Art and Documentation: Evidence, Work, and Events [ read paper ]

Keywords: Evidence, Work, Events, Art, Information

The tradition of the art avant-garde in the West raises questions in regard to the limits and possibilities of documentation and information science. If documents are understood to be evidence as Suzanne Briet, and later, Michael Buckland, have suggested, what type of evidence does the work of art produce, and does this working of the work differ in modality and significance from the type of evidence and signification that we commonly associate with more traditional forms of documents? Raising the problem of the work of the work of art, particularly in the case of the 20th century avant-garde, within a discourse on documents and information provokes a discussion of the relation of documentation and information science to the philosophical and aesthetic concept of "the event," and with that concept, the issue of affect, as well. If we agree to discuss this notion of event within documentation and information science, we are faced with an inversion of the structural approach that the librarian and documentalist Briet relied upon for defining documents and acts of naming in terms of evidence, and we are led to thinking about evidence and language itself in terms of both tracing and creating. At stake is not only the problem of evidence as it has been traditionally understood in documentation and information science, but also, documentation and information science’s assumptions about the nature of language and time in regard to information, communication, and meaning.

Ron Day
Library and Information Science Program
106 Kresge Library
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan
USA 48202-3939

www.lisp.wayne.edu/~ai2398/