Back to the Future: The Aesthetics of Digitization vs. the Aesthetics of Administration
The Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform (LAADP) is situated within larger efforts, both at UCLA and beyond, to develop digitally-based means of organizing, presenting, and analyzing historical source material. These strategies go by many names - digital humanities, digital collections, OpenCourseWare, etc. - but they share the aim of developing a new informational aesthetic with equal emphases on dynamism, engagement, and centralization. This "aesthetics of digitization", a scholarly appeal of our age, is implicitly positioned against a more culturally-entrenched form of informational presentation, the "aesthetics of administration", a bureaucratic affect primed on ordered rows of archival boxes under fluorescent lights, amidst no-nonsense architectural décor, containing documents upon documents without clear hierarchical distinction. Defined by the historian Benjamin Buchloh in his 1990 essay, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions", the administration-aesthetic, as a cultural phenomenon, reached its apotheosis in the postwar culture of the 1950s-1970s, amidst the bureaucratic onslaught spurred in part by various interdisciplinary initiatives and think-tank models. Tellingly, this aesthetic found its purest life in new modes of art practice during that era, termed "Conceptual art" for their emphasis on process, idea, and information over visually compelling form.
Los Angeles City Municipal Archives: Entrance
To be clear: the aesthetics of administration is historical opponent to the aesthetics of digitization. It is inefficient, banal, ugly, disorganized, sprawling, unwelcoming, overwhelming, at times inhumane. It plays the barren labyrinth to digitization's sleek and ever-new skyscraper of knowledge. And its sense of space is entirely alien to the laptop screen in more literal ways: think windowless buildings, monumental in the bad way, containing mostly "behind-the-scenes" storage warehouses complemented by charmless and cramped reading rooms.
We might thus be tempted to dismiss, with gratitude, the obsolescing of these older places, and of the taxing research protocols they demand. Certainly this is the implicit call of many recent university-based research initiatives - a model of totally linear progress, with the new emphasis on speed, mobility, and convenience signaling an upgrade over the archive-behemoths of old. But accepting such narratives would be a mistake, a willful overlooking of the ways that sited and digitized, real-space and virtual-space, old-fangled and future research methods coexist and intermix within our scholarly Zeitgeist.
L.A. City Municipal Archives Building: View from Union Station
Take, for example, the LAADP in the archival context of Los Angeles institutions. In-depth engagement with the Platform's digitized original source material and scholarship provides a framework for understanding the historical, cultural, social, political and economic context of 20th century L.A. water infrastructure, but in order to realize that framework's full potential one must follow research cues that lead elsewhere, and perhaps historically backwards - to the spaces of the administration-aesthetic. Which is to say, the story that the LAADP tells - of a vast engineering endeavor undergirded by a complex civic and bureaucratic apparatus - is necessarily a sited story. It takes up space. And it is still actualized, in part, within the halls of administration.
And so I took the cues; I read the scholarly ciphers for what I thought them to be. And sure enough they led me to vast warehouses, industrial yards, awkward architectural behemoths, file boxes without hierarchy, nondescript rooms under fluorescent lights, gray worktables. The itinerary had site-specific value: in these spaces, the history of the Aqueduct appeared richly elaborated yet urgently incomplete, capable of unfolding according to an infinite number of contradictions and sidebars. The peculiarity and difficulty of the experience underlined its potential, in other words.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center: Context, with Records Center at Right
At the L.A. City Municipal Archives (set atop a vast police garage and auto shop on the fringes of downtown) and the L.A. Department of Water and Power Records Center (set amidst an East L.A. industrial yard bordering an emergent above-ground metro line), I studied the complete construction reports of the Aqueduct, administrative files from the various departments within the Aqueduct Bureau, the full run of reports by Aqueduct engineers to L.A. city administration, scrapbooks on early-20th century L.A. water culture. Within these archives, typewritten texts were annotated and amended by the pens of William Mulholland and Joseph B. Lippincott, key players in the project's conception and execution. These documents summed not so much to a historical snapshot as a rough historical taxonomy. More firmly securing the categories of information according to their relative research-value would require further visits, driven by other questions.
What did these archives offer? They delineated an expanded cultural and physical geography of the city, forcing engagement with sidelined places that felt remote from the centers of official culture. They forced consideration of these places as essential to the city, substantial within its informational infrastructure. They delivered the sited experience of sited knowledge--both through the persons of the archivists themselves, and in the organization of the archival materials; these documents upon documents were not arranged solely according to the cold, rote logic of chronological or thematic structure, although they purported themselves to be. Organization was shown to be a form of knowledge-production within the archives, but also a form of criticism and historical analysis. No archive is neutral. Lastly, I arrived in the course of this work at a more deeply-registered sense of the Aqueduct's oft-discussed scale (historical, infrastructural, physical, financial, administrative, archival). In its spatiotemporal span, the Aqueduct touched on many categories of socio-cultural production, articulating them along the path from one place to another and from then to now. The encounter in the archives was with the dimensions of that megaproject, in its historical situation relative to our own.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center: Reference Room
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By Nico Machida, Research Scholar for the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform in the Center for Primary Research and Training
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow!
Several wigs used in the television show Star Trek mysteriously disappeared...
Desilu Productions Inc. correspondence, from the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek Television Series Collection, 1966-1969 (Collection 62), UCLA Library Special Collections
The Desilu Productions Inc. memo from show producer Robert Justman to show creator Gene Roddenberry documents the high value of wigs and hair pieces used on the show to the show's actors. Where did they go? And, were they ever returned? The Gene Roddenberry Star Trek collection and the Robert Justman Papers offer a peek behind the scenes of one of television's most popular shows. By Peggy Alexander
No More Leaders, No More State: Revolutionary Catalonia and the Spanish Civil War
Blog post by Lori Dedeyan.
A recent exhibit in Library Special Collections drew on our rich collections of material related to the Spanish Civil War to explore the conflict within the context of its early revolutionary promises in Catalonia. The premise of this exhibit was inspired by my observations during a recent summer trip to Barcelona. Now back in Los Angeles, what remains with me is a jumble of impressions, collectively charged by the electric feeling of the city - observing the presence of cooperatives and squats, spotting anarchist graffiti, or standing in front of the graves of anarchist heroes Durruti, Ferrer and Ascaso in the sprawling Cementerio de Montjuïc, as a Balearic breeze ruffled the faded tributary flags and plastic flowers. Beside the official efforts made by the city to memorialize the conflict, the more ephemeral memorials on the city walls and streets, sprayed or wheat-pasted, sought to readapt its essential messages to the current situation. Some photo/graphic mementos from these experiences are included here.
Left: The grave of Buenaventura Durruti, flanked on both sides by those of Ferrer and Ascaso. The inscriptions read: "Ferrer! Ascaso! Durruti! Symbolize and remind us of the anonymous many who gave their lives for the ideals of freedom and social justice." And below, a quote from Durruti: "We carry a new world in our hearts." Photo by Lori Dedeyan.
Right: Paste-up poster in the Gracia district which reads: "WE ARE ANTIFASCISTS [added: AND FEMINISTS] BECAUSE WE ARE ANTICAPITALISTS. 'When the Bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of hand, it raises fascism to maintain its privileges.' - B. Durruti". Photo by Lori Dedeyan.
The region of Catalonia, with Barcelona as its pulsing heart, has always maintained an insistently individual identity, with a distinct language and culture. It is, in addition, the largest industrial center in Spain, with an accordingly developed workers' movement that was led, in the early twentieth century, by anarcho-syndicalists. These factors made it a natural epicenter of resistance prior to and during the Spanish Civil War and a subsequent target, in the years of the Franco regime, of suppression through a rigorous campaign of forced cultural assimilation. These memories can explain the questions of identity that today still seem to hang in the air.
"Barcelona, July 19 [1936]. Barricade raised by militiamen on Calle Hospital, in the Catalan capital." Del Amo Foundation Spanish Civil War Collection (Collection 2012), UCLA Library Special Collections
As the event itself has receded in time and its historical narrative constructed and then reassessed, there have been efforts to reintroduce the seminal revolutionary influence of the anarchist movement and workers' trade-unionism to a historical discourse that has seen it overshadowed by the conflict between the Communists and Fascists. In Catalonia, the National Confederation of Labor (C.N.T.) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.) were representatives of this movement.
Poster from 1936 issued by the CNT-FAI, from "Carteles De La Guerra 1936-1939: Coleccion Fundacion Pablo Iglesias" (Barcelona : Círculo de Bellas Artes : Lunwerg Editores ; [Madrid] : Fundación Pablo Iglesias, c. 2004).
Pamphlets and newspapers form a large part of the exhibit, as they have traditionally been the formats of choice for the dissemination of news and propaganda. They were used particularly in the decades of anarchist activity and outreach preceding the Spanish Civil War. As Diaz de Moral wrote in 1923, "Reading was unrelenting by night in the farmsteads; by day in the ploughed fields, during (smoking) breaks the spectacle was always the same: some worker reading and the rest listening very attentively...Farm laborers carried some pamphlet or newspaper in their knapsacks along with their lunches. Any one of the trade unionist villages received hundreds of copies of the like-minded press, purchased even by those who could not read." During the conflict itself, pamphlets were also used for critique or to rally support abroad. The pamphlets here are international in scope and varied in perspective, including commentary by notable anarchists such as Rudolph Rocker. They are primarily from the years 1936-1938.
Various pamphlets from Communist and pro-Fascist perspectives. Collection of Socialist and Labor Movement Pamphlets and Books (Collection 932) and Collection of material about the Spanish Civil War (Collection 205), UCLA Library Special Collections.
This exhibit features a copy of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia from the library of Susan Sontag. Orwell fought in Barcelona during the earlier stages of the war, as a member of the International Brigades. In an article for the New English Weekly in mid-1937, he wrote: "The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists...By January [1937] power had passed, though not so completely as later, from the Anarchists to the Communists, and the Communists were using every possible method, fair and foul, to stamp out what was left of the revolution. The Spanish Civil War was notable for its internationalism, which it still seems to inspire today. Below are stickers I photographed on the headstone of Buenaventura Durruti's grave, originating in Austria, Chile, France and Mexico.
Grave stickers. Photos by Lori Dedeyan.
The early stages of the Spanish Revolution, which saw the formation of workers' and peasants' cooperatives, along with the degree of success with which they administered their affairs, still maintain a hold on the popular spirit and imagination. Personally, handling these archival materials and recalling their contemporary analogues in Barcelona reinforced the notion of how we sift through the documents of history for the relevant lessons that will help us interpret where we find ourselves now. The past and present both are made in the image of the other.
An article about Barcelona's food collectives from "Volunteer for Liberty" publication (New York : Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, [1949]), juxtaposed against the logo of the Casa Can Masdeu, a contemporary squatted cooperative and community garden on the outskirts of Barcelona, as well as a banner hung on the façade of Kasa de la Muntanya cooperative, near Parc Guell. Photos by Lori Dedeyan.
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