The garden at the Scuola di San Pasquale, Castello District, Venice 2005
Presented in the exhibition Ireland at Venice, curated by Rene Zechlin at the Louis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (1 February - 1 March 2006) following Sarah Pierce's representation in Ireland's national pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, commissioned by Sarah Glennie (12 June - 2 October 2005).
The garden at the Scuola di San Pasquale, Castello District, Venice 2005
Robert Smithson walking along Spiral Jetty, Utah. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Courtesy the Estate of Robert Smithson, copyright 1996
by Rene Zechlin
The concept of documentation comes from the legal area. There, the document is a certification or a piece of evidence. The document is thus regarded as a representation of truth. Documentation and documentary practice, therefore, always have something to do with a search for or a representation of truth. Between the document on the one hand, and truth on the other, however, various levels are inserted which, with various methods, try to bridge the gap and which are also a field of activity for artistic strategies.
"If a document, in the definition of the term, is 'an object serving to identify a reality' it stands in relation to a truth, the truth of representation. The concept of the documentary, on the other hand, stands in a relation to a point of view, an attitude."(1) The document is part of a reality which is reconstructed by documentary procedures. Through the reconstruction in the form of making a connection between individual documents, reality can take on very different forms. The document therefore relates to documentation as reality to truth. Whereas document and reality describe what is factual, documentation and truth tend toward an interpretative statement. Dealing with the document with an eye to a reconstruction of reality or even a statement of truth is therefore always purposeful and thus burdened with the subjectivity of the point of view and the mode of presentation. This problem is the same in law and art, but it is dealt with employing different strategies. Whereas in legal proceedings, through the repeated juxtaposition of various modes of presentation an attempt is made to eliminate subjectivity as far as possible, in documentary procedures within art, subjectivity is either consciously employed or an attempt is made to side-step it in various ways. A couple of examples should make this clear.
(1) Pascale Cassagnau: Future Amnesia (The Need for Documents), in The Need to Document Zurich: JRP Ringier 2005 p. 167.
The historical painting, for instance, is an artistic form of documentation which interprets and presents historical facts in an unambiguous way with a view to making a certain statement. When making a classification according to the degree of employment of purposeful interpretations, a further, particular form of documentation in the fine arts must, interestingly enough, be placed completely on the subjective side: the documentation of art itself. We know about forms of art tightly defined by time or space, such as performance or land art, mostly only through their documentation, which is often very far removed from an objective viewpoint. The documentation serves rather to complete the art work according to the artist's intentions.
In both research practice and art, an archive avoids any purposeful interpretation of its contents. The archive is the neutral totality of documents which serve as a basis for an interpretation. The archive thus pretends to be a kind of pre-documentation and appears, paradoxically, in its lack of purposeful direction, to be closer to an objective truth. (However, setting up an archive already includes subjective processes of selection.) This objectivity, however, can only continue to exist on a symbolic level. Any use of the archive materials to form a statement inherently includes already an instrumentalisation and subjectivisation of the material.
A middle way between an apparently objective neutrality and a conscious instrumentalisation of subjectivity in documentary procedures is offered by the form of (the documentary) installation. Jan Verwoert compares this with Adorno's concept of the essay. For Adorno, the essay counters the linear, objectifying thinking of science with another form of knowing which is based on grasping associatively arranged statements in going through a personal experience. Similar to the essay, in a documentary installation, individual documents are laid out and the viewer is called upon to make his or her own connections between the materials and to personally go through and understand the historical ambivalences. The installation thus opens up its topic not in the form of an argument, but rather communicates it as an experience and therefore could be described as an 'essayistic installation'. The concern of essayistic documentation would be therefore to set up a necessary measure of formal coherence in order to make contents experienceable without reducing the complexity of the object through the form of presentation. (2)
(2) Jan Verwoert: Dokumentation als kuenstlerische Praxis, springerin 3, Wien, 2003 p. 28.
(Rene Zechlin, "The Concept of Documentation", wall text commissioned by Sarah Pierce for her installation in Ireland at Venice, Louis Glucksman Gallery, Cork 2006.)