Artists Space

Ever Ephemeral: Remembering and Forgetting in the Archive

Julie Ault
with Richard Birkett

Conversation
February 21, 2014, 7pm

For tonight’s event Julie Ault will be in conversation with Artists Space curator Richard Birkett, discussing her thesis research, and reflecting on the nature of historical inquiry as subject and object.

A series of vintage, abstract clocks hanging on a white wall above a long didactic text displayed on a horizontal plinth.
Vintage clocks designed by George Nelson, late 1940-50s. Collected by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Loaned by Julie Ault, John Connelly, Amada Cruz Harman and Rick G. Harman, Jim Hodges, Roni Horn, Michelle Reyes, Andrea Rosen. [A series of vintage, abstract clocks hanging on a white wall above a long didactic text displayed on a horizontal plinth.]

Julie Ault’s ongoing investigation into the significance of the archive and its intricate relationship with registering history lies at the center of the exhibition Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault. The presentation of Ault’s collection, its expansion from the space of personal exchange to public exhibition, speaks to the coproduction of memory and artifact, and to historical representation itself as a field of action.

As such, the exhibition exists in direct relation to Ault’s recent framing of her engagement with “the retrospective and prospective dimensions of archiving in practice,” and the “consequences of registering previously unhistoricized art field events and practices into enduring public records.”
In 2011 Ault completed her doctoral research into this territory, titled Remembering and Forgetting in the Archive: Instituting ‘Group Material’ (1979–1996), including a related exhibition at Signal Center for Contemporary Art and Inter Arts Center in Malmö, Sweden. This work has reflected on particular experiences and sites of negotiation between the enduring and the ephemeral, including the creation of a public archive on Group Material, and Ault’s engagement with the practices of artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sister Corita.