What becomes history is to some degree determined by what is archived. Julie Ault¹
he archival footnotes had been transplanted, as it were, from their usual marginal location to the centre of the body and incorporated into the text. The sources themselves played a part in the plot. This act of inclusiveness assigns an entirely revolutionary status to archives. Such an operation served to repatriate sources, which by convention are deported to the end (foot) of the entire text, invariably alienating the archive from the body.2 Vincent Bonin’s contribution to Documentary Protocols (1967-1975), the ambitious bilingual exhibition catalogue released in 2010 that he edited with Michèle Thériault, is the most recent attempt to answer AA Bronson’s call to arms nearly thirty years ago: “Someone sometime must write a really good history of Canadian art in the 60s and 70s.”3 The immediate impetus for Bonin’s text was a two-part exhibition that he conceived and developed at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal, Documentary Protocols I and II, mounted in 2007 and 2008. Documentary Protocols was conceived as a corrective to what Bonin views as the pervasive “methodological shortcomings” of recent curatorial engagements with the archive—a lack of precision signaled by the near total absence of this term in its plural form in the prolific discourse which it has spawned.4 Given this challenge to dominant discourse, the Montreal-based curator’s deployment of the term “documentary” is liable to be misleading. The archival turn in contemporary art is frequently marked by a presentation of photographs or videos that, despite their documentary function (standing in for ephemeral actions or events), nonetheless approximate the visual attributes of traditional museum objects sufficiently to support an accumulation of surplus value. Going against the grain, Documentary Protocols mainly assembled textual byproducts of the administrative infrastructure developed by artists in Canada from 1967 to 1975. Although Bonin’s claim that “it would have been possible to by-pass the actual display of the documents by presenting them directly in the publication”5 is somewhat exaggerated, it is notable that his selection of materials for display and subsequent reproduction are characterized by a minimum of non-textual properties. These are artefacts that, by virtue of their almost entirely 52