The ideas behind Self-Storage, a collection of boxes that are part self-archive, part self-curated solo show, remind me of “covers.” In the pop music industry, a cover version of a song has come to be known as a kind of tribute or homage from one artist to another, an interpersonal nod that instantly becomes public domain. A handful of decades ago, the “cover” connoted rival versions of the same song recorded by bands fighting for the top of the Hit Parade charts. The etymology of the term even suggests this competitive spirit; a more popular version of a single song could literally cover the original on the sales racks or on a record executive’s desk. It wasn’t until later that the cover became defined by not only re-recording a song but recording a version fundamentally different from the original. This notion of the cover is both a nod to a song’s authorship and an assertion of the cover band’s versatility and originality.
ake for example the song “Heartbeats,” originally written and recorded in 2002 by the Swedish sibling duo The Knife, released on the album Deep Cuts and separately as a single. One year later, the song appeared again on Veneer, the debut album of fellow Swede José González.
This is an intriguing cover, mostly because it usually takes a listen or two to recognize that this is, in fact, the song by The Knife. González takes a quintessential party girl, electro-90s throwback and turns it into a sentimental folk song. The two versions act as total foils to each other; the flippant, sassy quality of The Knife vocalist Karin Dreijer’s voice couldn’t be more different than González’s soft, sweet style.
I can’t help but hear González’s version as the sensitive, swooning boy’s response to the callous chick delivery of the original, a relationship heightened by the fact that “Heartbeats” is a thinly veiled love song. González amplifies this fact in his version, enunciating The Knife’s romantic lyrics: “One night to be confused/ one night to speed up truth/… we had a promise made/ we were in love…” The nature of the cover in contemporary pop music is mutually beneficial for both the artist covering and the artist being covered, although the merits of the two versions are hotly debated on internet fan sites. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Knife re-released the “Heartbeats” single after the success of González version.
       What might covers have to do with Self-Storage? In our invitation to the artists and archivists who participated in this exhibition, one of the only thematic leads we provided was the precedent of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile, a term coined for Fuller’s system of archiving his life every fifteen minutes. We connected this impossibly thorough recording structure with the architecture of the box, a form that embodies the notion of preserving, protecting, hiding and archiving. Our exhibition takes its name from the standardized business of renting units to people who need temporary storage for their personal belongings. The secrets and memories hidden in the walls and boxes of these storage units are unfathomable. But unlike the people who use self-storage units as a practical solution, the artists and archivists of Self-Storage have carefully selected and crafted the contents of their respective box to represent their practice or their approach to the idea of self-archiving and the box structure. I can’t help but think of these boxes as self-covers, in a sense.
In 2000 Chan Marshall, who records under the name Cat Power, released The Covers Record, which included (among covers of songs by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Oasis) a cover of her own song, “In This Hole,” originally released in 1996 on the album What Would The Community Think. This year Cat Power released Juke Box– the artist’s second all-covers album– that again includes one self-cover– “Metal Heart”– originally recorded in 1998 on Moon Pix. I find myself fascinated by these covers and by the fact that Marshall still considers these new versions covers, even though she is both the original and covering artist. In the case of the self-cover, is the act of covering a self-tribute or a strange sort of competition with the past? Maybe it’s both. What defines these new versions of old songs as covers, in my eyes, is Marshall’s willingness to rethink songs that she wrote ten years ago. She uses materials from the past to create totally new songs, which are not immediately recognizable as hers…although, bizarrely, you are logically aware of listening to a Cat Power record.
Perhaps Marshall is poking fun at the old notion that a cover competes with the original for popularity by competing with herself–she’s harkening back to a former self, a version of herself that is long gone. In Marshall’s case, the gap between her current and former version of self is vast; she was once notorious for her performance anxiety and on-stage breakdowns, now replaced by an upbeat sound and altogether more hinged self-presentation. She is perhaps also mocking the entertainment industry’s blood sucking tendencies, expecting artists to keep pumping out the same stuff, milking their popularity for all its worth. In a hilariously self-reflexive song that speaks to this issue, “Best Imitation of Myself,” pop artist Ben Folds croons: “I feel like a quote out of context/ Withholding the rest/ So I can be for you what you want to see/ I got the gesture and sound/ Got the timing down/ It's uncanny, yeah, you’d think it was me.”
Not only does Folds jab at the record label giants in his lyrics, the song actually is a great imitation of what you think of as “typical Ben Folds.”
Similarly, visual artists are constantly under pressure to make the same kind of work again and again, particularly when they become commercially successful. Artists who resist standardizing or streamlining their practice to one genre or style are often snubbed by curators or collectors, who refuse to show or buy their new work because it seems inconsistent to them. Because formal or conceptual turns are often not easily digestible and do not fit into the prescribed retrospective exhibition format, artists who take risks often face an untimely end to their careers. Self-Storage is meant to be an exhibition format that celebrates diversity within an artist’s practice, and encourages each artist or archivist to use this unique format as a space to expand and reinvent what they do.
The artists in Self-Storage who have chosen to use the box as a self-reflexive structure have avoided imitating themselves in favor of an approach that is akin to the cover. Some, like Marie Jager, have used the strictures of six cardboard walls to rethink what a miniature exhibition of their current work might look like. Others have approached the box as a frame for self-portraiture, which might be the visual art world’s closest equivalent to the self-cover.
One such approach is exemplified by Kristan Horton’s contribution: a box filled with 3500 sheets of paper and a DVD. The artist has created a “…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 literalizes the idea of revising one’s depiction of self, layering different versions of the work upon one another in the process of filming, printing, scanning, and reconstituting the video. Horton reaches into his own video, pulls its guts out, and shoves them back in.
Through that process, we observe the idiosyncrasies of Horton’s methods, such as what happens to the video frames as the toner cartridge in the artist’s printer starts to run low. In the final video, Horton’s image fades in and out of view. In his box, we find the final DVD and 117 sheets of paper representing each frame; this number has clearly been chosen because this is exactly the amount of standard computer paper that fits into the banker’s box we sent him. The intense weight of the box hints at the artist’s laborious process.
A different portrait of self is fashioned by the boxes sent to us by archivists Fern Bayer and Steven Leiber. Fern Bayer, whose professional experience includes working as the General Idea archivist, has sent a number of her personal files. The files reveal her organizational system for ephemera and correspondence from different arts organizations that she has kept her eye on over the years. While her contribution is very personal and reveals the personal archiving methods of a professional archivist, Bayer’s portrait turns an eye outward toward the art world. Through these materials, we pick up clues about the people who run these galleries, such as handwriting on successive postcards that span number of years. Pieces of ephemera stand in for the people who populate the art world, each of whom have a set of files that look more or less like these.
Steven Leiber’s six-hour audio guide is a far more inward-looking portrait, revealing a kind of theatrical day-in-the-life of this San Francisco collector and dealer. The presence of his voice, in conversation with his assistant Amber Hasselbring, affords a glimpse of Leiber’s personal style and cataloguing methods. Leiber has accepted the magnifying glass offered by our suggestion of taking Buckminster Fuller’s model of the constant archive as the premise of his project.
Not unlike records and CDs, the thirty boxes of Self-Storage stand side-by-side on shelves looking more or less the same, save a box here and there that is painted black or invisible. What is contained within each box is vastly different from its neighbor to the left or the right, above or below. They prove that similar packaging and titles do not make works of art the same. This group of works subverts standardization while working within its basic visual parameters, using the restrictions of the box to think beyond it.