Mission statement

SPOOL – short for Site, Performance, Object, Online Lexicon, is a digital, art-historical archive dedicated to site-specific practices from antiquity to the present and their manifold forms of documentation.

Spool, [spuːl] verb: to be wound or unwound.

The term retrait in Jaques Derrida's thought signifies a complex, non-linear movement of simultaneous withdrawal and return, effacement and inscription, division and assembly. It highlights the inherent undecidability, heterogeneity, and excess within language, meaning, and ontological structures, operating as a singular plural term ("retraits") that incises ontological difference itself, challenging stable concepts and definitions.¹ As Derrida writes of the "retrait of the trait," the line "in its very act of being traced, immediately begins to withdraw or eclipse itself… an a priori withdrawal, unappearance, and effacement of its own mark in its incision,"² a movement that "grants speech" even as it "forbids separating drawing from the discursive murmur."³

Derrida's proposal accords with those positions brought forward by key strands of performance-art discourse on the critical modalities of documentation and the ontological operations that inhere in them. Documentation does not merely report on an event but participates in constituting it,⁴ and neither the live act nor its image holds privileged truth⁵. As Peggy Phelan posits, documentation, such as photographs, texts, or videos, acts as a "supplement" to the live act of performance.⁶ This supplement simultaneously exposes the original body or event as already supplementary (lacking inherent self-presence) and acts as a "protection against that very menace"⁷ of absence. The documentation thus becomes part of an "infinite chain" of "supplementary mediations" that produce the "sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, or originary perception"⁸. This exactly reflects the retrait, as the 'intial' presence withdraws, but its 'sense' or effect is sustained and multiplied through documentation.

Site-specific art often works to perturb the oppositions between the site and the work and opposition between 'ideal' and 'real' space.⁹ This mirrors the inherent restlessness and disjunction central to the retrait. Architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi, influenced by Derrida, defines architecture precisely through the disjunction between the concept and experience of space, and his project La Villette (early 1980s) explicitly rejected an "obsession with presence" and sought to be "pure trace or play of language"¹⁰ rather than having a fixed meaning. The site, like meaning, is deferred, differed, and rendered irresolute.

We seek to build an art-historical archive of performance and land-based practices, treating site and documentation as central constituents of the form of an artwork. We employ Derrida’s term retrait because these practices often withdraw as they occur. They weather, disperse and leave traces. Their histories must be reconstructed from what remains and from what later reappears in conservation and display, including, but not limited to scores, photographs, site modifications, permits, maintenance logs and witnesses’ accounts.

Our remit is decidedly diachronic. We situate contemporary formations alongside earlier land-based interventions to establish longer genealogies of form, site, and reception. The project is explicitly curatorial-historical rather than celebratory, as we seek to attend to artists and practitioners historically underrepresented in the literature, collecting, and exhibition practices, including women, Indigenous and diasporic makers, regionally embedded and vernacular traditions, together with the frequently occluded agents of production and mediation (assistants, fabricators, documentarians, site stewards, local publics). Our aim is to reconstruct the situatedness of works and how bodies, materials, legalities, and ecologies co-produce them while keeping visible the very operations of writing and imaging that make them legible. Through dossiers, provenance notes, site and ecology records, and work-specific chronologies (conception, realization, documentation, conservation, re-staging), SPOOL seeks to build a searchable apparatus that clarifies authorship, maintenance, and mediation.

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1. Jaques Derrida, "4 The Retrait of Metaphor," The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, 102-129. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473644-007

2. Ibid., 125.

3. Jaques Derrida, "7 From Memoirs of the Blind," The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, 169-183. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473644-010 :179.

4. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 5.

5. Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 11.

6. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 151–52, quoted in Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 13–14.

7. Jacques Derrida, “That Dangerous Supplement,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 154, quoted in Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 14.

8. Jacques Derrida, “That Dangerous Supplement,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 157, 163, quoted in Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 14.

9. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 29.

10. Ibid., 51.