Potential: Ongoing Archive

I had geared myself up for a long day in the gallery, sitting in room after room rifling through musty filing cabinets, endless drawers, mysterious files and semi-labelled boxes. So I was partly disappointed, partly relieved, to discover that 'Potential: Ongoing Archive', curated by Anna Harding, did not look or feel like an archive. Rather, the exhibition aimed to chart how the 11 featured artists use archives as part of their research processes, as subject matter or as a starting-point for a body of work.

The most straightforward manifestations of the curatorial criteria were Helmut Kandl's Portraits Austria 1942-44 and A Doctor from Vienna (both undated). Kandl discovered 14,000 numbered and dated photographic negatives in a derelict house, taken over three decades by a doctor with a passion for cameras. The images depict such diverse scenes as men repairing telephone lines, family holidays, high-jumpers, cub scouts, peasants, Nazis, graveyards and, one can but assume, shots of the doctor and his wife in the nude. No personal information accompanied the negatives, not even a family name, and most of the places depicted would be anonymous to all but the most proficient of tram historians or avid followers of Austrian vernacular architecture. Stumbling across such an extensive, beautiful and personal archive must surely be the holy grail of every archivist, and so looking at Kandl's selection of slides the viewer shares in this special sense of privilege, fascination and sheer pleasure.

Any desire the visitor may have had to learn of curious, obscure and bizarre pre-existent archives was indulged only occasionally, most notably in Naomi Salaman's Changed Press Marks of the Private Case (2001). Salaman presented microfilm documentation of the 'Private Case', a section of the British Library originating in the early 19th century and formerly inaccessible to the public, dedicated to erotica and anything else deemed inappropriate for public consumption. The microfilm contains images of the cards that the archivists used to declassify the books gradually. It was a pity that very few titles of books were included on these cards, but the names of the authors almost made up for this: in addition to the occasional Marquess, Viscount and member of the French clergy, a plethora of double-barrelled continental writers, semi-asterisked noms de plume and pseudonyms of the depraved and blatantly unstable rolled past the eyes. Entertainingly, several publications had gone missing from the collection, in spite of having been locked in the private offices of the British Library.

Artists creating or developing their own archives included Nils Norman, Nasrin Tabatabai, Ella Gibbs, Barbara Steveni and Christian Dorley-Brown. Continuing his exploration of formal and do-it-yourself urban spaces, Norman presented six panels introducing the history of adventure playgrounds; the only drawback was that the viewer was left wanting to see considerably more of his project. Computer-based archives from Tabatabai and Gibbs made interesting contributions without making tediously overbearing and unrewarding inroads into IT in the gallery context. Indeed Gibbs' archive of the Programme series of events she organized for the 'Temporary Accommodation' exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London last year shows what an asset new media would have been to the arts labs of the late 1960s and 1970s. Conversely, presentation of the material Steveni amassed during the Artist Placement Group years (and subsequently from O+I) demonstrates that digital archiving can easily lose the aesthetic and tactile appeal of original documentation. Dorley-Brown's Revisits 1987-2002 (2002) involved the artist photographing all the tower blocks in Hackney 15 years ago and then returning to do the same earlier this year. The 58 pairs of images reveal, perhaps surprisingly, that only a small number of the blocks have been pulled down in that time and that, rather than having decayed, the borough seems generally in a lot better condition now. With its images of gentrification, modernization, developments in car design, architecture, social policy and urban planning, this series is not only exceptionally beautiful but also thoroughly intriguing.

Running through the exhibition and the accompanying publication is the theme of art's capacity to contribute directly to the betterment of society, implicit not only in the work of Steveni, Norman and Dorley-Brown but also in Jakob Jakobsen's New Emotional Map of Southampton (2002). Rita Keegan's small series of photographs of her grandmother's aprons and Jonathan Faiers' Dissolves: A Stolen Life, 1946 (2002), in spite of their merits, struggled to justify their presence here, but perhaps this reflects Harding's courage to create sparks through tangents, oblique connections and the unexpected.