The Hodell collection at the National Library of Sweden as an artistic project

Abstract

In this essay, I examine archival material at the National Library of Sweden relating to the Swedish poet, artist and playwright Åke Hodell (1919–2000). The Hodell collection consists of a wide range of material, including manuscripts, letters, photographs, press cuttings and autobiographical notes. Given Hodell’s significance in the field of experimental literature and text-sound compositions of the 1960s, the collection is an informative source for a study of the concretist movement or the Nordic neo-avantgarde. However, I want to emphasize that the material should also be understood as an archival work of art, which can be described through the notions of montage, collection and conceptual uses of the document. Just as Hodell’s collage work Självbiografi (“Autobiography”), from 1967, situates the subject in a complex intertextual weave, his archive constitutes a second, institutionalized and more comprehensive autobiographical montage. Both illustrate how the ego is always given for itself in context, and the act of collecting and editing personal documents is a means of relating to this fact. In these respects, Hodell’s archive can be related to the more well known archive of Walter Benjamin, just as it should be understood in relation to the tradition of the avant-garde, with its uses of the ready-made and its destabilization of the categories of life and art. Hodell’s collection and its artistic context show how the archive medium requires a double vision, through which it can be seen as a collection of traces and information, but also as a work that should be understood through its processuality and its constellations of discrete, yet assembled material.