Cleaning off my desk and sorting through notes from my meeting with Andrea Kohashi in the Special Collections at Cabell Library. I think we talked about our personal stake in the issue of documentation, and shared a reluctance to call a piece done and document it. But that isn't what I recorded with these notes. Although some of what we talked about was shared conversation as artists, about our work and our personal attitudes about documentation. All I have to recall that is my memory of that conversation, what I did record relates more to a professional interest in documentation and the study of documents. These notes reference language and texts that address this issue within the context of the library science discipline. This begs the question about science and the necessity of providing documentation to back up theory. Documentation of observation. Two ideas stand out to me from our conversation (well, more than two. there is the delight of engaging in conversation with a friend and artist but that is a feeling that takes on a life of its own. is this conversation "off the record"?): documentation as a reference, and documentation as a surrogate. I enjoy the "otherness" this begs. Maybe it's time to revisit Susan Sonntag (In Plato's Cave) and Plato's analogy itself..
