Mary Clark Catches 'Archive Fever'

In her GRAPHITE 5 essay “Archives: Space and Play,” Mary Clark ruminates on her experience working at the Southern Regional Library Facility at UCLA and wonders how the archive grafts a temporal and spatial network. Cameos include Jacques Derrida, Gaston Bachelard, a lampshade made of flesh, and some fabulous Rudi Gernreich-designed one-piece bikinis.
GRAPHITE‘s own Hana Cohn had a few questions for Clark:

Hana Cohn: Favorite bathing suit?

Mary Clark: I really like all kinds of bathing suits: bikinis, topless one-pieces, thong one-pieces, thong bikinis, sporty one-pieces, sexy one-pieces, tankinis, halters, tube tops, triangle tops, etc. I guess my favorites are practical one-pieces that are comfortable. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need/wear bathing suits.

HC: If you could play in any archive which would it be?

MC: I would play in any archive ever. I want to visit archives of little towns and go through all of their memorabilia, records, photographs, and machines. And I want to visit huge national archives with tall shiny shelves and secret files. I would like to play in a film archive and watch every movie.

HC: Do you have any archives? If so, of what?

MC: I don’t really have any.

HC: How often do you see moving monuments?

MC: I can think of some historical examples like when they tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, when the French sent the U.S. the Statue of Liberty in little pieces across the ocean, and when flags are raised and lowered. That’s a pretty literal answer.

HC: Could you construct a haiku summarizing your piece in this issue of GRAPHITE?

MC:

I made up a day
dream about a big building
at U.C.L.A

For more information about Mary Clark and the other contributors to GRAPHITE Issue 5: Networks, stay tuned for more updates on our blog. The journal will be released TOMORROW, June 6.