Sands’ often describes himself as “too productive.” He can generate five HORSES in a matter of minutes. This over production combined together with his refusal to ever throw anything away is, in part, why the Gift Science Archive is so massive and sprawling.
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Labor, though, also figures into Sands’ practice and, with it, into the Gift Science Archive in other infrastructural and immaterial ways. On the one hand, there is a continual reckoning with the neoliberal demands for professionalization and, with it, a miming of market-oriented performances of labor. What is work anyway?
On the other hand, there is a consistent commitment to honoring the DOMESTIC, day-to-day, reproductive labor involved in sustaining a life and a practice. Questions of value and relationships, in particular, inspired the project’s three “PROCESS EVENTS”, which featured conversations with Vivian van Saaze, Aimar Arriola, and the Gift Science team respectively. But, really, one need only search ROBIN to understand this. Robin is a partner, an interlocutor, a photographer and a marker of time. Murray-Wassink and Wassinque Inc. emerge as new signatures. The kinship unit and business unit blur.
Blurring is one of Sands' favorite actions, actually, whether it be on the page or on stage, in the photograph or at home. In the blurring the formless comes into focus, and the networks that hold objects and people together become our buoys. Those networks, the emotional labor that acts as their glue, and value of relationships are organising principles for the Gift Science Archive. One need only look at the extensive list of ‘social links’ tracked in the database to understand this. But you won’t find Robin there because he’s so much more. – MH.
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Make-up stains.
Email exchange – 26.04.20. “Art for me is a belief system, and a tool to get through life.” – SMW.
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“Body as material. Thought as material. Why does something have to be physical?” – SMW paraphrased by MH.
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 07.01.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of Megan Hoetger and Sands Murray-Wassink unrolling a naked self-portrait of Sands. Lavender chair with Sands his sequined notebook. Studio with mostly empty shelves.
“GSA meetings around this time involved a lot of unrolling. Sands his naked body, the ‘explicit’ images and texts in his work have been always present. But this image, of MH and SMW unrolling together, reminds me of another moment: when we did interviews with possible interns, and we would during the job interview randomly pick a painting and unroll this together-of course precisely that one had an explicit text. It was a surprise, and a nice test if the interviewee and Sands would match.” – RR.
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 28.01.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of SMW and MH unpacking, measuring, photographing and ordering rolled-up painting works. Images of the large print of e-mail from Adrian Piper with archiving tips on the wall.
“Books as weights to keep the painting rolled out on the floor, a table instead of a ladder-ways of auto-archiving, no need to do it perfect.” – RR.
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Diagram with caption created by Megan Hoetger on occasion of the Rijks 150-year anniversary publication. Caption reads as follows: Gift Science Archive (GSA) is an eighteen-month ‘monumental’ performance commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Edition VII – Ritual and Display). The project has in part unfolded at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, where Sands Murray-Wassink is a guest resident, and where he and collaborators Megan Hoetger (Curator, If I Can’t Dance), Radna Rumping (independent curator and editor), and Amalia Calderón (storyteller and graduate student) have dug through, ordered, and archived over 2000 ‘studio objects’ accrued over the artist’s expansive, multimedia twenty-five-year studio practice. Between March 2020 and May 2021 Murray-Wassink worked with Calderón and Hoetger in archiving sessions making an inventory of both physical and digital materials in a custom-built GSA digital database, developed by the If I Can’t Dance team to ‘catalogue’ objects through their messy webs of relations. Alongside the archiving proper, Rumping has developed the meta-archive: reflections on the archiving process, as well as recorded conversations between Rumping, Murray-Wassink, Calderón, and Robin Wassink-Murray on the intergenerational and intimate processes of remembering (later transcribed by Martha Jager). These private dialogues have been complemented by public “process events” that began in the Rijksakademie studio in March 2020 with art historian Vivian van Saaze (“VALUE. What is Trash? What is Trashy but Valuable?”) and transitioned into an eight-month epistolary exchange (“RELATIONSHIPS. Feminist Legacies, Queer Intimacies”) between Murray-Wassink and curator Aimar Arriola, which was shared in the ificantdance.studio over Winter and early Spring 2021. All of these intersecting activities—and countless other studio visits and research exchanges—form the multi-dimensional core of the GSA ‘performance’ and inform the project’s collaborative ethos. The exhibition In Good Company (Horsepower): Materials from the Gift Science Archive, 1993–present at mistral, Amsterdam, in Spring 2021 presented a ‘culminating’ performative installation, which offered viewers one-on-one haptic engagements with the GSA database, the meta-archive, and the materials unearthed in the gift-science-archiving process. For the final public moment of the performance, and in conjunction with the Rijks Opens Studios, the GSA database is being launched as giftsciencearchive.net, a website that makes Murray-Wassink and team’s Gift Science Archive accessible to audiences near and far. Following the formal end of Murray-Wassink’s guest residency at the Rijksakademie and, with it, the GSA performance, Murray-Wassink will open I Am Not American. I Have Venus Envy, an exhibition and public performance program developed over the course of GSAin conversation with the curatorial team of AutoItalia, London.
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Spread for ‘Metropolis M’ magazine, October 2020.
SMW & AC inventorying session – 08.10.20. “You can’t extinguish everyone in your life who isn’t a feminist, or pro-queer, or decolonial. You have to live in the world and with the people in it.” – AC. “Lines get blurry. It’s also about chemistry between people, you can’t account for people in your life. [… ] It wasn’t even about politics, it was their behaviour.” – SMW. “Behaviour enacts politics. Someone’s behaviour is the real politics, and sometimes they are different from what they say they are.” – AC. “There is something about having an irritative quality or work. I may destroy them (some artworks) someday, but for now they can go in the archive and irritate people.” – SMW.
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 22 February-5 March, 2021. Location: mistral, Amsterdam (Pakhuis Wilhelmina).
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Like the horse drawings, the letterhead drawings are not always on letterhead, but share amongst them use of the handwritten text.
“I printed this stationary to use for my business, but never really used it for that. I used it to start making drawings on. My Mom had sent me fruit scented markers with animals printed on them, which I had used in my childhood. I used these to make the drawings, declarative statements to find my way.” – SMW.
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The pages are yellowed and cracked with age. Dutch Curator Erik Hagoort gave SMW a few huge boxes of these French gay liberation magazines from the 80s, and SMW intuitively started painting on them. There are many more than those listed in the archive.
“I had to throw away a lot of these, there were also Dutch gay liberation magazines in the boxes Erik Hagoort gave me, called ‘De Verkeerde Krant’ or so, (‘van de verkeerde kant’ was a Dutch saying for a queer person) but due to storage I could not keep everything as a resource to use. There are hundreds of these painted drawings, and they get quite a good response. Paul Thek = newspaper paintings, Karen Finley = same as Paul Thek, Erik Hagoort is the partner of Dutch artist Albert van Westing and AA Bronson showed a fondness for the drawings.” – SMW.
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Video registration of the third and final of the process event series, which took place as a live-stream conversation within the public program of Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021. The artist and collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping sat together with If I Can't Dance archive and research curator Anik Fournier to discuss the structures of 'collaboration' within the group's 'monumental' 18-month performance of archiving, as well as their respective roles and shared tasks throughout the process. Friday 21 June 2021, 12.00-13.30hr. Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Listings connecting to the keyword “Labor” (807)
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“The word artist means so many different things to so many different people.” – SMW (On AC’s recollection of living in alternate universes from well known/rich artists).
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“There is always a tail (like they say in Dutch)…” – SMW.
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Inventorying session – 03.09.20. “As an artist, you are never really safe.” – SMW.
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Heart drawings
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Amy O’Neill
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“I guess I was thinking of the most visceral phrasing I could imagine. Carolee was always so good at speaking about the body in visceral terms, like putting it into literal words.” – SMW paraphrased by MH.
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01283-2019…
Meta-archive
Process image
2019
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 12.12.19. Location: Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, small studio (in main building) and large studio (in manege). Images of Sands Murray-Wassink, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping moving studio; from a smaller ‘office-like’ space in the main building of the Rijksakademie, to the larger studio at the manege. Images of paintings, slides, photographs, studio interior, bags to move the materials. Plus a portrait of SMW, MH, RR together.
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Meta-archive
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2020
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 14.01.20. Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of various materials that are unpacked in the studio by SMW and MH. Written caption by Sands on a rolled-up painting ‘meet your own needs’. Two images of a diagram MH has made during a brainstorm about the possible structure of the database.
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Lucy Lippard
2020
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 18.02.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of SMW working in the studio. Image of a self-portrait. Image of a pink note from the Angelyne Fan Club on the wall, accompanied by a card saying 'bottoming to the top' (a gift from MH to SMW).
“In between, during shorts breaks we discuss Tony Cokes, and how Sands is attracted to these ‘clear messages’-a bold text on a screen, seemingly simple, effective, thinking as well of Lucy Lippard’s book ‘Get the message’ (1984).” From the meta-archive process diary. – RR.
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Meta-archive
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2020
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 25.02.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of installation activities in the studio, with SMW, MH and Roger Cremers who assists with hanging a large vinyl print and the framed work dedicated to Carolee Schneemann. Unpacking materials. Sands holding a drawing with a clock and 'tyranny' text, a gift for Roger. The beginnings of making the horse cloud on the studio wall.
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Meta-archive
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2020
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Photographer: Radna Rumping
Date: 04.03.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of working on large horse cloud with SMW, MH and Amalia Calderón. First time GSA meeting with Amalia present, images of Sands and Amalia talking with poster of Hannah Wilke in the background.
“There is a gap in this diary but that doesn’t mean things didn’t happen.On March 6th the first process event took place, in a crowded studio, sitting with a beautiful sprawling horse cloud as the backdrop for a flowing conversation (with interesting questions from the audience), I remember how the temperature was literally rising. The video documentation + recording + notes that Amalia took can capture the event. It was also one of the last public events before the corona virus arrived seriously in The Netherlands, and evolved into a worldwide pandemic over the past few weeks, which brings us in a very different situation by now: we can’t meet in person, Sands didn’t go to the Rijksakademie anymore, Amalia moved back to her family in Spain for now, and also Megan works from home instead of the IICD office. How should we continue with this process-that for a large part is dependent on actual people, bodies, meeting in space to collaborate, have rose tea together, touch, measure and discuss the materials of Sands’ his studio.” From the meta-archive process diary. – RR.
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