Additional Questions for Bill Fox Part #2
Nevada Museum of Art
Center for Art + Environment
These are additional questions that follow the initial interview performed with Bill Fox. The earlier interview is documented on Wooden Leg.
1.An archive within a museum has a unique relationship to the institution and the public. Could you describe the role that you imagine the Center for Art+ Environment will play for the museum, researchers, other artists, and institutions like the Center for Land Use and Interpretation?
The CA+E is the most concentrated part of a thematic focus for the museum that enables it to generate original scholarship, and attracting in the process new and non-local funding for us. We’re expanding opportunities for scholars and artists to examine a collection of related materials–which in turn brings artists and organizations such as CLUI in range of a broader group of scholars globally. Aggregate resources and they will come!
2. Who is the archive primarily for? Who is the ideal audience that you hope will use it?
Our primary audience is for scholars and artists. Unlike fostering a communication between a work of art and a viewer, this is more about growing a network of scholars and artists and organizations.
3. From where do you source the materials that end up in the archive?How is the archive necessary for the creation and preservation of information about artists and their individual practices?
We source the materials by doing research. In fact, we have an intern working on part of that this summer. That means we look at the history of what’s been produced and try to construct a coherent picture of the work done by different people–but in some cases we also research what’s soon going to be produced (contacting an artist as she or he is just beginning to work on a project for example, and asking them to construct an archive for us).
Archives do three things. They preserve materials that otherwise are prone to getting lost, they aggregate them so they inform one another in the minds of scholars, and they increase the understanding of the art by establishing a larger context for it. Stuff in the attic of an artist doesn’t get organized very well in most cases, or fare well or get studied much.
4. This archive has a specific focus on art and the environment. What niche does this fill? Is the environment in artists practices a subject that has been overlooked by museums?
We’re the only museum-based research institute devoted to art + the environment, and yeah, it’s been overlooked in favor of more traditional frameworks. So you get archives about individual artists, or formal movements such as performance or installation art–but not something on a rubric from other disciplines.