his project, Bonin references a sociological literature on the “ordinary writing”80 generated by encounters between citizens and institutions. The intrinsic reflexivity of these transactions provides a model for Bonin’s own exploration of the, “parallels between strategies adopted by artists to create new platforms for information exchange and the programs aiming to decentralize culture initiated by the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”81 The analysis of artist-run organizations as extending state structures of governmentality presented in “Documentary Protocols” also transfers Jon Agar’s findings on the “material culture of bureaucracy” within the British civil service to the Canadian context.82 Agar’s analysis of “the interplay of discursive and material technologies” that produced a technocratic paradigm of government in Great Britain parallels Bonin’s history of the emergence of cybernetic metaphors of self-regulation in the discourse of Canadian cultural officials such as Gérard Pelletier.83 Ken Lum’s critique of Canadian artist-run structures as instituting a “cradle to coffin scenario”—in which a Canadian artist could, in theory at least, avoid critical evaluation by non-artist experts at every stage in their career “in the name of a non-hierarchical system of artistic measurement”— is also central to Bonin’s analysis.84 To wit, Bonin fills a gap in Lum’s analysis by specifying that the “destination” of documents generated by this system of peer review is domiciliation in an institutional archive, which itself is circumscribed by a regime of cultural heritage defined by principles of self-determination.85 The “passage of an archival fonds from one address to another” marks the “house arrest” of the de-localized correspondence network with which artists’ groups had sought to short-circuit the “‘destinal’ institution” of the postal system.86 In the narrative of artist-initiated structures in Canada, Bonin refuses to accept a condition of house arrest as the final word. Drawing on Brien Brothman’s Derridean insight that “language never arrives at a final destination,” Bonin’s curatorial staging of the archive insists that “despite the archive—because of the archive—nothing, no presence, ever arrives at its destination”87 The destination of Bonin’s archival project thus coincides with the unstable addressee of the paratext in the writing of Genette. “Our destination is the archive that subverts and contests the limits,” to invoke Brothman again.88 Bonin thereby re-routes the address of archival documents to new destinations in the public domain. Rather than questioning the archive’s “staging of objectivity,”89 Bonin troubles the institutional limits of the archive in order to draw attention to “uses that actually increase the value of the commons.”90 This dynamic resonates with John Frow’s analysis of the aporetic status of information as both gift and commodity. Frow complicates prevailing articulations of the political economy of 58
information that ascribe a straightforward commodity status to information. He argues that the value which information accrues in capitalist economies is inseparable from its relationship to the commons. Indeed, information is frequently mistaken for a gift in information society discourse (that often promotes the Internet as an unrestricted commons) and draws much of its value from that misrecognition. It is precisely the interplay of gift and commodity relations that produces the asymmetries which generate value in an information economy: “the public domain is a ‘device that permits the rest of the system to work by leaving the raw material of authorship available for authors to use.’”91 Building on these insights, Bonin exposes contradictions in the representation of the archive that are ordinarily expressed as oppositions; in particular, he underlines how archives support the generation of capital even when established as non-capitalist structures. Bonin’s representation of the archive thereby approximates the “library model” as it figures in Frow’s writing as “a counterpart to the regime of commodified information. [A]lthough it does not by any means entail a straightforward dichotomy of gift and commodity forms,”92 Bonin’s motivation in undertaking this Derridean exploration of the archive is to challenge representations of the document as a “supreme form of evidence”93 circulating in many projects associated with the archival turn in contemporary art. Eschewing representations of the archival document as either commodity or evidence, Bonin reveals the ontology of the document to be poised in the margins of an asymmetrical economy that generates wealth through the interaction of private property and the commons. The implication of this move for artist-run projects is clear: selfdetermination is achieved at the cost of a purchase on the information economy.
Working with Objects In keeping with the spirit of “democratization” that fuelled Conceptual artists’ formation of institutional archives,94 Bonin emphasizes the “anti-materialism” of the documentary traces left by that project.95 Somewhat paradoxically, the curator’s disinvestiture of the aesthetic values that these documents might otherwise accrue—through strategies that underline their status as “unmediated information”96—is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be an artistic project. A close reading of the curator’s references reveals that key decisions responded to the work of other artists. The “counter-archival” tactics epitomized by the work