Cruising the archive: Discovering a queer methodology
Paige, Steven
Authors
Steven Paige
Abstract
As an artist researcher I am exploring how I orientate my queer body in an archival space. The focus of this article is how my discursive body negotiates archival relations, conflating ‘cruising’ as a method, seeking through intrigue and desire, making connections and disruptions across archival accounts. I am building upon the current dialogues across ‘queering and queered’ archives and this understanding offers a recognition of the visceral relationship that forms when finding and meeting the charged archival items. In seeking through a ‘queer/ed’ approach to creative research, I am acknowledging the ‘distinct knowing of self’ that takes place, where an archive yields to me and me to it. In this case I am recognizing and acknowledging potential relations and partnerships with my own curiously, cruising gaze through the artefacts, be they clearly announced or in the gaps and slippages. This self-perpetuating path, as I seek one queer body after another, one encounter after another, is a possible alternative approach to the normative and historized methods of archival research. The locus of this research is centred through time spent in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archive, New York, in June 2023. My approach develops a form of community recognition and building, a renewed discovery of a queer/queered network of sympathies, where both the researcher and archive and the creative opportunities become more porous, affected and meaningful.
