Recording Culture

Hundreds if not thousands of tapes overflow boxes stacked up in a crowded room and tossed about haphazardly by videographer Thierry Guetta in Banksy’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010).  Most tapes are not labeled and the massive amount of material is lost to its creator. Some archivists will argue that if something cannot be retrieved then it does not exist, while others will emphasize that the process of documenting life is most meaningful. Ultimately, life is recorded and collected, so that someone else can revisit it later. In the film, Shepard Fairey explains that he let Thierry follow him around because he found it valuable having his work on tape. Similarly, Banksy was interested in documenting people’s reactions before his work was removed. Filming the artist and the work allows a nonpermanent medium like street art to be immortalized on tape.  The videos, oral testimonies, paint cans, arrest records, the mask he wears— collectively make up an archive of things that record the culture of street art. 

 

A lot of the movie is made up of archival footage—footage that had to be found among thousands of hours of unmarked video in Thierry’s collection.  Anyone from an individual to an institution may hold an archive of various materials. Materials can be anything from old and rare artifacts to digital materials like emails or texts. In addition to consciously collecting archives, the items of any person's life naturally make up their own archival collection, whether they are aware of it or not. And then there are archivists, who collect with the intention of recording culture. Everyone has a collection that says something about his or her life. In particular an artist not only collects, but also creates and produces the materials in their life. As we go through life, experiencing different events, cities, people, perspectives, etc. we endlessly collect and discard the items that mark those experiences. How do we organize or make sense of various collections in our life? How do we assemble our personal histories? 

 

My favorite part of Banksy’s movie is when they show Fairey at the Kinko’s store on Vine Street cutting out a huge Andre the Giant. The store looks exactly like the Kinko’s I worked in as a senior in high school. I spent hours in that space bored and waiting for my shift to end. I don’t have anything that documents the humdrum experiences of my first job and it doesn’t matter. However, as someone who values the subtleties and nuances that make experiences meaningful, I wish a lot of my mundane and seemingly prosaic experiences were captured. I like to think that life is made up of lots of small moments all worth documenting, keeping, and revisiting.