Dr. Kid President Jr.: Anarchiving and Arts-Based Educational Research

• In Event: (Re)Tracing, (Un)Curating, and (An)Archiving Children's Artistic Productions: Sophisticated Scribbles and the Influence of Rhoda Kellogg

Abstract

There is no shortage of texts on research methods. “Rigorous” methods, like these, depend on archives. While rigorous methods offer legitimacy and authority, they produce specific types of knowledge. Arts-based educational research opens up new processes, which, in turn, creates new forms of knowledge. This paper continues the project of arts-based educational research by exploring anarchiving as a research creation technique. Many discuss the anarchive in research creation (Massumi, 2017), but it is not a new term. Derrida described anarchive as escaping or exceeding the archive (1996). Contemporaneously, Anne-Marie Duguet launched ANARCHIVE (Anarchive 1, 1999), giving CD-ROM users the opportunity to manipulate and curate the oeuvre of particular artists, blurring creation and preservation (Lessard, 2009). More recently, Massumi described the anarchive as a “repertory of traces,” a “feed-forward mechanism” that forms a “springboard” for thought, a “supplement” of the archive that is an “event derivative,” a “process-making engine” (2016, p. 6-7). Elsewhere, Massumi simply described the anarchive as an “archive of events” (2017, p. 97). According to Erin Manning, the anarchive relates to devising “techniques that can make the unrealized as real felt” (2019, p. 7). Anarchiving is a technique of attuning with all that is left out of archives.

Manning (2015) differentiated between methods and techniques. While method fashions “knowledge as a static organization of preformed categories” (p. 56), technique is more dynamic, “open to the shift caused by repetition” (Manning, 2015, p. 64). The anarchive is more like a technique. In this paper, I use an example as a technique to explore anarchiving. In exploring the example, this paper draws on records related to the artist, Brian Belott’s, Dr. Kid President Jr., art criticism, artist conversations, and a podcast appearance. Kellogg’s archive served as inspiration for Belott. In Dr. Kid President Jr., Belott presented children’s art from Kellogg’s archive, some of Kellogg’s tracings of children’s artwork, his own work inspired by the children’s artwork from Kellogg’s archive, and a space for children to create their own artwork for display or preservation.

Rhoda Kellogg archived materials typically anarchived. Children’s art poses an archival challenge. The ubiquity of children’s art often renders it too mundane to archive. It is also fleeting. In fact, sometimes children layer their art one atop the other. Finally, children’s art faces the pernicious stigma of the “immature,” making it unlikely to be archived. In describing a “repertory of traces,” Massumi explained, “[t]hey are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration” (2016, p. 6). Belott’s Dr. Kid President Jr. reactivates the archive, using these “carriers of potential” as a springboard for the exhibit. While much qualitative research seems increasingly bound by methodocentrism (Weaver & Snaza, 2017), some methodologists aspire to new ways of seeing (Sousanis, 2015), doing, and thinking. Anarchiving germinates new seeds of thought, new processes. Manning (2019) argues that these new processes “will likely unmoor the shape of the event as it reveals itself today.” (p. 23).

Author

• Seth A. McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University