, all lace and flounce – temporarily unstitched and waiting to be reunited. At the next workstation there’s a huge tapestry from a National Trust property, most of it rolled up – opened out, it would dominate the room. Lister stands beside the final table and draws back its layers of sheeting, to reveal – another startling moment – a T-shaped tabard of uncannily similar design and dimensions as Franko B’s. Only this one is made of feathery silk, stitched in the early 1800s for the first Duke of Wellington.

Where Franko’s garment is robust, stern, stiff, the Duke’s is terrifyingly fragile. Its painted gossamer silk has fractured into jigsaw pieces; Lister’s task is to restabilise them into a single entity, to be returned to public display. I find I can’t look at it, that looking at it induces a mild panic attack. My fingers prickle at a memory: of taking down a set of curtains I’d made myself, for my bedroom 18 years ago, from a stiff organza silk. Four years of exposure to sunlight had damaged the fabric irreparably; as I took the curtains down they crumbled in my hands, into skin cells, into dust.

These textiles were made to be laid next to the skin, held close for comfort. The fabric asks to be cared for. It asks for care.

3

her wrists arc over the fabric / her neck bends over the fabric / her body follows the original weavers’ movements / like an embrace

When she works on the tapestry, Lister leans in close, tracing the original stitches with her own. Each mark she makes in the act of repair is sewn onto a secondary backing. She is writing a crib sheet for questions, expected but as yet unknown. Every new stitch must be accounted for, identifiable as such, as a modern intervention. There is a difference, Lister says, between preventive fabric conservation – the measures taken to avoid decay before a textile work is even made – and interventive. As a private practitioner, intervention is where her focus lies.

The word conveys a violence far removed from the close caress of Lister’s fingers. Once, she says, she found a centuries-old human hair woven into the back of a carpet. There is a human tactility to fabrics: they were made by people, worn by people, and those people are here with you.

4

S/he lifts the object with gloved hands. S/he places the object in a box the shade of dove grey. S/he releases the object to a bed of tissue paper. It makes a sound like fresh snow.

I’ve heard Franko B describe himself as an image maker, rather than a performance maker. But his images are sewn into the fabric of time. Their mortality is part of their language. That’s what makes them so human. Mary, who wrote those words, looks at Franko’s textile pieces and warms at a memory. Franko B’s work is vulnerable, she writes: here is a man, naked and hurting, and here are you. Here are you. And here is another human being. And here are you. There is no room for gaps, for endings; there is no end to this work: it is a practice of being alive. It is a practice of being interconnected, of needing more than anyone can ever give, of giving more than anyone can ever pay for, of stretching beyond the limits of your own body into the sinews of other people’s minds.

This is not quite what I see when I look at Franko’s textile pieces.

Mary and I, accompanied by Julian Warren and his colleague Sian Williams, return with Lister to the Franko table. I lean in close to examine the stitches on the kilt. The fabric is thick, heavy, rough beneath fingers; I know because I’ve stitched fabric like this myself before, felt its weight drag against the needle, as though refusing to be manipulated. Sure enough, the stitching of the kilt is wayward, wobbly; I can see the hands of the person attempting to sew it, struggling to control the material as they fed it through the machine, unable to produce a truly straight seam. I realise that as remains of the moment of performance, an iconic performance by Franko B, the canvas itself is so monolithic that I feel little connection with the man, naked and hurting. Instead it is an object beyond the moment, and becomes alive to me differently, as a record of the vulnerability of another human being. I see that vulnerability in every stitch, and it’s unexpectedly visceral to witness.

The liveness continues, says Lister. She demonstrates how Franko’s fabric pieces will be packed, so that the “most interesting aspect is immediately visible”, to minimise the need for unpacking. The protective fabric sheeting of her studio will be replaced by protective sheets of tissue paper, interleaved between every delicate fold. There might be dirt ingrained in the fabric but that too was of the moment. From now on it will be the responsibility of every visitor to the archive not to damage it further with their touch.

As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B archive, writers-in-residence Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa are engaging creatively with the Franko B archive as it is catalogued, conserved and made accessible. Their blog posts reflect on the complex set of challenges the Franko B archive poses, the archival process and Franko B’s artistic practice, which explores issues such as the limits of the body and the human condition, dealing with pain, suffering, abuse of power, empathy, eroticism, and sexuality in contemporary culture.

by Maddy Costa

Although it might not look like it, this post is constructed from two interviews: with Stefan Dickers, Library and Archives Manager at Bishopsgate Institute in London, and Dr Justin Bengry, Lecturer in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London. I approached both of them with a vague set of thoughts about how an institution confers value: is there a qualitative difference between the “value” of Franko B’s work within the Theatre Collection and Tate’s archive, for instance? Certainly the art market and performance market are wildly different financial beasts. At a discussion event with Franko, attended by Alison Lister, the textile conservation specialist who has been working with his canvases, we talked about how the canvas held by Tate is sealed within a protective environment, whereas Alison sees the organic properties of the work, its propensity to degrade where stained, as integral to the experience of interacting with this archive. I’ll be thinking about this further in a future post.

My conversations with Stefan and Justin started with these questions but soon journeyed elsewhere, in directions focused less on abstract notions of value and more on the human aspects of the encounter within the archive. The texts that follow have been written by merging their voices with mine: I’m grateful to Stefan and Justin for their generosity both in sharing their time, thoughts and work with me, and in allowing me to render their words in this way.

Dear future student

Let’s imagine a consistency from my time to yours. That the doors to the library are still heavy and intimidating, that to reach the archive requires passing through a wood-panelled vestibule, dark and austere. I don’t remember any more what I went through to become comfortable in those spaces, it’s just you do it and do it and do it again. It might feel risky, as though something is at risk.

Perhaps you know what you’ve come here in search of. Perhaps you’re searching not knowing. I ended up doing queer history by accident: sifting through different materials, poring over images, slipping through the margins. Cultivate your queer Spidey sense. I want to propose this as a proper methodology: just flipping through things, something grabs your eye. There’s not a reason for it: something unconscious takes your eye there. This might be the springboard for a new line of research, for a lifetime of slowly unfolding work.

Some of what you see might surprise or unsettle you. What we’re doing here, the collecting of diverse sexuality and wider queer experience, is quite new territory. Think of the archivist as your companion and guide, translating from catalogue to object, text, or image. They might say informally: do prepare yourself. Prepare yourself with trust.

Notice the affective power in actually holding materials. There is something electric about that encounter with an object that has touched someone that you’re researching, that has been created by someone you’re researching. Your relationship with what you’re studying can change when you have a tactile experience of the remnants of what people have left behind. What has degraded over time, because of this touch? There is always existing damage, and damage that I’ve created. Harm is inevitable. Franko’s archive speaks to that harm.

What you are looking at is not just a spectacle: it is profoundly political. To know this you need the context. That context can be the context of the moment of creation and the politics behind it, it can be the context of the acquisition of the piece, it can be the context in which you’re now viewing it. It’s going to have multiple moments of historical significance. Lines of connection strung like a spider’s web, sticky and strong, across these contexts, past and present, my now and your now, imagined forward and back. That queer Spidey sense moving through and between, evaluating, reflecting back on the period, and seeing what that means to us. Whisper back to me what you see.

Dear future historian

[of art? performance? aesthetics? spaces of gathering? galleries, or nightclubs, or community halls? of queer lives? subcultures? social foment? resistance?]

Let’s imagine a progression from my time to yours. That the opening of the archive to the social and cultural experience of queer Britain has been one among a series of profound and positive shifts in understanding human relations, that heterocentricity has shifted off centre, that heteronormativity no longer claims normality. These archives stand as reminders that the routes to those changes were complex and multifaceted; that queer history is not just about being annoyed and pissed off, about protest, campaigning, going on pride marches. The expression of the queer community is not just making a placard: it’s about singing clubs, dancing clubs, poetry, writing a play. And it’s about sexuality, about kink and fetish, the leather rubber scene – desires, experiences and expressions of self whose meaning and value are changed by being deemed by experts to be worthy of interrogation, investigation, examination.

What might be required to think yourself back, to the rancour and violence of my time? Might the blood shed on a sheet of canvas do it? An image of a man bound in hospital paraphernalia, shaking a nightclub crowd out of its complacent hedonism? Has the violence of language been tempered? What words need excavating for the difference between your now and mine to burn clear? Classification – how people have been named and identified in the past – is really interesting. We deal with this a lot in LGBTQ histories. What do we do with keywording that either leaves us out entirely, or uses words and terms that lose meaning or gain different meanings or become offensive? Faced with offensive labels and cataloguing information, do you say, ‘we are a progressive institution and we don’t want to project that offensive material on to our staff and patrons’? Or do we say, ‘our catalogue itself is a historical document’? I lean towards the latter. It’s important not to lose that information, because if you don’t know that it had been catalogued like that, it’s easier to imagine that the archive was always this beautiful, welcoming, inclusive place, and it wasn’t.

Franko’s archive winds through progressive waves of homophobia, progressive acts of humiliation against humans who don’t conform to gender or sexual stereotypes, progressive attempts to marginalise anyone who lives differently. The work of classifying and cataloguing addresses the past from the present. I hope you recognise that past as a distant landscape, narrowing your eyes in relief.

Dear future archivist

Let’s imagine a collapse of civilisation, or environment, or both, between my time and yours. What has been saved? Has Franko’s work been saved? While everything around it has crumbled has the archive somehow managed to settle, like geological layers compressed in time? I’m going to trust that the answer is yes. That the archive was deemed precious, worth saving. And that happened because of how archivists now and in the future steer people here.

This is the work of the archivist, this guidance. I’ve always seen working in an archive as similar to working in Boots. It’s a service industry. You’re not a guardian, you’re not a custodian: you’re a facilitator. Someone comes in and says, I want to see something or I want to know more about this, and your job is to facilitate that person to go away having learned more about that. And that’s a political thing, because you decide what to show them and what routes to take them down – and I would try to open up all options.

You hold a position of power framed by generosity. You hold a position of vibrant authority. I’m so reliant on archivists who know their collections better than I ever will, to say – once I’ve explained what I’m researching – oh, have you thought about this collection, when nothing in the catalogue suggests to me that I would have looked there. They know better than I do where I might find things, especially if they’ve been there for a long time, if they accessioned it, and might have been the ones cataloguing it. When an archivist moves on, institutional knowledge is lost. The loss of the knowledge that was there can feel like it deadens an archive. You understand this so well: that an archive is a living collection, but it’s even more living when a living, breathing human is there to open it up to you. And further: there’s no way you can get the physical experience of using an archive from a catalogue. Knowledge passes palm to palm.

You recognise how this job is laced with political decisions, especially when the archive in question involves bodies, queer bodies, leaking bodies, bodies abraded, pierced, scarred. Some might dismiss the images you hold as obscene, but again, what’s obscene is completely political – and who am I to make those kinds of decisions? What you choose to protect is political. So is the question of who. And of course that influences the stories we can tell. How you begin those stories – with the language you choose to wrap around the catalogue – is political. With society in tatters, these stories might reform/re-form society’s foundations. Every piece of the archive a stone to build on.

Dear future artist

Let’s imagine, you and me. Isn’t that the invitation? Immersed in this disrespectable archive, with its tattoos and its scrawls and its weight of canvas drill, with its boots and its radiation mask and its unrepentant images. Image imagine imagination. Deep in the roots of the word imagine an old French word meaning sculpt, carve, paint, decorate, embellish. I think of your hands, moving through Franko’s archive, how open it is to your touch. What do you make of it? What might you make from it? I reach out from the past to discover.

by Mary Paterson

As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B archive, writers-in-residence Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa are engaging creatively with the Franko B archive as it is catalogued, conserved and made accessible. 

Inside a manila folder inside a box inside Franko B’s archive is a packet of slides of a performance he made around 1991. To see the pictures, hold the plastic packet in both hands and angle it towards the light of the window. Squint.

Here is a body. Naked, perhaps? Partially naked? It’s a man’s body. His face is covered by a mask and his body is covered in black marks. Keep squinting. The black marks are words, projected onto his skin and the wall behind him. In these photos he is standing static against the wall, like a captured specimen. A specimen captured by words.

Move your hands down the sides of the plastic packet, carefully. Perhaps there is an archivist nearby who you sense might be watching. Perhaps she makes you feel nervous about touching the real slides with your real fingers, in case your body might ooze with something that tends to decay. Or perhaps there is something nostalgic about holding the plastic packet and squinting at the window and watching these tiny runes come to life like twentieth century stained glass.

Keep looking and you will find slides that are close-up images of words. Are these the words used to pin the body to the wall? They are sentences taken from tightly packed newsprint; key phrases ringed in black felt tip:

Judge James Rant, passing sentence at The Old Bailey, said, “This is not a witch hunt against homosexuals … nor is it a campaign to curtail the private sexual activities of citizens of this country. Much has been said about individual liberty and the rights people have to do what they want with their own bodies, but the courts must draw the line between what is acceptable in a civilized society and what is not.”

*

In her office inside a Georgian townhouse, Sue Paterson, the outgoing Director of Legal Services for Bristol University, describes the legal work that surrounds the acquisition of archives that may contain ‘challenging’ material. Challenging, in a legal context, means challenging to the law; the relevant laws, in the context of Franko B’s archive, include The Obscene Publications Act (1959 and 1964), the Indecent Displays Act (1981) and the Video Recordings Act (1984 and 2010). The wording of the Obscene Publications Act, Paterson says, has not changed since it was first introduced sixty years ago. An obscene publication is a photograph, film, book or other kind of document that ‘tend[s] to deprave and corrupt.’

But what ‘tend[s] to deprave and corrupt’ is a matter of opinion. The words from the judgment that appeared in Franko’s 1991 piece came from a 1990 court case, in which sixteen men stood trial at The Old Bailey on obscene publications offences – they were accused of making and distributing BDSM porn for gay men. The policeman who led the investigation described the defendants as part of “the most horrific porn ring ever to appear before a British court”, linking gay pornography to unnamed violence. Their defence team said the films were of consensual acts between adult men. The judge said that consent was irrelevant. “[P]eople,” said Judge James Rant, “must sometimes be protected from themselves.”

If there is one defining feature of Live Art, it is the quality of the interpersonal encounter: the alchemy of bodily presence in a room; the frisson between the artist (who is not acting but embodying thoughts and feelings) and the audience (who is not spectating but participating in a one-off event). Live Art is about the collision of ideas in the embodied experiences of interconnected people. You could say it is based on an opposite world view to the idea that people need protecting from themselves, their bodies or their bodily desires. On the contrary, Live Art is interested in what happens when bodies are brought together.

For artists and historians of Live Art, then, the ‘challenge’ of Franko B’s archive is not the subject matter of the material so much as the forms and processes of its documentation. Looking at a slide of a man’s body covered in words spoken thirty years ago, how can I understand how it felt to be there? How can I smell the sweat, the fear, the trust, the danger? What is lost in this transformation of an experience into an image? This is not just a transformation from the dimensions of the physical world to the 2D illusion of a picture, but also a crucial transformation in time – from a moment shared between a limited number of individuals, to a moment that can be distributed far and wide.

This same threshold of time is, in fact, crucial to the law. The Obscene Publications Act does not concern a live event but its records. Many acts are not illegal until they are recorded, as Nigel Richardson tells me. Richardson is the specialist lawyer the University consulted about the material in Franko’s archive. The example he gives is of an 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old woman having sex. The sex is legal. But a video of it is not: the video is child pornography. (While the age of consent for sex is 16, the age of consent for pornography is 18.) So, while Live Art historians might argue that documentation is a diminished form of the embodied encounter, the law might argue that it’s a criminal one.

Both disciplines of thought acknowledge the razor-sharp edge of this distinction in time. And it’s obvious why. The circulation of a video is viscerally, importantly different to the experience of a live action; consenting to a live action is viscerally, importantly different to consenting to a distributed document of it. And yet what Franko so expertly highlights is the way in which this distinction has different politicised effects in the service of different types of power. In the case of the law, and in direct contravention of his stated intention (“this is not a witch-hunt against homosexuals …”), Judge Rant used his position to condemn the desires of gay men:

“People,” said Judge Rant, “must sometimes be protected from themselves.”

By people he meant gay men.

By sometimes he meant always.

By protected he meant isolated.

By themselves he meant them, the other, the immoral, the excluded …

Judge Rant meant, “gay men must always be isolated from themselves and each other.” And the unspoken words in that sentence are the most powerful of all: “gay men should always be isolated from themselves and each other,” meant Judge Rant, “by people like me.”

The body is muted by the words. The body is overcome by them. There is no escaping these words, projected onto the body, shaping its curves and its crevices, marking its movements and its desires. Disembodied and enlarged, these words map this body, subjecting his skin to the flare of a projector’s screen like an interrogator’s lamp. Presumed guilty. Inscribed with difference. Inscribed with the difference between the power of the man who said these words, and the power of the men whose lives are changed as a result.

What is the difference, for a presiding judge, between the live and the documented? As soon as he spoke, Rant’s words were recorded in real time by the court recorder, reproduced and distributed in newspapers around the country. He spoke these words and, as a direct result, all three defendants changed their plea to guilty. Judge Rant’s interpretation condemned them to condemn themselves.

*

The naked body, the objectified body, the resistant body, the illegal body, the artistic body, the captured body, the young body, the younger body of the now older body of the artist Franko B, who’s body I have seen on more than one occasion, in more than one medium, naked and clothed, inscribed with tattoos, pierced with cannulas and streaked with blood, streaked with sweat, streaked with paint.

As I squint at this body which glows like shards of stained glass in my hands, I am looking at an idea of a body as much as I am looking at a document of one. What does it mean when your body is described as degraded, poisonous, disgusting? What does it mean when your desires are described as uncivilised, cruel, violent? What does it do to your body? What does it do to your closeness to other people? What does it do to your freedom? The freedom of your body and the freedom of your mind?

Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know anything about this piece of work until you found some records of it here, inside a manila envelope, inside a box, inside a room lined with books. Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know anything about Judge James Rant, or the Obscene Publications Act, or the fact that Franko’s work was separated, at his degree show, from that of other students, in order to issue a warning. Anyone entering Franko B’s graduating exhibition was told they might find his work obscene or offensive. (What does this do to your freedom?)

In the same archival box there is a photograph in a frame, wrapped gently in polyethylene and tied in a bow. The frame is old and wobbly. Perhaps it is a cheap frame. The picture inside shows three men, laughing and smiling. They are young and beautiful. Two of them are naked from the waist up. One of them is lying across the others. Perhaps they are 18 or 20. Perhaps they are 16 or 24. They are so beautiful. Beautiful in the way that young people are beautiful, beautiful in the way that we were all once young and we were all once beautiful. It is perhaps the most intimate, most delicate, most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Our bodies. Ourselves. Our intimacy.

*

The Obscene Publications Act is no longer very relevant. It has been superseded by other laws, which describe specific activities considered obscene. In 2019, the Crown Prosecution Service published guidelines to indicate that consensual acts between adults should no longer be prosecuted under the OPA. In any case, society has changed: the number of prosecutions brought under this act, the guidelines say, had declined from 131 in 1999 to 35 in 2005. Perhaps we have become more tolerant of each other. Perhaps we no longer think that the obscenity, depravity or corruption of private desires should be decided at the discretion of a judge. Nevertheless, the sixteen men tried in 1990 remain guilty. Five of the defendants appealed their conviction at the Court of Appeal and, when that failed, at the House of Lords. When that failed, three of the defendants went to the European Court of Human Rights. In 1997, that appeal failed, too.

Meanwhile, Franko’s questioning of the real and the imagined, the spoken and the performed, the live and the distributed, continues to resonate. As we become ever more immersed in digital technology’s stream of broken consciousness, the questions swirling round what is real, what is a document, what is a memory, what is a prediction, how we encounter these things, and which systems of power they serve, become more complex. If a 17-year-old woman sends a naked photograph of herself to an 18-year-old man, is this a consensual act or non-consensual child pornography? If a performance is streamed live on Facebook, is it an interpersonal encounter or a disembodied film? If a senior police officer is sent a file to their phone, even if they never see it, are they guilty of possessing a Class A indecent image? What if the police officer is a woman? What if she is black?

As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B archive, writers-in-residence Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa are engaging creatively with the Franko B archive as it is catalogued, conserved and made accessible. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts reflecting on the complex set of challenges the Franko B archive poses, the archival process, and the ways in which the archive might inspire new creative work. Franko B’s artistic practice explores issues such as the limits of the body and the human condition, dealing with pain, suffering, abuse of power, empathy, eroticism, and sexuality in contemporary culture.

In their most recent posts, Maddy and Mary have posed each other a series of questions, on the subject of encounter and engagement with archives, and with Franko B’s archive specifically. The dialogue begins here, continues here, and concludes with this post, in which Mary asks the questions and Maddy replies.

You studied English at University. What does the study of literature have to teach us about how to approach the archives of Live Art?

An instinct to avoid the question.

This is personal. Those years at university were a privilege that clings through every attempt at erasure. Worn on the body like a skin, like an armour, no matter how fragile the matter beneath. And so ill-fitting. Three years of avoiding study, spending hours in second-hand bookshops bingeing on the idea of books but not actually reading them, or running away, to gigs, to London, to New England once, following a band, to the loss of self only music could bring. No lectures. Finishing essays at 6am. Three years of block and avoidance. At least back then it was free.

But also:

Discovering Gertrude Stein. Discovering Djuna Barnes. Discovering the feminist writers of the 1890s, and the queer culture tucked in the pages of The Yellow Book. Discovering French feminism, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray. Adding these things to riot grrrl fanzines and queercore bands and the deaths of River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. Discovering Pauline Boty. Discovering Shostakovich. One magical month learning how to spin a web from myriad threads, connecting things seemingly unrelated. A skill that would finally find its uses in the encounter with performance and live art.

But also:

Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling unable to fathom the depths of language, only ever swimming in the shallows of a poem. Feeling the tools of criticism weigh heavy, mistaking a sledgehammer for a scalpel. Feeling at the edges of nuance but finding no way in. Perhaps everyone feels this gut-punch of fraudulence, this itch of imposter syndrome.

Too many critics of performance arrive from the study of literature, unversed in the lexicon of the body, seeking the fixed and the focused. The archives of live art avoid definition but might be described as places of vagary, fallibility, refusal. Here the ephemeral becomes tangible but still evasive, present but still absent, comprehensive but still incomplete. The text is partial, the subtext elusive. Perhaps it’s not the study of words themselves that teaches us how to approach the archives of live art but the study of the space between the words and between the lines.

But also:

The study of literature never ends. A journey literal and lateral, criss-crossing a landscape wide and deep. Always receptive, always discovering, always leading to other fields – philosophy, politics, performance of course. Live art is all of these. The fences between each field open like the margins of a page.

What is the cultural landscape that Franko’s archive imagines? What is it for you?

What is it to step into a landscape long avoided? Perhaps even, just a little bit, feared?

I am sitting in a hospital room having a cannula inserted into my arm, similar to the kind Franko uses for his blood-letting performances. The nurse tries a vein in my left arm, and then in my right, a vein in my left hand and then in my right. Each time a scratch, a scant dash of blood, and then the vein slips away. After five attempts I am nauseous with anxiety and almost faint. This is the landscape I imagined when I thought about Franko’s work. Even though the blood-letting performances are only a fraction of that work.

The archive requires a reimagining on my part. Or rather, has offered a remembering.

I remember a pub in Essex Road, a frayed artery of north London, called Disgraceland. Opening a newspaper to see a photo of it used to illustrate an article on social inequality in the landscape of my youth, wealthy people oblivious to the fractured lives of their near-neighbours in homes judged unfit for human habitation. The name of the pub was ironic and true.

I remember walking the underpass at Waterloo station, known then as cardboard city, a home claimed and created by homeless people.

I remember Soho’s reputation as a dive bar at 3am exploded across tight-knit streets. Sex workers louche in doorways and gay men holding hands and neon lights and detritus and defiance ingrained in the tarmac.

I remember a photo of Derek Jarman on a hospital bed, dying, bringing up the death toll of AIDS, surrounded by cherubic young men. The friend holding the book pointing out his younger self in the photo, fresh-faced, luminous.

I remember a girl at school knocking the heel from her shoe to show the cavity where she hid Ecstasy pills on the nights she slipped out raving.

This is the cultural landscape of my growing up, most of it, just a little bit, feared. Even then it was being swept aside and the landscape that’s replaced it – metal shard and mirror glass, locked door and security guard – is so much more terrifying. What’s that thing Franko says? “Once I was underground, now I’m marginalised – it’s a big difference.”

His archive is that difference.

Maddy: who else needs to know about this archive? Who else needs to breathe this air, construct this landscape, be vulnerable here?

I hold the past in the palm of my hand. I hold the present, I hold the world. I swipe, navigate, like, share. I find Franko’s website, see photographs of the work, read lists of dates, read reviews. It’s comprehensive. Ordered, orderly, aligned with precision. Even the bulges of his naked body are minimised by this geometry of containment.

There is a line in Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism that haunts me: “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Website design portions the thinkable into neat boxes, regimented fonts, formats that function equally across desktop and mobile. What might be beyond the horizon?

I have watched the archive in its journey from slapdash miscellany of plastic containers to the standardised boxes and folders of a library collection. Each item finding its place in a catalogue, sequenced, numbered, filed. But this feels like a different kind of order: one that sets disobedience free. Open a folder the colour of farmhouse butter and what surprise might slip out? My favourites so far: a diary, hand-scrawled with messages mundane and mysterious; a sequence of flyers advertising a fetish club night (“sleaze pit for dicks & clits”) with an escalating intensity of dress code, first strict, then ultra strict, then very ultra strict; an angular skirt constructed with the canvas from one of the bleeding pieces, splattered with blood, sullied with mud, reshaped with lines of stitching that skitter across the heavy fabric. Each object holds the fingerprint of those who’ve held it before, trace of long-shed skin cells.

The archive is for those who hold the world in the palm of their hand and know there are further horizons. Already, two or more decades ago, predating so much modern technology, capitalism had shaped a generation (to quote Fisher again) “whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened”. Algorithms track and anticipate and hustle the seeker down predetermined paths. The archive is for those who crave a different map of discovery.

Maddy – my final question to you: amongst this multiplicity of angles, where are you coming from?

from the ego that (still) wants to make art

from the humiliation of (repeatedly) being the least creative person in the room

from the desire to work with and for others, alongside and through others, to think in conversation, to write in collaboration, to be part of something bigger than myself

from a belief in stories handed on, handed down, retold, reshaped, forged myths, unblinking testimonies, cult romances, besotted critiques

from love of words, love of people, love of mystery, love of otherness, love of dogs and sometimes children

from queer idolatry and feminist passion

from curiosity, doubt, fear

from two conflicting impulses: to be visible/heard/known, and to slip through a crack, disappear

As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B archive, writers-in-residence Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa are engaging creatively with the Franko B archive as it is catalogued, conserved and made accessible. This is the third in a series of blog posts that will reflect on the complex set of challenges the Franko B archive poses, the archival process and Franko B’s artistic practice which explores issues such as the limits of the body and the human condition, dealing with pain, suffering, abuse of power, empathy, eroticism, and sexuality in contemporary culture.

This post responds to the second blog post, published here.

In Response to Maddy, Katrina, Ash
by Mary Paterson

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Mary, I’m curious where this overlaps with or differs from your own experience, as someone who studied the history of art. What do you still apply from that study, in terms of approaches, questions, principles or practices? What have you since rejected or found to be unhelpful?

Shortly after I left university with a degree in Art History, I started working as a receptionist in an artists’ studio organisation. The university where I had studied presented Picasso as the most modern of modern artists, and the sole module offered on him was oversubscribed. So I studied historic periods: principally, the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. All of which is to say, it was a shock to meet an actual artist. And even more of a shock to realise artists had real opinions.

Just like Katrina, my studies had focused on the interpretation of the work of art as an object. In this scenario, the art object takes on the status of something like a natural phenomenon – as still and steady as a rock formation. This type of study, of course, is frequently concerned with art objects so famous they really do constitute a naturalised cultural landscape: the great cliffs of Rubens, Rembrandt, Renoir …

Later, I pursued a Master’s in Visual Cultures: an offshoot of Art History, inspired by the politics of civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Taking an anthropological model instead of an historical model as its basis, Visual Cultures promised to consider the stories that traditional histories have hidden from view. In this scenario, the art object is less like a rock formation than a fossilized skeleton dug up from the earth. Art is a record of its context, both a crystallised impression of a specific moment, and a clue to the environment at large.

Visual Cultures shifts the focus from art as object to art as relationship, but my studies still mined a distance between the art work and its affect. Inside this distance, in both my degrees, sat the art historian: investigating, interpreting, informing. This is the position I have tried to avoid being in, ever since, although I’m not sure if it’s a position sculpted by the disciplines, or by the learning environments of schools and universities – which instrumentalise the discoveries of meaning.

Just as you describe, what has always been so captivating to me about Live Art is that it collapses the borders between agents, subjects and objects, creating an avalanche of meaning that makes this distance impossible to preserve. Watching Live Art – particularly body based Live Art – I feel connected to the artist, who is the art, which is the audience, which is the affect, which is the meeting, which is the art.

Maddy: you studied English at University. I tried to do that too, but had to give up because I couldn’t bear to read (or write) turgid pieces of literary criticism instead of beautiful works of literature. In literature, the art object takes a different form: rarely a single item, the text is mass produced in different versions; although the power struggles between artist and critic remain the same. What does the study of literature have to teach us about how to approach the archives of Live Art?

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Mary, one of my favourite stories you’ve told me of your life before I knew you is of being a student in Edinburgh and discovering feminist performance art in the archive. Is this something you went looking for? Or something that found you?

I didn’t discover feminist performance art in Edinburgh (where I did my first degree), but at Middlesex (where I did my Master’s). Getting to grips with the discipline of Visual Cultures, and armed with the relatively recent discovery that artists are people, I began to explore the visual, social and psychological landscapes of art within living memory. I was looking at artists from the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s. I went backwards like that – from things I could recognise to the things those things were referencing, and so on. I rewound through the library shelves, from colour to black and white, from VHS tapes to still images, from pictures to descriptions of acts nobody had planned to remember.

I remember the thrill of watching a grainy film of Hannah Wilke from the 1970s. In the film, she is stripping off and making ridiculous shapes in front of Duchamp’s The Large Glass. Her body and her attitude are a challenge to the male gaze and the cult of the male artist. Her later photographs document the disintegration of her body during cancer and its treatment. Now her long limbs and smooth skin are bloated and yellow. She stares out of the pictures, eyes fixed on mine. She is echoing a pose from years earlier, in which those same eyes gazed from a field of tiny chewing gum sculptures – models of vulvas, dotted all over her face.

Like many women, I had always hated my body for the way it mediated other people’s opinions of me. Now, I was discovering this archive of feminist performance art – often labelled ‘explicit’ – that imagined an entirely new relationship between a body and a (gendered) self. I don’t know whether I found the archive or it found me, but I do know that I was in desperate need of a new landscape to live in. My memories of this time are visceral, as if my body was really encountering these artists’ bodies. I think of this physicality as a quality of the work, which refuses to be an object; and as a quality of the archive, which requires the touch of your hand on the page, the weight of your finger on a button, the intimacy of your breath.

Is this the difference between the performance of the academy and the performance of the archive? The academy requires its students (and, increasingly, its teachers) to show their workings as they trample over familiar ground. The archive requires nothing but your attention. It predicts nothing but your time. What happens in the archive? What secrets does it hold?

Recently, I saw some of Wilke’s vulva sculptures exhibited at a show of women artists at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. They were lined up in a vitrine, like specimens in a museum. I leant close to the glass. The closer I got, the more the glass began to mist. The sculptures began to fade from view, so I shut my eyes to remember them. I imagined Wilke’s wet saliva still glistening in their folds.

Maddy: what is the cultural landscape that Franko’s archive imagines? What is it for you?

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Mary, around your creative practice you also work as a producer, in finance, on the board of a National Portfolio Organisation: that is, you do a lot of the invisible work that goes into making performance happen. I’m interested in two things here: the ways in which a neoliberal culture deploys invisibility, often to make invisible both the workings of its own power and the machineries of inequality; and also the invisibility of care that makes capitalism possible, whether it’s care for children or those who are too old or too sick to be part of the capitalist machine. You and I have talked about the feminisation of care, and how that is integral to its eradication from view within a patriarchal culture. I’m curious how we can make all this visible in our project, as writers-in-residence with Franko’s archive, how we can question these absences – but also how we can make sure we see them, given their absence, their seeming invisibility.

There are two ways in which care becomes diminished in our society. One is the way in which it is rendered invisible by capitalism – a system based on the exploitation of labour for financial value, which cannot (as a matter of survival) recognise the affects and effects of non-financialised care. The other is the way in which it is rendered visible by capitalism – a system based on the promise of economic potential, which speaks only in relation to how this potential is lost or gained.

This is why caring for people has such low status: the very act of care implies the economic potential of both carer and cared for is curtailed. It is also why it never works to talk about care in capitalist terms – to describe the economic ‘cost’ of care work, for example; to do so is to diminish the topic of ‘care’ to ‘capitalism’, which is both smaller than care and ignorant of its meanings.

I could replace the word ‘care’ in the sentence above with ‘art’ and it would still ring true. I could replace ‘care’ with ‘grief’, or ‘social relations’, or ‘mental health.’ And yet, we still care for each other and make art, grieve and have relationships. We do these things and we talk about them. And that, I think, is a testament to the fact that although we are disciplined by it we are not enslaved by capitalism: its values are not our values, its terms are not our terms, its limits do not approach the richness of our lives.

The objects in an archive will degrade. Their financial depreciation is as sure as your next breath. Are these the kinds of secrets that lie in wait inside?

I know the buzz of finding administrative detail in an archive. Looking through the Edge 88 archives, for example, is to find (amongst other things) a series of fruitful glimpses of the planning process: funding procedures, letters of invitation, suggestions of space required to put on a performance art festival in a run down part of London in the 1980s. Reading about artists’ ambitions for screen sizes or room layouts is an important way to bust the myth of the all knowing artist-genius, as well as the myth of the always perfect art-object. It anchors the work of art to artists’ intentions, and simultaneously destablises those intentions with their clumsy corollaries: mistakes, coincidence, luck. This administrative care work roots art in the networks and complexities of life.

But I wonder if looking for evidence of this kind of activity – the desire to render this care work visible – is also a way of asserting the power of interpretation: the art historian as the arbiter of truth, and the judge of what should be remembered. What if we start from another perspective: that care is held in these boxes of photographs and flyers in the Franko B archive, and in the intention to keep them? What if we remember how this archive came about: as a personal collection gifted by the artist to an institution? What if we think of this collection as a practice of care, which is not represented or contained by any of its individual objects, but sustained in the ongoing encounters they have with curators, researchers, visitors, and our collective imaginations?

In other words: what if we think of Franko’s archive as a complex and multi-layered series of acts of care? It was an act of care to keep this material (do you still have a copy of your undergraduate dissertation?), and then to give it away. It is an act of care from the archivists to take this material, to consider its preservation, and to make it available. None of the relationships involved in this network of care is transactional, in the sense that none of them is complete: Franko has not stopped collecting, the archivists will not stop preserving, the archive will not stop being ready for visitors. And, waiting for the visitor’s touch, none of the objects is complete, either.

In a transaction, one thing transforms (or pretends to) into the next – labour into money; or perhaps, the moment into the document, the present into the past. But in a relationship of care, something remains. Your life is always worth more than the things you do with it. Your memories are never sealed in collections of words. Time does not sit quietly in the past, but persists in the movement of your body, curling its ideas into the tension of your spine.

All these things are clear to the people who care for you.

I think this is what people mean when they talk about the ‘explicit’ body in performance. It is not the material of the body that’s explicit, but the expansive and unknowable landscape of its relations to other people. As Franko often says, his work isn’t shocking. War is shocking. Famine is shocking. Exploitative and degrading capitalism is shocking. Instead, I think of Franko’s work as vulnerable: here is a man, naked and hurting, and here are you. Here are you. And here is another human being. And here are you. There is no room for gaps, for endings; there is no end to this work. It is a practice of being alive. It is a practice of being interconnected, of needing more than anyone can ever give, of giving more than anyone can ever pay for, of stretching beyond the limits of your own body into the sinews of other people’s minds.

This practice of being alive is made explicit by Franko’s archive: the long processes of his life and work. For every artwork of his that I’ve seen, read about, heard about, or imagined in some kind of public discourse, here are dozens of images, experiments, notes, ticket stubs, flyers, scrawled names and numbers, friendships hinted at, romances recalled, pieces of cloth, pieces of paper, memories, moments and moments and moments collected like bubbles of air in the archive. Like bubbles of air, because they do not make an object but an atmosphere. Like bubbles of air, because they are waiting for your breath.

Breathe them in, absorb these moments, process them in your body and breathe them out. In this way, this archival project requires a vulnerable visitor: arms open, ready to be wounded. In this way, it echoes the workings of art, grief, love, social relations, happiness, emotional excess, memory, forgetfulness and all the other threads of our lives that are not acknowledged in terms of the transaction, the object(ive) or the workings of capital. In this context, every intention is an unanswered question. Every encounter is an unexpected response. How do we talk about all of this? Explicitly (breathe). Vulnerably (breathe). Together? (breathe)

Maddy: who else needs to know about this archive? Who else needs to breathe this air, construct this landscape, be vulnerable here?

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The final question for now, Mary. How do we guard against our own fetishisations as we approach the archive from a multiplicity of angles, holding Franko at the centre of our inquiry?

 In Freudian terms, a fetish is a type of misrecognition. The fetish object appears to have inherent properties which are, in fact, the properties of the social relations that surround it. Social relations can also produce a fetish: a King thinks he’s a king because other people are his subjects; a subject thinks he’s a subject because someone else is King. And thus a madman who believes he is King is no more mad, wrote the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, than a King who does: both have misrecognised the body of a man as the source of his power.

You could say the same thing about the artist. Or the art historian. Or the art objects that represent their labour.

There is definitely a kind of transfiguration that takes place when you study an art object closely. There’s a painting in the National Gallery of Scotland that I studied so much as an undergraduate, my mind wanders across its surface, sometimes, while I drift into the oblivion of sleep. The painting reminds me of a time when I believed in truths, and discoveries, and a canonical cultural landscape; before I became vulnerable to the explicit mess of subjective relations.

But this is just a story I tell. I know the painting doesn’t embody my feelings about it. I know that if you walked into a small, richly painted room in Edinburgh and saw the Stoning of St Stephen painted in 1603 on copper, it would not mean my dream of intellectual freedom. When I read about you and Katrina finding Franko’s diary, I don’t think the diary holds the value you found. Rather, the value emerges from the ideas you floated together, the relationship you formed, the stories you can tell. And it is in fact this value that holds the diary – makes the pages more tactile, pushes meaning into the gaps between words.

This relationship that you formed includes Franko, imagined in the conversations between you and Katrina, as well as in your private desires to know more. This relationship includes Franko’s intentions, his acts of care, and ego, and preservation that are embedded in this archive. It includes the archivists, the institution, the funders and the other practical supporters of the object you were holding in your hands. And it includes the object.

But it is not the object.

It is a body of relations. An explicit body of relations. Perhaps, an explicit body of relations of care.

What if we start from there?

Or in other words, the answer to your question is in its reverse: holding Franko at the centre of our inquiry, we approach the archive from a multiplicity of angles, avoiding fetishisation.

Maddy – my final question to you: amongst this multiplicity of angles, where are you coming from?