The Queer Archive in Fragments: Sunil Gupta's London Gay Switchboard

The exhibition Slide/Tape was staged at Vivid Projects, Birmingham, England, from October 5 to November 16, 2013. Curated by Yasmeen Baig-Clifford and Mo White (2013: 2), the show attempted "a fresh appraisal of an abandoned medium," tape-slide, as it was used by artists across the 1970s and 1980s. As White (2007: 60) writes in her unpublished doctoral thesis, tape-slide was "technically crude, cheap and eccentric": its technical assemblage usually consisted of one or two carousels of 35 mm slides with an accompanying audio cassette soundtrack. The progression of the slide images could be activated by hand or set to advance at a pace controlled by the cassette. Tape-slide's precarious form made it susceptible to disassembly, its material components easily scattered and lost. It was also materially delicate: individual images could be scratched or burned, and audio tapes might snap or unspool. The instability and ephemerality of the medium contributed, in significant part, to a notable paucity of critical attention from historians and theorists. As White writes (60–61), "Tape-slide has not offered itself up to be collected, archived or even adequately documented making the task of providing an accurate retrieval of its history difficult. [As the artist Judith Higginbottom notes,] the unpredictable nature of tape-slide led to much of the original material not surviving and that which did is difficult to access in archives." The Vivid Projects exhibition included work by Black Audio Film Collective, Nina Danino, William Furlong, Sunil Gupta, Tina Keane, and Cordelia Swann. Gupta's contribution consisted of "fragments"—the curators' term—from his 1980 tape-slide project London Gay Switchboard. As the program for the exhibition noted of Gupta's piece, "The audio track remains missing, a reminder of the fragile nature of early slide-tape work" (Baig-Clifford and White 2013: 7).

The image—or "fragment"—by Gupta used to illustrate his entry in the program and to adorn its cover was shot in the London nightclub Heaven. The gay "superclub" was launched in 1979 and swiftly became an enormous hit. Gupta's photograph (fig. 1) provides a bystander's perspective, inviting the viewer to join patrons arrayed in clusters or standing alone around the edge of the dance floor as they watch and cruise. The visual focus of the image is located halfway down and just in from the left of the frame where, in the receding perspective of the shot, a man is dancing, the exposure catching him in a pose with his legs akimbo. A strong white-yellow light emanates from behind the dancer, rays strafing the space and drawing the viewer's eye toward him. On the right of the frame, three men bathed in red and purple light stand nonchalantly. The shortest of the three, dressed in slacks and a white shirt, faces away from the camera; one of the others seems to have spotted Gupta and his camera. On the left of the frame, a fey figure in black leans against a ledge, watching the dancer. In the center of the photograph, five men are moving toward the dance floor; the attention of some of these men also seems to have been caught by the dancer. The composition of the shot is formally rigorous, the use of light and color vibrant and bold. The photograph has force and unity as a self-contained cultural text or object, a documentary record of a particular (sub)cultural space and its complex spatial and sexual dynamics. As a fragment of something larger, however—that is, as just one element of London Gay Switchboard—it tantalizes. What was this larger work, one that now seems to exist only as a phantasm? How much of the shattered work remains? What would be achieved through its reconstitution, however partial or incomplete? And what might the work, splintered, reveal about the place of the fragment in the queer archive and about the queer relation to the archival fragment?

To theorize or engage with the archive, any archive, is necessarily to confront fragmentation and the fragment. For Carolyn Steedman (1998: 67...