hyperallergic.com: There is a particular kind of shame that comes with losing your own work.
Not the spectacular kind. Not the kind that arrives with a public failure or a dramatic ending. This shame is quieter. It settles in the body. It convinces you not to tell anyone. It suggests that if you were more responsible, more successful, more organized, this would not have happened. It tells you that asking for help would only confirm what you already fear, that you were never supposed to need it in the first place.
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When I was reading through this article there were two things that I was thinking of the entire time. One that this demonstrates the importance of digitizing your creations. In today's world you really can't go without some form of digital gallery anyway. So while you are storing your creations online virtually forever. You can also at the same time publicize your work in that same website environment. The other thing I thought of was more of a perspective I had on the whole article. Theres a saying that if you forget something it might not be that important, it really seems like this whole situation stems from the fact that this artist didn't care to monitor that his art work was in a storage unit, that he knew he could no longer pay for. The whole article is about losing pieces that he has so much connection to. But he seemingly forgot that they were even in the storage unit. Because even when he knew he could no longer pay for it, he just left them there to be auctioned off.
With the talk of submitting resumes and samples of work to apply for internships, I have been thinking a lot about my process of archival lately. I definitely have not found that sweet spot where I feel confident in my ability to find all of my old work somewhere on my laptop, but I think my organization system is getting much better. At this point, it feels like the actual process of digitalisation is where I need to make the most improvement. I hope to, at the end of this semester, rent out a camera from the Hunt library and take many photographs of the art I have created over this first year. I also see many people with their own websites where they keep old work, and I think that might be the step I take this summer. I want my portfolio to come across aesthetically pleasing and also be easy to navigate, which will take some trial and error.
This article really made me think about how fragile an artist’s work can be outside of institutions or major galleries. I had never really considered how something as simple as a missed storage payment could completely change the fate of an artist’s archive. Reading this also made me feel really thankful that my parents always pushed me to take pictures of my artwork when I finished it. At the time it sometimes felt unnecessary, but this article reminded me how important archiving work can be. Even if the physical piece is lost, damaged, or sold, having some kind of record of it still preserves part of the artist’s intention and history. I also found the discussion of shame really interesting, because it shows how artists are often expected to appear stable and successful even when they are dealing with financial or structural challenges. It made me realize that preserving work isn’t just personal responsibility, but also a larger issue within the art world.
The story here of lost physical work is tragic, and I think it is suggestive towards an even bigger issue of storage and possession, especially in the digital world. It has been increasingly clear that there are a lot of questions about the ownership and longevity of anything that is done in the digital domain. It is very easy to work with online cloud services, but it is not clear what the longevity of those services is going to be. When an online service shuts down it is likely that all of the data from that service will just be destroyed, but I would not be completely surprised if it just got sold off, depending on the financial state or morals of the company. With how valuable data is, particularly data from artists, is in the modern world of AI models hungry from data. I could see something similar as this article happening, with the original artist having no idea that their digital data had been sold off to the highest bidder.
In my sophomore year of high school, much of my portfolio of art was misplaced. I don’t know if it was thrown away, put in a box to be donated, left at my old studio, or what, but I lost about 4 years of my art. This wasn’t something I made a terrible scene about, or freaked out about because at that point, there was nothing I could do. What this article writes about is true - It feels like it’s my fault, like I should feel ashamed that something out of my control happened. The shame felt by me, although nothing compared to an entire collection being destroyed by fire, is a real thing felt by artists. The world of physical creation is a scary one - a canvas can be broken by a slip and a fall, and boom. gone forever. (This has also happened to me! long story). The age of the digital media hasn't made this less scary - what if my backup fails? or my hardware renders the software unreachable? There's nothing we can really do in situations like those.
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