Lost in archives: disentangling invisible traces and constructed identities
Walker, James (2017) Lost in archives: disentangling invisible traces and constructed identities. In: Illustration & Identity/ies international conference, 8 -10 November 2017, University of Lorraine, Nancy, France. (Unpublished)
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Our visual culture is interwoven with elements of illustrative forms and the ever expansiveness of the illustrated over the centuries has led to a complex segmentation and fragmentation of how to site illustration within other forms of visual culture, forms of knowledge. How we consider and study illustration requires a transformative process that engages with “historical imagination”. (Ernst 2013:44) This historical imagination embodies how society identifies with the materiality of the illustrated and our consumerist exchange with illustration.
As such illustration often remains an adjunct to other textual, visual and cultural forms that navigate different histories and world views. It is proposed that illustration cannot be navigated in insolation as it requires some form of connection and relation with something ‘other’, the archive. Silver argues that: “As social beings, as people interested in people we are naturally less interested in objects than in what they can be made to render up: the cultures they come from, the people who used them, the activities they make or made possible.” (Silver 2015:331) This is evidenced in how we remember and process our engagement and reading of the illustrated in constructing a sense of self. As seen in the literary narratives of Umberto Eco in which the visual, in particular illustration, are constituent parts of a narrative agents’ identity; and Art Spielgelman’s use of early American comics, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Katzenjammer Kids, in In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Both navigate through the materiality of the archive, one that “is no longer simply a passive storage space but becomes generative itself in algorithmically rules prosesscuality.” (Ernst 2013:29) The paper further considers the fractured presence of illustration in archives, museums and specialist collections in the United Kingdom in order to unravel the “visible marks” of the illustrated. (Foucault 1989:26).
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