Have you made any arrangements where your archive will end up?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Have you made any arrangements where your archive will end up when you kick off?

Providing you are an old timer who has produced a body of work that is noteworthy and collectable to archivists. (Young guns don't think of such things.)

Edited August 8, 2019 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Phil Connolly]

I dunno, but I've lugging round two plastic tubs full of Digi-Beta's, HDCAM, Dv and DVC pro and firewire disks for the last 5 house moves.

Hard to tell in advance if any of it is "noteworthy" though

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Only prospective institutions can tell you. Probably if they are not too commercial in nature they may have some historical interest down the road. Although even if commercial, institutions would want to get an archive of famous / noteworthy filmmakers. So commercial or not, that may not be the deciding factor.  The passage of time seems to make masterpieces out of almost anything. (Look at all the collectors of old 16mm TV commercials and movie trailers.) And some institutions may specialize in commercial collecting.

I made 67 films this year on Instagram before they took away the 'like' button. I possibly have one of the world's largest collection of this material. (If this is worth anything for the historical record remains to be seen.) The Instagram film series ranges for 6.25 hours to about 10 minutes. The films are very simplistic in nature and are all about social documentary subject matter.

I never have tried to place my short subject movies with institutions before. So I didn't know what to expect. I have a huge amount of experience placing photography and artist's books with institutions. Many thousand solicitations over the years. I wrote to about 15 institutions with DVD offers and was able to place about a dozen DVD's with 3 institutions: 

NYPL Special Collections

University of Houston Special Collections

FIT (Fashion Institute Special Collections - SUNY) 

Here is a shortened version of one of the films in the Instagram Series to give you an idea of what I am discussing.  And bear in mind, when I speak of 'placing,' I am talking about donating the material. As a general rule, if you approach an institution, they expect a donation. If they approach you, they still hope for a donation, but you may be able to get some $$. And this generality varies depending on how famous you are and how much of a hard-on they have for you.

 

From my work with still photos and books, the rejection rate is about 85% - 95% rejection rate for donations. (Some projects I spent 2-1/2 years on have been 100% rejection...for a donation.)   

What I like about working with movies as opposed to print / books is, the DVD's are very fast and cheap to  produce. Producing a hand-printed artist's books is very time consuming and $$.  Production of the source material used in the books / movies varies on how much you put into it. What I'm talking about is the final distribution costs books vs DVD.  

The benefit of books / photos over movies is; the printed material may have a longer archival life than the DVD, unless the institution takes care to back it up thoroughly. From my own experience, special collection libraries would not accept my work unless it was hand-printed, which makes it a work of art in its own right. Although they will collect commercially printed books if they really want it. I guess my work was not of that caliber, so I had to induce them by hand-making the books.

If you are doing something that may be important down the road; don't forget to do a good job with archiving the ephemera related to the project. 

Strong NSFW

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/ephemera-an-often-overlooked-area-of-preservation/

A couple decades ago I never used to give ephemera any thought. Really, I used to trash ephemera. Then one day a curator asked if I had any ephemera to give them. That made me aware of the importance of ephemera. 

 

 

Edited August 10, 2019 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Phil Connolly]

Archiving is a tricky thing because so much material is generated and it gets expensive to store. Also its not possible to determine if it has future value.  For instance some reality tv show outtakes may be meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but in later years the person they feature becomes POTUS  and it shows him doing bad things... suddenly priceless.

Anything could become more or less important in the future and its really hard to tell what will be worth keeping. 

Thats why when your on Red User and they keep banging on about "future proofing" their footage by shooting at 8k. Its a bit silly, the future ether does or doesn't care about their creepy "fashion" videos, certainly not about the resolution.

I used to work with Xavier Mendik and he ran the Cult Film Archive. It was very difficult for him to find space for it and so far they have struggled to find enough budget to digitise the assets. They have a ton of filmmaker interviews and rare materials but a lot is on VHS which is hard to access now.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Yes, concur Phil. In the early days of my work I was constantly turned down because of the 'no room' excuse. I offered digital files on DVD but institutions want the original artwork or nothing at all. It also could have been their excuse instead of saying they didn't like my work. But I think many archives are short on room. 

Hard to collect it all. Be we can collect varying degrees of sampling of different genres if we want to have a somewhat encyclopedic collection of material. That is how I run my archive anyway. I was an early adopter of digital collecting starting around 2010. About 15% of my archive is digital only.  In the movie world a lot of what is being done is digital only. But it has not seemed to trickle down to museums.

I'm working with some VHS now. Trying to put on DVD. Early 70's material . But already hard to find the ones I'm looking for. 

 

 

 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

One area that has not been discussed is that of 'putting all your eggs in one basket.'

With all the prejudice and extreme views nowadays you can find your archive in trouble if you are ever put on the 'poop list.' 

If you read the art news you will have seen how doxing and shunning are very common nowadays if you don't toe the party line of what is politically correct at the current moment. 

http://www.artnews.com/2018/01/25/national-gallery-cancels-chuck-close-show-following-allegations-sexual-misconduct/

As an underground artist and curator,  nothing really offends me. I can easily separate people from their art. I may hate the person, but love the art. I realize the artist  needed to live the life they did to produce the art they did. Other people can't separate the two. It is all or none with them.

I've seen this 'come and go' popularity first hand with my own work. Here are a couple examples. But have many more direct experience examples with this.

In the past I had donated many projects to Yale Haas Art Library Special Collections. One day they changed curators and that was it for me. One curator may love you work, the next curator hates it. Of course, this is more of an issue with 'no strings attached' institutions that do not accept artworks into their permanent collection, such as special collection libraries as compared to art museums. But permanent collection or not, things can be deaccessed. If you are donating something to the institution, always refer to the Deed of Gift to see the terms. Some D.O.G.'s even make you sign away your copyright.

In 2018 I received a package in the mail from Emory University Library Special Collections. In the package was 2 hand-printed artist's books I had donated to them  a few years earlier. There was no note or anything regarding the return. The books were requested by Emory and accepted at the time of donation. But maybe a new director or curator came aboard and that was it.  And it may be different for institutions collecting the entire archive of an artist. But I was told early on, they can't collect everything I produce. Guess it all balances on how famous you are.

For my own work I've used more of a 'shotgun' approach to getting my work out there. Instead of banking on 1 institution, I've placed my work with 130+ institutions around the world. None of them have a definitive collection, especially of ephemera. But they make up a very broad collection  that I hope will be safe from prejudicial trends and doxing as compared to 1 institution holding all the cards.

Now, getting back to movie making. The wonderful thing about DVD donations versus artist's book donations is this. The DVD donation may cost $5 and take half an hour. The book donation may cost $160 and take a week to print. Sadly, everything that is donated to an institution does not make its way into their collection. About 15% - 20% of what I've donated seems to be lost. No one can or will answer what ever happened to the material. This brings up another topic to discuss possibly later. The unprofessionalism of many institutions.

 

Edited August 11, 2019 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.