In addition to continuous access on the World Wide Web since May 1994, the project will be presented in many different public situations, from large scale installations, such as that at the Chicago Cultural Center in summer 1994, to prototype terminal access such as at Ars Electronica.
In addition to database access, a "visitor" to The File Room can add cases to the archive through the on-line submission form, as well as comment on the content of the archive. In this way, the archive is not a static entity, governed and defined by its creators, rather The File Room invites the interpretation and participation of it's global audience.
The File Room was produced by artists, curators and students and as such does not presume the role of a library, or an encyclopedia, in the traditional sense. Instead, the project proposes alternative methods for information collection, processing and distribution, to stimulate dialogue and debate around issues of censorship and archiving. Links to other electronic archives and databases internationallyÑas well as multiple accounts of the same "incident" and a wide range of contributorsÑ challenge The File Room visitor to make her or his own decisions about what constitutes an "accurate" account of a censored work of art or historical incident.
Support for The File Room has been provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Playboy Foundation, the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and the Chicago Artists International Program of the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
The File Room began as an idea: an abstract construction that became a prototype, a model of an interactive and open system. It prompts our thinking and discussion, and serves as an evolving archive of how the suppression of information has been orchestrated throughout history in different contexts, countries and civilizations.
The process of suppressing information Ð of people in power attempting to hide images, sounds and words Ð must itself be viewed in perspective. The organizing principles of The File Room archive recognize acts of censorship in relation to their social settings, political movements, religious beliefs, economic conditions, cultural expressions and/or personal identities. The means of censorship are understood in equally broad terms and techniques, from behind-the-scenes structural censorship that regulates and controls access to the means of production; to obvious physical restrictions of single instances; to subtle, pervasive, and often invisible psychological methods.
Countering the closed circle of power systems, this project gains its meaning through a group effort of individuals, organizations, and institutions. Naturally, this project must be self-critical and self- reflective about the contradictions and possibilities of its own organizing system, the nature of subjective editing, and the limited amount of research that can be accomplished in a given period of time. The File Room, rather than being presented as a finished work, is being made publicly available at the point of its initiation. It is an open system that becomes activated, "filed" and developed through the public process of its own existence.
Installed at the Chicago Cultural Center, The File Room referenced this building's past as a library, a public repository of what is thought to be important. The interactive process of Internet (which remains at this moment a free system for dialogue and information) allows The File Room to become a social sculpture, as it moves back and forth from its 3-dimensional installation to an unknown dimension in the Net. When people activate and contribute to this artifact, they will challenge these dimensions and the questions, contradictions, and limitations of attempting to define censorship. The interactive technology is being utilized to add new points of view, complete missing information, challenge notions of authorship, and to reflect direct voices and opinions wherever possible.
As the debate over free and open telecommunications grows, so too will The File Room reflect decisions of why, how, when, where an individual point of view may be removed, canÕt be seen, heard, or read Ð each decision resonating with the implications throughout past and future of new technologies, marketing strategies, political decisions, andÉ "moral" control.
As Hans Magnus Enzensberger has written, whoever "believes censorship to be an abuse has not understood. Without its tireless twin, self-censorship, censorship could not workÉ Self-censorship outruns in elegance and shrewdness everything that the most vicious (censor) could imagineÉ Its target (often met) is the prohibition to thinkÉ Whoever believes that they are immune, is the first victim." LetÕs consider The File Room as a cultural project: an open prototype where participation, possibilities, and challenges will be tested.
Muntadas and Randolph Street Gallery, May 1994
For more than twenty years, Spanish artist Antonio Muntadas has orchestrated remarkably complex installations whose content -- the analysis of the institutions of cultural and political power -- changes with each situation in which the work is presented. This nomadic character is a hallmark of the work and the career; but in a structural pattern characteristic of the artist, the work instantly contradicts its own mutable quality and is housed or recontextualized in the very form of the institution being examined. Projects earmarked for museum visitors, such as Between the Frames (1983-1993) and work for public spaces, are planned according to the anticipated audiences. The permanent appearance of the installations, whose architectural refinement is evident and often elegant, belies the evolving mass of information they contain. Other levels of meaning are revealed in the design of these architectural pieces, for they are conceptualized to function semiotically, not merely to frame the situations they critique.
Muntadas's latest project is The File Room, which examines the massive history of censorship. He began his research on censorship five years ago and imagined a space suggesting bureaucratic enclosures, dimly lit chambers claiming forbidden materials. I am persuaded that Muntadas's work derives from a postmodern impulse to salvage and recuperate rather than a utopian urge to rescue and affirm. The overbearing walls of black file drawers and low-hanging light fixtures in The File Room give material presence to the sinister arena of censorship. Viewers participate, as did the artist, in a conscious political performance as they search at computer terminals for examples of censorship or, if they choose, enter their own cases into the archive.
For its introduction in Chicago, on the first floor of the Cultural Center, an enclosure constructed from 138 black metal file cabinets, holds 552 cabinet drawers. The project's interactive component consists of seven color computer monitors (linked to a central server) installed in file cabinets around the room. With a click of a mouse at any one of these terminals, viewers can access case histories of censorship by geographical location, date, grounds for censorship or medium. At the center of the room is a desk with another computer at which visitors can enter their own examples. In May 1994, the project opened with more than 400 entries on censorship from antiquity to the present. Under theater, for example, The File Room lists multiple occasions from the fifth century BC. to l967 in Athens, when Aristophanes' classic plays were banned for reasons of obscenity and anti-war themes. Another literary example is Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses while entries from popular culture recently added include television host Ed Sullivan's request to Jim Morrison of The Doors to alter a line in his song, "Light My Fire", the banning of Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List in Jordan and from personal experience, the Chicago Public School's attempt to confiscate materials handed out to high school students by the Coalition for Positive Sexuality. Entries can also be logged in through Internet and new archives of texts and images running on other Internet sites worldwide are added to The File Room through hypertext links. Hundreds of individuals from around the world log on as users daily. What originally had been private becomes public, audiences become archivists and consumers of an expanding collection of source material.
Archives are begun when groups of individuals -- families, cities -- accumulate material that documents a particular activity or series of events. More systematic than the diaristic activities of those who keep journals, archival methods of saving are nevertheless inspired by the profound desire to mark events or to record something for posterity. Whether personal or political, archives have roots in antiquity and are prompted by a consciousness that what occurs is noteworthy, deserving of future consideration. Record keeping provides evidence: source material for future historians collected in the present serves as factual evidence of the past. The opposite of the archival institution, censorship has an equally long history, but represents erasure, withdrawal from memory. On both personal and public levels with subjective and objective justification, the need to control what is spoken, written or acted has often occurred as an adjunct activity of authoritarian regimes and religious movements.
The File Room's material condition, however, is rooted and objective; before it was designated and transformed into a municipal exhibition facility, the Chicago Cultural Center housed the main branch of the city's public library. Indeed, the landmark building was constructed in 1897 as a library by the architectural firm Shipley, Rutan and Coolidge. Muntadas chose the Chicago situation because the Cultural Center functions somewhere between the public space of a street and the specialized space of a museum. Since the organizing principle of The File Room is that of an archive, its place in Chicago becomes doubly resonant. Architecturally its rationale and history coincide with the subject matter of Muntadas's project to reintroduce censored material into the library. Furthermore, its civic constituency, the fact that it is physically open and accessible to the public, underscores the openness and fluid character of the archival process, always growing, never complete. A similar lack of boundaries and psychological uncertainty marks censorship and self-censorship, since what can be stated and what cannot is always debatable, open to redefinition and potentially infinite.
Taken to an absurdist point, The File Room in this scenario can never be complete. It holds out the promise of rendering invisible images visible, censored texts legible. Indeed there are archives of on-line books which can be accessed from within The File Room case record. A direct hypertext link will bring up complete texts of Machiavelli's The Prince, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Whitman's Leaves of Grass, as well as other literary works which have been marked by censorship at one time or another. For the most part, Muntadas's oppositional critique is lodged against and in relation to an institution or ideology. While The File Room, like many of his social sculptures, was initiated on a metaphorical level as an archetypal space, with a set-up that evokes the claustrophobic spaces of Kafka, the artist has pushed beyond its perceptual boundaries into a fourth dimension: the space and time of the Internet, the so-called information superhighway. Dialectically poised between reference to past function and present high-tech usage, The File Room exists in an uncertain temporal situation and in an equally unresolved conceptual terrain, the puzzle of censorship--who wields the power, what are its targets, whom does it aim to protect?
Rejecting the comfort of extreme positions left or right, Muntadas locates his work in the gray zones between the poles of populism and authoritarianism, censorship and self-censorship. Intentionality becomes a problem as his artistic negotiations are more complex, less conclusive and self-critical of his own position as the single authority who collects the cases. These material and intellectual shifts, which in retrospect seem almost preordained, also displace Muntadas's artistic authority -- his role is more like that of an editor of an anthology -- as he leads a collaborative team of programmers and researchers who worked together to design the Mosaic program and to undertake research for the archive. Indeed, there is the uncomfortable sense that the project is too open-ended, too haphazard and subjective with few, if any, criteria for selection but every case for itself. In an essay by Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Muntadas locates some insights into the problem of censorship sprawl:
"Structural censorship does not operate with absolute perfection, in a 100/100 way. Usually it works following the rules of the calculus of probability. Messages are mitigated, altered or brutally eliminated depending upon their degree of incompatibility. . . .While censorship oriented toward production cleans up the core of the cultural industry (publishing, television, cinema), policing censorship -- since it is complementary to the first kind of censorship -- leans the periphery (fanzines, small presses). The first kind of censorship is unobserved, so much the second is noisy. And this second one likes to give spectacle, having people talking about it; its actions are meant to be demonstrative." (1)
The paradox of The File Room is the fact that like its content, it cannot be controlled or concluded; potentially it could include all cultural and political production from anytime, any place. The File Room changes according to its user's willingness to contribute, to engage in a dialogue and debate the contradictions of censorship without reaching a resolution. It is striking that Muntadas has veered away from his own agenda of deconstructing spectacle and mass media to expose its internal mechanisms in order to provide a global frame of reference for this massive collection. It is perhaps inevitable that certain subscribers to America Online have already submitted an entry about the infringement of their public speech by forum hosts on Internet. According to one subscriber, members of an bulletin board are having their "posts pulled" by this commercial service provider for violating the vague admonition against vulgar or insulting language and explicit talk about sex. In fact, even euphemisms are being pulled for content, although America Online denies its adherence to any specific code of electronic proprieties. Ultimately, The File Room is subject to the same constraints of its own cultural logic; it can only be concluded if someone pulls the plug or censors the file.
I would like to thank Sue Taylor, Paul Brenner and Antonio Muntadas for their assistance and insights.
(1.) From "Lo dico, non lo dico, no, lo dico..." Hans Magnus Enzenberger translated by Catarina Borelli from an article reprinted this year in the Italian newspaper, L'Espresso, copyright 1977 by Pardon and L'Espresso.
Randolph Street Gallery was founded as a non-profit organization by a small group of artists in 1979. Beginning in a storefront on Randolph Street and moving to its present location on Milwaukee Avenue in 1982, RSG has since established itself as one of the most distinguished art centers of its type in the US. Since its inception, RSG has introduced thousands of artists to the Chicago arts community, serving as an incubator for the new and the daring. Unlike many arts organizations that focus on a single art form, RSG is multi-disciplinary, emphasizing the content and significance of artists' expressions.
We explore the intersections of art and society through a prolific schedule that runs September - July. RSG has steadily expanded its programs and services in response to constituent demands. The staff, the Board of Directors, and Board Committees have all undertaken planning and professionalization in order to meet the expanded needs of our service communities and the increased responsibilities of directing a larger organization.
Located in Chicago's West Town neighborhood, our programs present new artists in ways that are both experimental and accessible, celebrating the cultural diversity that is our heritage, engaging over 25,000 people each year. RSG is concerned with producing the relevant artists of our time, yet it is also concerned with improving the general conditions and environment for the creation of art.
Our space, located at 756 North Milwaukee, includes an exhibitions gallery, a black-box performance space for time-arts, and a projects space. RSG provides vigorous support to young artists of merit, as well as to more established artists making experimental works. Program committees of artists, arts professionals and community members work to develop curatorial themes and select artists. RSG has served as a venue for such diverse artists as Leon Golub, Andres Serrano, Muntadas, Spiderwoman Theatre, Japanese Butoh artist Natsu Nakajima, Ron Athey, Chicagoans Carmela Rago, Heather McAdams, and Brigid Murphy, and many others. RSG also supports an active grant-making program for regional artists. Since 1989, RSG has provided project grants to artists totaling close to $200,000.
By being committed to serious art in all media, RSG serves as a nationally - respected forum for new art, and one of the Midwest's most active centers for performance and inter-media art. Through the years, RSG has served as an instigator and focal point for what has become a thriving performance scene in Chicago. In 1986, RSG introduced P-FORM, the Midwest's only periodical devoted to building audiences for performance art through the publication of interviews, features, reviews, and other information.
last changed 21.April 95