relevant to a paratextual reading of “Documentary Protocols”—a text with margins swarming with “side notes” that function beyond mere reference—is the footnote.32 Genette has analyzed the history of annotation as well as its function in terms of the addressee of the note. Being optional to the reader, Genette concludes that this addressee does not necessarily coincide with the reader. Rather, the note may be “addressed only to certain readers: to those who will be interested in one or another supplementary or digressive consideration.”33 In a sense, annotation addresses a reader who will constitute the discourse of the text as a system of intertextuality. Jacques Derrida’s witty deconstruction of annotation practices, “This Is Not an Oral Footnote,” complements Genette’s analysis of the footnote as a component of the paratextual apparatus when he concludes that, “annotation in the strict sense in no way differs from intertextuality. It is intertextual through and through, from the moment we understand ‘text’ in the classical sense as a notation representing one discourse propped on another.”34 For Derrida, as for Genette, the footnote frames a discourse as a text constituted by a series of (permeable) “boundaries.”35 Following the examples of Derrida and Genette, I approach the profusion of marginal notes in Bonin’s catalogue text as an intertextual system, one that brings into representation the boundary the curator crossed when transferring artefacts from the archives into the space of the gallery as a threshold of meaning. The footnote, Bonin observes, is central to the production of “discursive hierarchies”: a “segregation” of sources from the body of the text that his own inclusive editorial structure was explicitly designed to undo.36 My foregrounding of the “minor text” of the marginal note functions, in turn, to assist Bonin in his operation of “providing equal visibility” to the profusion of texts— archival, primary, bibliographic, etc.—which the authorcurator has spread out on a single plane for his reader.37 At a staggering 157 marginal notes, a comprehensive review is hardly feasible here. Instead, I have grouped selected references into provisional constellations intended to facilitate the work of the reader in tracing connections, both within Bonin’s labyrinthine text and by linking it to broader networks of discourse and practice. As such, this text is constituted as an “epitext”38 to Bonin’s essay that both stands apart from and refers back to the discourse that it propagates and extends. The supplemental tactics presented here are liable to give rise to questions similar to those posed by Brien Brothman in a text cited by Bonin: “One might wonder at times whether the present text is a ‘book review […], a ‘review article’ of several writings […], or an ‘article’ per se: what distinguishes one writer’s ‘work’ or ‘text’ from another’s?”39 This text is also offered as a gift. That is, it attempts to fulfill the obligation imposed by its host text to instigate
what Miwon Kwon has described in another context as the “circuit of obligation and reciprocity” proper to a gift economy.40 The gift economy set in motion by “Documentary Protocols” was underlined by Bonin in an earlier epitext to the exhibition and catalogue, in which he stated that, “I saw my work as a trigger for more research on the period and for making the documents I was studying more accessible to researchers and the public at large.”41 In making public the documentary findings of the “continuous research process”42 that provided the framework for his curatorial and publishing projects, Bonin established an alternative circuit of exchange with readers, one that demands reciprocation through the intertextual labour of debate and dissemination. Through sharing, the giver of the gift thus solicits rival texts in the interests of producing a “public.”43 “You need to return the gift,” Bonin reminds readers.44 “And this is the problem: it’s really hard to quantify what you have to return.”45 In choosing a pubic destination as the “address” of his project, the curator has recycled tactics deployed by the very generation of artists that constitutes his research subject—artists who, as Julie Ault describes, sought “alternatives to ‘art as merchandise.’”46 This essay is intended to aid and abet the curator in undermining the “domiciliation” of the archive by diverting its address to new destinations, and new recipients, in the public domain.47
"Artist-run Margins"48 On first reading, “Documentary Protocols” is a history of artist-initiated groups in Canada from 1967 to 1975. Bonin studies the institutions created by artists in pursuit of a “paradigm of self-determination”49 during this period by analyzing archival fonds that today preserve material evidence of artists’ administrative labour then. This historical narrative is reflected in the marginal notes to Bonin’s text— a mere portion of which constitutes nothing less than a comprehensive literature review of artist-run organizations in Canada during the timeframe selected by the curator. Despite the summative character of Bonin’s reading of previously published sources, he succeeds in proposing a highly original narrative. Bonin’s innovation emerges from his focused reading of the theme of self-administration as a provision of service in texts by Lucy Lippard and Clive Robertson, in addition to intertwined themes of self-determination, communications technology and federal policy found in the work of Bronson and Lum. In her critical assessment of Conceptual artists’ adoption of “ways of producing art that were analogous to other forms 55