A few years ago a phenomenon called parkour surfaced on my radar. My first encounter with these hip-hop inflected, multiplanar, architectural acrobatics came via YouTube, a two-dimensional portal no taller than my thumb and occupying a fraction of my screen’s grid. The video stream presented an international mash-up of French hip-hop tracks propelling Russian youths to vault, unassisted, from sidewalk to rooftop to ledge in ardent disregard of Newton’s law. As if sprung from Ilya Kabakov’s utopian wish in The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1968–96), the aeronauts, called traceurs, were directing their flight paths so as to stay within the city skyline’s orbit, but they risked with each leap the loss of a magical balance between airborne suspension and earthbound fall.

This Lilliputian team of pixelated acrobats might just have been the perfect docents to lead hopscotch tours of the artworks and ephemera in Self-Storage. Imagining them hurdling from banker’s box to banker’s box, I recalled an unrealized piece by Vito Acconci, Room (Storage Room, City Room) (1969), in which furniture was to be piled from floor to ceiling inside a gallery or museum on a temporary basis: “To ‘see’ the show, a viewer climbs over the furniture—walking, crawling, from street to street, from city to city. If you’ve stored a piece of furniture and want to take it back before the show is over, you have to make your way through the city, you have to push on from city to city, to retrieve it.”1 The visitors to our modest collection followed their own sort of obstacle course, eschewing normally trafficked gallery routes to locate Metro Self-Storage at 300 Treat Avenue, navigating first the city, then labyrinthine hallways and makeshift walls to retrieve the various contents of our little trove of cardboard boxes. From the box by Iman Issa, for example, a whole other city spilled out in an array of shiny towers, as flimsy as the magazine stock they were cut from, along with a mirrored globe, photographs, and an audio recording—Issa’s vision of a new metropolis.

Self-Storage was based on a simple distribution network: 30 banker’s boxes delivered to an equal number of artists and archivists. Once returned to our care, these newly generated solo projects circulated under the familiar rules of a reference library: handling was allowed, but the boxes had to remain on-site. The building, an industrial red-brick edifice subdivided into smaller partitions priced by the square foot, is itself designed to lend Cartesian order to an otherwise messy assortment of objects: warehoused books, sacks of coffee beans, TV sets, tables, letters, thimbles, artworks, radios, baseball pennants, etc. A storage facility is a conflicted site of excess and preciousness, care and disuse. To this chaos of objects we added 30 boxes, a desk, four tables, a clock, and signage advertising our location and hours of operation. The boxes, arranged and aligned on two shelving units made of particleboard and steel, resembled the face of an apartment building—a bank of discrete, contained little universes.

At the opening reception, Chip Lord (of the experimental art group Ant Farm) recalled once venturing into a storage facility late at night and spotting a glimmer of light emerging from one of the units. He and his companions investigated and discovered a man seated in the center of the space, surrounded by a mountain of books, engrossed in reading. Lord’s own contribution to Self-Storage was a chronological survey of Ant Farm capers, including the satirical restaging of a political assassination, the collision of a retrofitted Cadillac into a bank of television sets, the hoax of a fictitious restaurant issuing excrement by mail, and some insider information related to the acquisition of Ant Farm’s archive by the Berkeley Art Museum. The Ant Farm box housed a variety of ephemera that gave an intimate portrait of the group’s members and a fragile paper trail of their exploits.

The San Francisco art dealer and Self-Storage participant Steven Leiber has made it his vocation to decipher this sort of artistic ephemera. Lord’s evocation of the reader absorbed in his stored collection of books conjures, in fact, the rare world of the Steven Leiber Basement, where the collector and his assistant, Amber Hasselbring, toil amid boxes, bookshelves, and cabinets filled to the brim. Their Self-Storage box contained six one-hour recordings of Leiber’s narration, interspersed with questions from Hasselbring. Listening through headphones to the CDs, visitors got a personal tour through Leiber’s maze of boxes. The tour was illustrated by folders of photographs labeled to accompany the recordings and also by a series of historical artists’ boxes. The resulting illustrated audio catalogue covered myriad artworks, ranging from the innovative periodical Aspen to Tanglewood Press’s postminimalist portfolio Seven Objects in a Box (1966). The density of information was a reminder of how speech is uncompressed data, and how talk, in its richness yet easy familiarity, is so critical to the relay of knowledge about art and artists.

The heaviest box, by Kristan Horton, weighed 40 pounds, and the lightest, a contribution from the John Fare Estate, was an empty gap where a box should have been. The Fare box, visitors were informed, had disappeared during a vanishing act performed by a magician on the evening of April 11 at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. A transparent ploy, perhaps, but the mere mention of a missing artifact still piqued curiosity. By coincidence another one of the artists, Amy Robinson, who traveled to San Francisco for the opening, happened at the time to be reading A Void, Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition, in which the missing figure is the letter e. A sucker for such tidy correspondences, I rushed to procure a copy of Perec’s original French edition. Like a house built around the absence of a central supporting beam, the text is on the verge of collapse at all times; it is breathless and sometimes terse. Perec induces linguistic vertigo by proposing a dialect that could be mistaken for French, but when stripped of an integral vowel and reduced to 25 letters, an altogether different language emerges. There is a similarity between the book and Robinson’s scrambling of familiar messages. Her box gathered a series of boxes within boxes, which were hand painted to resemble cookbooks, science-fiction paperbacks, and the like, thus transforming our natural conception of familiar objects into an uncanny mirroring of the standard architecture of the printed word.

In Perec’s novel, the systematic omission of the letter e matches the narrative hook—a central character who vanishes, possibly a victim of kidnapping. During our exhibition research we learned that in 1969 the members of Ant Farm had engaged in a friendly abduction of Buckminster Fuller, who was, in a way, the quiet central character of Self-Storage. As a guru for emergent eco-sensibility in architecture and a full-blown pop-cultural icon, Fuller was doubly interesting to Ant Farm. His larger-than-life stature had to do in part with his complex understanding of self, achieved through compulsive auto-archiving of his own life in laboratory logbook fashion; he even gave himself the moniker Guinea Pig B. Buckminster Fuller appeared to us, a generation after the Ant Farm kidnapping, as an appropriate North Star for a project that proposed that a structure as simple as a cardboard box could be a fruitful enclosure for ideas.

In the case of the John Fare Estate box, it was only an idea that circulated. It fulfilled a human desire for the unknown, the concealed, and the obscure, which is part of the archival impulse—the potential to recover meaning from objects that would otherwise be lost. Quite a bit of our technological vocabulary today is related to loss, with concepts such as “lossless data compression” and “high definition” now part of everyday exchange. Kristan Horton’s box grappled directly with the notion of data expansion. When it arrived, it was a puzzle to decode—a box packed full of individual sheets of consumer-grade laser-printed paper, arranged by numbered dividers and accompanied by a DVD. The video was silent and showed the artist with headphones on, moving to unknown music. We immediately discerned a strict correspondence between the images on the sheets of paper and the video. But we were curious about certain material details of both—rips, pen markings, and fading—that betrayed some form of additional processing. A note from the artist finally revealed his process: “Video portrait recorded for 117 seconds. Each frame of video is printed on a black-and-white laser printer. Each print is manually scanned back into the computer. The scanned images are reassembled into a video.” Horton thus essentially presented a reanimation of digital information, which we think of as weightless, in a physical mass of single frames. At roughly 30 frames per second, Horton’s 117 seconds corresponded to 3500 separate images that, once scanned and printed, weighed 40 pounds. The relay of the digital information to paper was clearly taxing on the machines involved; Horton almost disappeared from the frame as the toner drained. The technology’s failure to render his image in sufficient detail produced a vanishing effect, paradoxical in relation to the physical weight of the paper.

Ryan Gander, whose box remained sealed with duct tape for the duration of the exhibition, tantalized visitors with a long and detailed enumeration of the contents, including a “lightproof A4 sized envelope containing a latent image made from unoxidised silver on paper. Exposed on the 5th of March 2008 at 16:23 by Ryan Gander alone in his studio in East London, the photographic paper is undeveloped and unfixed and still light sensitive.” Stephen Kaltenbach’s box was likewise very enigmatic, holding two objects made of seemingly impenetrable steel—examples from his Time Capsule series (1968–69). In one case, the spare inscription “bury with the artist” offered the only clue to its contents. The second capsule, a cube marked “esteemed visitant” and punctuated by a tiny pinhole, encouraged the viewer to imagine that his or her own refracted image might be captured inside. While Kaltenbach asked that his works be returned to him after the exhibition, Gander requested that his box and its unverified contents be buried in the desert. He assigned this arduous task to us, the curators, forcing us into an uneasy role compared to our usual one of guardianship and conservation. Yet out of this loss came something new, however intangible: the GPS coordinates of the burial site, which will be diligently relayed to Gander. Where those numbers will reappear, we have yet to find out.

1. Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969–1973 (Milan: Charta, 2004), 101.