Labor

Make-up stains.

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.

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.

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.

Spread for ‘Metropolis M’ magazine, October 2020.

Date: 22 February-5 March, 2021. Location: mistral, Amsterdam (Pakhuis Wilhelmina).

Like the horse drawings, the letterhead drawings are not always on letterhead, but share amongst them use of the handwritten text.

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.

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.