Reading “Preservation Matters” by Chon A. Noriega, immediately brought to mind James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture. Clifford is an art historian and professor at UC Santa Cruz who is known for his discussion of the preservation and presentation of non-Western art. In the chapter “On Collecting Art and Culture,” he explains how the dominant Western paradigm categorizes and thus archives art for posterity. According to Clifford, non-Western art is sorted according to the standards of the West: craft and fine art. This imposition of non-native categorization often separates bodies of work and fails to preserve the art in a way which honors its original attention.
In reading Noriega’s article, I got stuck on the notion of what creates an accurate archive. As an archive needs to be collected by a person, or group of people, it will, without a doubt, bear the viewpoint of those who created the archive. I loved that Noriega included his interactions with the artist, Harry Gamboa Jr, especially the conclusion that it was impossible for the artist to have an “accurate account of (his) personal history” because he had always been in the process of keeping an archive (5). Even though it logically seems that the artist should be the objective authority of his own work, it is impossible to deny that the creator every archive holds a bias.
Noriega’s account of building up the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) into an archive which provided real use and value for both the scholarly community and Chicano/a heritage community is what brought me to think of Clifford’s discussion of categorization. Noriega explains that in order to put information into an archive or resource, that information must be extracted from the community of its origin. In his position as the director of CSRC, his aim was to not “extract” information, thus removing it from the community, but to create a resource where the material could serve its community in a new way, a constructive rather than destructive force. This made me think of how Clifford argues that by placing non-Western heritage artworks in a museum setting, they can often loose their original meaning as they are often misinterpreted and can no longer carry out their intended function. (example: by removing a funeral mask from its indigenous community, one is not only taking away a ceremonial object, but also placing it in a setting for which is was not intended to be interacted with)
While Noriega’s account is more related to creating accessible information, rather than an argument regarding the placement of artifacts, both articles brought up questions for me about how data is sorted. Improper categorization can result in lost information and searching for information through a lens different from the one used to organize is often a fruitless search. (example: searching by tags or keywords which were not applied to the object in database, though they may be valid descriptions of said object) The construction of the archive is itself, in many ways, the construction of a specific argument. If anything, Noriega’s article sheds light on the misconception that an archive is inherently whole, rather archives should be viewed as a continual development based on the viewpoint of the collector(s).
The Predicament of Culture on the Harvard Press Website