Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive was established by Liam Vaughan in 2020, with a specific focus on collecting and cataloguing materials produced by artist-run, offsite and other non-institutional spaces. These documents consist of roomsheets, flyers, posters, social media posts, essays and so on, which often fall outside the remit of larger institutional collecting practices. Yet these are the records art historians will need, in ten or twenty years, when they are attempting to recover what the grassroots artworld was like. As a long-time, chronic ephemera hoarder, I sat down to chat with Vaughan about the Archive’s genesis, function and why it's important.
This transcript has been shortened and edited for clarity.
AMS: Maybe we can start chronologically — how did you start with the idea for the archive, or what happened beforehand?
LV: For the purposes of this interview, I'm a librarian, right?
AMS: You studied to be a librarian at university?
LV: Yes, I moved from art school to library school at RMIT some years ago. During that time I did work experience at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) Research Library and Archive. They maintained a mega national and international version of this project. But that collection is focused largely on work exhibited at long established commercial and larger art-org level, and the NGA accumulates exhibition ephemera almost effortlessly via galleries who used to mail, and now email them invitations, catalogues, flyers. It’s an invaluable collection that produces a specific chunk and vision of what Australian art is. Heaps of the material generated alongside exhibitions you see and interact with here in Naarm/Melbourne might not make it there, because they operate in this offsite or DIY zone, some are ‘artist-run’, whatever you like to call it.
AMS: Okay, and the NGA has a rule that they have to collect everything they're given or…? How do they collect?
LV: Institutional collections like that have immense capacity, but there’s always this tension between preserving everything and actually providing the means to engage with it. Like any collection, the accumulation and, like, the glut of content is always outpacing our ability to record it, so you have to be selective. What’s left out as a result of that tension has influenced the way I approach this project. There is some motivation here, I guess, to recirculate and preserve the art ephemera published in that para-institutional zone, which is increasingly difficult to define, and capture the informal and short-lived material generated in the arena of shows that are only partly represented in institutional collections.
AMS: And just to rewind, when you decided to do the NGA internship did you have a pre-existing interest in art and/or archive stuff? And then when you were at art school afterwards did you still have this interest, or did you focus on being an artist instead?
LV: The archives and art interests are sort of inseparable you know, like in the way you have an affinity, and it starts to emerge in everything you’re doing? Like I was really into Conceptual Art through art school. And a lot of that stuff just becomes information. Like, the formal language, the use of lists and maps and indexes and instructions.
AMS: Yeah, systems and information.
LV: Right. I mean whatever art I was doing was sort of just nominal and almost entirely dematerialised. As a short term solution ‘the document' and ‘the archive’ as authority objects were interesting to me. The archive is always fraught and corrupt, but also generative in the way that it can create narratives that are validated through the record’s inherited sense of legitimacy.
AMS: Yeah, I really like this idea — of being able to make art discursively like, cooking up texts or documents or writing the ideas down. For me, producing fictionalised exhibition texts, artists, roomsheets, and so on. Obviously I love the material side of art-making too, but a lot can happen in that basically de-materialised mode.
LV: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's it, like I didn't even want to do anything. I liked moving around. Eventually all I had to show for that was lists of impossible to execute ideas… At a certain point I’m like, what am I actually doing here? Just like aggregating information? Anyway, from there I went to work as a librarian, starting focusing on local history specifically, and kind of reverse-engineered this project from those conditions.
AMS: So, how did you come up with the idea specifically to do the Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive? Was it through recognising that gap while you were at the NGA?
LV: A gap, maybe that's the word? Not necessarily in the archive, but just generally like a difference in how activity in that informal space is remembered or recirculated. The approach to making and showing art in that DIY way has always been kind of fugitive, wherever making exceeds or bypasses the adjacent institutions or infrastructure.
There's often commentary about, you know, how art in Melbourne approaches garbage. Not ‘garbage’ as in ‘bad’, but literally assembled from like the refuse of its surroundings, and that being kind of an aestheticisation of the conditions it purports to be made under, financial instability, rental crisis, small art market and so on. This same ‘assemblage’ happens with the practice of curating and exhibiting artwork. I think of Peter Cripps’ Recession Art & Other Strategies. In a high-turnover sharehouse, or carpark, or gallery with a short-term shop lease, style and program and circumstance get folded together out of ambition or necessity.
AMS: Yeah — material that's produced ad hoc because of its conditions and the practical need for a roomsheet or poster or whatever.
LV: Yeah. Robyn McKenzie talked about this ‘practical model’ with the projects that preceded Store 5 (an artist-run space in Prahran between 1989 and 1993]).[1] Before Store 5, exhibition spaces such as Art Projects, the Institute of Temporary Art and V Space had an ephemerality that ‘promoted frequency and urged responsiveness’. I think of Recession Art again. I guess if we’re talking about a specific cultural memory, then that’s how a ‘gap’ starts to occur. They actively resist the record. Sometimes the work itself lasts, or documentation, pictures of it or whatever, but that’s usually it.
AMS: How do you decide what's collected by the Archive? What are the parameters of MAEA, and why?
LV: It'd be a separate thing to collect actual art or exhibition documentation, like photographs of openings or installation shots. The Archive is focused on exhibition ephemera, because I think there is a unique provisional quality in the way that work is exhibited, which ends up then being mirrored the kind of ad hoc way it’s promoted or responded to via posters and accompanying essays and stuff. Exhibition ephemera, like a roomsheet or Instagram story, isn’t meant to outlast the topicality of its message, so it’s deleted or binned or maybe like found partially destroyed in a jacket pocket later. But it contains heaps of contextual info about the work. That’s what the Archive aims to preserve.
AMS: Yeah these documents contain all this information that isn't captured by documentation or even sometimes the work itself — the title, exhibition dates, materials, etc. And of course, the often weird or experimental exhibition texts published alongside the show.
LV: Yeah and in that way, paradoxically, there's some stability around the ephemera that doesn't really exist in an artwork. All that info you just mentioned is metadata for a show that is kind of entombed in the exhibition ephemera, in the roomsheets or like a jpeg poster, an essay response or whatever else. That stuff is ready-made to be archived, but because of its temporary form and the fragile conditions it’s published and circulated in, all that information and detail is kind of evasive.
AMS: How do you go about gathering material for the archive? People give you stuff? You personally collect it?
LV: Like lots of people who do it, I started with the tendency to collect ephemera when going to shows. A lot of people, galleries, artists, are already collecting roomsheets and flyers and whatever else. But it’s accumulated passively, sporadically, and isolated in a box or hard drive. Part of the assembly of recessional strategies that one undertakes to be an artist or gallerist is also to act as a kind of amateur or proto-archivist. To collect your own stuff, because who else will do it? In theory, well-established commercial spaces could maintain proper archives if they choose to prioritise that as a tier of business. But it’s that more self-organised stratum of practice that the Archive collects. Not to flatten the different degrees of formality, or commercial aspiration, or relationship to institutions that these projects have, into one tight definition or whatever. The general title ‘ARIs’ disguises that these spaces are all very different from each other. But what they do share is some DIY quality, and they can be relatively short-lived, so the Archive piggy-backs off that impulse to collect and gives those collections somewhere to go.
A bunch of people have generously handed over their own stacks, leftover copies, galleries have sent digital copies of roomsheet PDFs and posters. And I encourage that (the MAEA website has a form where you can contribute your own documents). People have contributed their own personal collections. Now it’s just about cataloguing it all a little bit at a time, keeping up as it grows. I guess it bridges that gap between, and makes visible, the scattered home collections and those that pile up in the gallery or office, or wherever.
AMS: If someone gave you, or you collected, a digital copy of some material and then you also had a scan of a physical print-out, would the Archive collect both? I mean, I haven't been given a physical exhibition invite for so long — not like back in 2010-era VCA, where you'd constantly get invites appearing on your studio desk or something. I guess that was around when people really started promo-ing stuff on social media, which you also collect, right? Roomsheets have a different function though.
LV: Yeah. It doesn't matter so much whether they’re physically printed or born-digital. The Archive will accommodate for a Word.doc or a screenshot or somebody's like, you know, blurry-ass photo that they took of a roomsheet, if that’s all there is. Part of the aim of the Archive as a project, I guess, is not to purely or merely centralise the collecting of physical objects, but to put fragments of many kinds in dialogue with each other. Linking their titles and subjects and dates and places. In terms of its orientation in time, it’s a project that can accommodate both the torrent of new material, and all the stuff that gets exhumed from the past. Like the real value of any archive isn’t the presence or condition of any individual artefact, but more that the collection is networked and accessible.
AMS: Did I tell you I have a secret photo blog that's been going for thirteen years?
LV: Oh my god…every month? There's not a blank spot the whole way through!
AMS: You know what's fucked though? Knowing how many photos are on there and then knowing how much like film, and processing... It's a crazy investment, but then you're like, well I don't care. It's almost priceless to me at this point. I just factor it into groceries and stuff.
LV: I’ve done the same with videos since 2016, videos every single day. It’s a matter of habit now.
AMS: Are you fucking serious? When’s the first one? When's the ten-year anniversary?
LV: True, actually it's coming up. Maybe that's when I'll stop. April 2026. It's pretty soon. Then it'll be ten years of videos.
AMS: I think that just means keep going.
LV: Yeah, or like start some other thing, maybe some monumental shift will occur. I don’t know when to stop.
AMS: Maybe you’ll torch it.
LV: That’s kind of it with this archive too, right? Like I fully don't know how big it will be or how small it will be, who will support it, or if it will be ignored. If it ends up just being ten years of haphazard collecting, and it feels relevant, at the very least it's all somewhere that can be navigated. I’m into the idea that one day it’ll just be really neat. Like, it's just X amount of years, and it doesn't claim to be kind of definitive in any way, but at least it kind of vaguely tries to I don't know, approximate or capture something that’s been going on.
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The digital archive can be accessed online at ephemera-archive.melbourne, and in-person soon via ephemera files at the Melbourne Art Library in Coburg. You can contribute to the Archive via the ‘Contribute’ page on the website.
[1] Robyn McKenzie ‘The Local group: Store 5 1989-1993’, in Max Delany (ed.), Pitch Your Own Tent: Art Projects / Store 5 / 1st Floor, 23 June - 27 August 2005. Naarm / Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2005, pp. 38-47.