Jo Melvin, From Soft to Hard and Back Again: Barry Flanagan and His Contemporaries, NYC.

What materials should archives of contemporary art and contemporary artists collect and preserve? To what extent, and in what method, should their archiving be developed? How should they utilise diverse resources to create new values and relationships? In the construction of an archive, it is important not only to preserve materials but also to establish a system to circulate them and to communicate their importance to an external audience. Equally important is to develop a platform for the archive to help promote innovative research work and diverse creative practices.

Barry Flanagan’s archive creates various operational strategies for re-situating art work. The lecture considers some different situations.