Lisa Robertson’s Archive, Singular and Collective

In the closing paragraphs to her 2019 essay exploring the history of the Kootenay School of Writing (ksw), “The Collective,” former ksw poet and organizer Lisa Robertson offers resistance as a concept to unify the literary group’s shapeshifting, multiplicitous, and multifarious approaches to creative and critical cultural production. Of the members of the collective, she writes:

They were resisting the totalizing movement of capital and its usurpation of both individual and collective time, but they were resisting by widely varying means: Marxist class critique, avant-garde experiment, conceptual rigor, feminist rejections of gendered hierarchy, woman-centred editing practices, queer identity explosions, post-colonial and anti-racist actions. Some used images, or alcohol, or archives, or housing, or sex as the resistant material, experiencing these inseparably from language. Myriad groupings of identifications and practices ripped through and animated the collective fabric. […] Resistance became a form of life, a form of lived coexistence. This form of life included the structure of group conversations, the improvised ways decisions were made and tasks were allotted, [and] the chaotic fidelity with which records were kept and events and meetings were documented.

(26–27)

Robertson here maps out the political and aesthetic plurality embedded in the dynamics of the group’s individual and collaborative practices, while also highlighting the nature of the primary political ideas and strategies with which members of the group were engaged. She makes explicit that these were experienced “inseparably from language,” making clear the primacy of the ksw’s poetic and linguistic objectives but also drawing attention to the diversity of methods and individual identities at play. She discusses both the centrality of a resistant ethos and how life and language became intertwined and turns to the political role of the archive, in particular recordkeeping and documentation, in two separate instances: first, as one of the “means” for “resisting the totalizing movement of capital and its usurpation of both individual and collective time”, and, second, as a structuring tenet of the “form of life” adopted by the group. The explicit mention of how archival practice within the ksw informs Robertson’s individual approach to the concept and practice of the archive and bridges her interpretation and lived experience of being a writer in Vancouver associated with the ksw with her ideas about the ways that the formation, maintenance, and composition of an archive might be undergirded with a formal role in creative praxis.

While her environment and community in Vancouver influenced Robertson’s engagement with and conception of the archive, her practice also demonstrates a personal engagement with feminist conceptualist thought. Her poetic and artistic networks in the city framed archival practice as a form of creative and political institutional intervention, as well as a method for feminist self-realization and reflection. As such, Robertson takes an ongoing reflexive, relational approach to the institutional concept of the archive in her own fonds by means of the maintenance of an official archive in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University as well as a personal, unofficial, or “unarrested” archive (Morra 13). Robertson’s divided fonds demonstrate how her poetics, and the political poetics of members of the ksw more broadly, actively engage with the theoretical-ideological and feminist legacies of conceptual art and institutional critique as they permeate experimental, avant-gardist culture in Vancouver.

This essay is written in two distinct parts, both connected to the significance of archival practice within the ksw. In the first section, I trace a genealogy of conceptual art’s archival unconscious, examining how the archive became emblematic as a mode of thinking through the institutional politics of art and place with the arrival of politicized, anti-aesthetic principles reflexively premised in information and communication. I connect this genealogy both to Vancouver as a city and to the ksw’s entanglement with Vancouver art’s feminist histories. In the second section, I reflect on an interview I conducted with Robertson in March 2016, after which she offered me access to a small personal archive held at her mother’s home, even going so far as to...