The Artist as Archivist
Journal Entry: December 27, 2025 – 11:12 AM
History is not something that simply happens to artists. It is something that gets written about them, often much later, by people who were not present, working from fragments, market signals, and secondhand interpretations. This is why history matters, and why artists cannot afford to outsource it entirely to others.
Every artist should think of their entire body of work as a single, evolving project. Individual pieces may come and go, be sold, lost, or misunderstood, but together they form a living record of inquiry, experiment, failure, persistence, and growth. To treat works as isolated events is to fracture that record. To think archivally is to recognize continuity where the world tends to see only product.
Being one’s own archivist is not an act of ego. It is an act of clarity. Notes matter. Sketches matter. Process photographs matter. Drafts, false starts, abandoned paths, studio routines, and side experiments matter. These materials do not merely explain the work. They are part of the work. When artists fail to document their thinking, others are forced to speculate, often projecting fashionable theories or market-friendly narratives onto work that emerged from very different conditions.
It is far better to write down what you were thinking than to allow someone else to guess. The main beneficiary is yourself as a way of maintaining clarity of insight about your body of work as a totality. This mapping serves to provide new openings for future work when you hit dead spots or need to find a new way forward or want to examine what you have done to date. It is an extremely valuable practice to maintain.
One of the quiet failures of historicism in the arts community is its dependence on a narrow band of already validated figures. Art historians, like artists, must build careers. Writing about well-known artists carries name recognition, institutional access, and professional safety. The result is a feedback loop where a small number of artists receive disproportionate attention, while the broader field, where most of the real experimentation is taking place, remains largely undocumented and unexamined.
This produces a distorted picture of any given period. Movements appear cleaner, more unified, and more intentional than they ever were. The messy reality, the overlapping approaches, the regional differences, the parallel discoveries made in isolation, all fade into the background. What remains is a simplified narrative shaped less by what actually happened and more by what collectors, museums, and publishers find easy to circulate among themselves.
The market loves a tidy story. History rarely is one.
An honest cultural record requires work. It requires many voices, many notebooks, many small archives maintained by artists who understand that their experience is not marginal simply because it is not famous. When only the most visible work is preserved and discussed, the result is a false narrative that mistakes dominance for significance and visibility for value.
Artists who keep their own records help correct this imbalance. They leave behind not just objects but context. They show how ideas traveled, how influences crossed paths, how techniques emerged simultaneously in different places without centralized coordination. They reveal the field as it actually was: plural, uneven, and alive.
Archiving your work is not about controlling how you will be remembered. It is about preventing erasure. It is about giving future readers, artists, and historians enough information to see the complexity of the moment you lived through. When artists take responsibility for their own documentation, history becomes less of a speculative exercise and more of a conversation across time.
If we want a truer account of what art was in our era, it cannot be written solely by institutions or markets. It must be co-authored by the artists themselves, one studio note, one photograph, one reflection at a time.
I’ve been enjoying all of your writings. As always, they are excellent and thought provoking. Not commenting much as I’m recovering from a fall and surgery.
I have all my art pieces sketched out with notes about meaning, colors, the engineering of how I'm putting the objects best to be attached. I don't think about who'll be looking at these sketchbooks/journals but it's all what I need to see how a piece will evolve in the best way it needs to be. I don't get too detailed about the meaning other than some general writings as to what I want the piece to say for me as when I used to have shows, I loved hearing what the public would say about the pieces. But when art critics came around, they were so determined as to what exactly a piece meant.....not to them specifically, but they had their conviction as to what they assumed I was saying with a piece. I treated that with some annoyance when they got it not quite right yet amused as I had to allow everyone to say what they felt about a piece. I even had one woman want to hide a piece as she thought it was about something that offended her and didn't bother to ask me about it. I don't really think about what the future holds once I kick the bucket and am gone. I don't even know what'll happen to my art at all. But I'll keep making it because I have to. Thanks for another great essay.