ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I use artwork to open up passages within the library. ‘Folk Archive’, an ongoing contemporary art project by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, offers a critical intersection with the library as a form, through notions of documentary, photography, taxonomy, and the form of the book itself— titled Folk Archive. I privilege the engagement with Folk Archive as a book, but one that is contextualised by art gallery exhibitions. Its authors frame this archive as an attempt to consider what constitutes present day folk art in Britain and Northern Ireland—a kind of popular form of practice that can be opposed to corporate and banal forms of representation. The diverse material gathered in Deller and Kane’s ‘Folk Archive’ privileges personal impulse as its organising logic, an admission that must be recognised within the founding of many museums and libraries, because of gestations that are often subject to the preferences, accountabilities, perversions, intentions, and oversights of the founder. This is not stated as an attempt to overly privilege the role of the individual, but to suggest a tension between individual agency and more conventional readings of archives as social structures. 1 ‘Folk Archive’ resonates in its propinquity to actual institutions by revealing a taxonomical form of holding, subject to generative internal conflicts and oppositions.
