non-visual character, exemplify Lucy Lippard’s influential thesis of “dematerialization”, having resisted the logic of commodification to which, according to Lippard herself, most non-object-based practices of the 1960s and early 1970s had succumbed as early as 1973.6 Entombed within the vaults of museums and university libraries, the materials curated by Bonin have, almost without exception, been overlooked by researchers—not to mention the market—for nearly four decades. This is not to suggest that Bonin proposed a naive opposition between textual and more conventional “documentary” formats, or that he wasn’t aware of the value generated by the transfer of archival materials from their respective institutional repositories into the white cube of the university art gallery. Indeed, “Documentary Protocols” is above all a meditation on the “co-opting” of archives in recent international projects that implicates Bonin’s own curatorial endeavor as the first instance of such a project in Canada.7 Catherine Moseley notes that “as conceptual documents age, they become perceived as precious.”8 Bonin’s strategy, developed for Documentary Protocols II, of making available photocopies of selected items exhibited in the display cases for consultation on adjacent shelves, underlines the fetishization that results from the presentation of objects under typical conditions of gallery display, no matter how de-emphasized their visual characteristics. The promiscuous contiguity of relatively scarce archival objects and disposable reproductions was both a democratizing gesture and one that draws attention to the symbolic gap in which cultural capital is generated. This dual purpose was achieved by foregrounding the information content of the documents. Bonin’s decision to restrict all didactic commentary and
bibliographic data to leaflets—thereby presenting archival objects and their photocopied surrogates alike without conventional interpretive frameworks—involved visitors in the interpretation of objects, a role usually reserved for the curator. Positioning visitors as researchers implicated them in the scholar’s “appropriation” of the archive as part of a “chain of production where access to collective heritage becomes a service transaction.”9 In its conf lation of spaces ordinarily segregated (reading room and exhibition area), the hybrid plan of Documentary Protocols II recalls Martin Beck’s exploration of 1960s, “artists’ initiatives seeking to explore and create new spaces for the presentation and distribution of artworks.”10 By transferring non-art objects into the gallery space, the exhibition instantiated a logic of “decompartmentalization” for which the practices of Beck and sometime collaborator Julie Ault are paradigmatic.11 Yet, Bonin’s approach must be distinguished from that of Ault, for whom non-art objects generally function as documentation of events (exhibitions, protests, etc.)12 Bonin’s deployment of archival objects, on the other hand, brought to light the administrative protocols informing the constitution of the archives. At the same time, the project contests the institutional containment of those archives today. Nevertheless, Ault’s stated goal of bringing to light “the paper trails of defunct groups” resonates with Bonin’s materialist project.13 Bonin’s catalogue essay also responded to an ongoing dialogue about the history and politics of artist-run centres in Canada initiated by Bronson’s seminal memoir and provocation, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat” (1983), and extends to recent materialist histories such as Clive Robertson’s formidable Policy Matters (2006) as well 53