Institutional Garbage: Jill Magi
Institutional Garbage: Jill Magi
Jill Magi, “Curious, Fugitive, and Inedited (The Art Labor Archive of Teaching Days),” 2016
Curious, Fugitive, and Inedited takes its name from an odd section of Robert Chambers’ 19th century The Book of Days, “a miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar.” As an “archive of teaching days,” this project’s content is comprised of the detritus of in-class writing exercises—trace elements of the moments of teaching when the institutional creative writing instructor invites the class to write, provides a prompt, and then writes alongside her students. The texts that result are anxious and scattered—they are “curious, fugitive, and inedited”—and in this artist’s view, they appear to be garbage. The handwritten scribbles that pepper her writing notebooks are re-presented here in a kind of retrograde visual fashion: typed on an old typewriter that has no ribbon, typed through a sheet of carbon paper so as to make an imprint that is susceptible to smudging and eventually fading. The presence of a time stamp and archive cataloguing stamp suggest that writing is a recursive act—a repeated happening in shared classroom space—and at the same time the pages suggest solidarity and even equality among teacher and students. Yet as pages typed out, scanned, and digitized, these text shards excavate labor whose value is unclear and that goes nowhere except into The Art Labor Archive: an unfunded institution located in the artist’s imagination and with occasional manifestations as art projects for installation and digital space. (Note: the writer/writing teacher acknowledges that the phrase “veiled spill,” imprinted on her subconscious and reproduced on page -45479, is most certainly from her writing/teaching colleague Jan Clausen’s 2014 book Veiled Spill: A Sequence. The writer/writing teacher apologizes for any other undetected, unacknowledged influence transfers.)
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