To sell or not to sell Langton’s Archive?

Is this a sacrificial act? Or are you just erasing our past to rewrite your own?

Tercerunquinto selling our heart and soul, the sprit, the genie that fly’s out of the bottle when you rub it?

I know what’s in those undeserving plain-wrap boxes containing the archive. I personally participated in creating it.

When I took over as Operations Manager in ’93, I had the decision to donate or to commit to continuing Langton’s Archive. I made the commitment and personally sans-payroll, indexed the archive, making it available to our exhibiting artist and extended community.

Yes, late nights with no money in sight, committed volunteers and friends alike worked to document our history for our legacy.

I experienced phone calls from NLA’s past exhibiting artist’s and students who would request items from NLA’s Archive to further their careers and study. Who wouldn’t have wanted an illustrated program from our ‘Rat Fink’ show? Did you know you could have bought one for three bucks?

I challenge the Directors to create options and outline permissible conditions of the sale. I suggest finding an appropriate offer that keeps archival material accessible to artist of past exhibitions and to students and the art community at large.

I challenge the Directors to publicly publish the Archives’ Index of materials. New Langtons’ Archive possibly contains Artist’s works that were donated to the institution and were not to be considered as apart of the Archive.

Tercerunquinto also made this assessment of Langton: ‘We saw that the “real” site of Langton is not it’s building but its archive. The building doesn’t matter here, the institution is represented in a different way, not by its building but by its history.’

I sat in the gallery for years, NLA enjoyed much return foot traffic due the length of our south of market location.

This building is truly unique and built for art. Did you know there is a hidden hallway behind the theater where we hid things downstairs during events to keep things organized for the theater. New Langton Arts gallery and theater split-level space is uniquely and distinctly its’ own.

I’d ask the Board to poll our past Performance Artists and have them speak to the intimate atmosphere of NLA’s theater and the magic it creates. Where else could you screen Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’ for eleven hours?

I challenge Tercerunquintos’ entire assessment of New Langton Art’s. I see it as a shortsighted, skewed assessment, entangled in wholly opportunistic art making.

I propose that if NLA sells it’s Archive, please sell it’s name and location too.

Honestly, the Archive in all of it’s beautiful imperfectness is at least ours… even if for just a little while longer.

Personally, I disagree with the end result of Tercerunquinto’s analysis. While Langton’s history is important, not as nostalgia but as the foundation for the context under which we engage new artists and produce new projects, the physical archive has little to do with that history in psychological terms. That history has been documented in several publications and has resurfaced in exhibitions which think forward while understanding the evolution of the past (not just of Langton’s past but of the trajectory which has formed various types of practices both locally and internationally).

In truth, Langton, doesn’t have the space or appropriate facilities to house archival material of any sort for extended amounts of time. The archive is inaccessible to almost everyone and therefore exists, even now as more of a psychological space than an actual resource. For this reason, the archive would be in better hands elsewhere, and Tercerunquinto has successfully pushed the conversation of the archive’s future life to the fore in a non-profit that tends to move slowly where questions of identity and possession are concerned.

What continues to concern me though is the assertion that the archive itself is the most valuable asset Langton has, and that it forms the core of Langton’s identity. I find this assertion to be dangerous in that it strays our emphasis from what I believe to be the core of Langton’s identity which is the production of new, experimental works. It is artists and curators who push Langton and who continue to mold and remold the institution from within.