The Queer Archive in Fragments: Sunil Gupta's London Gay Switchboard

Abstract

The exhibition Slide/Tape was staged at Vivid Projects, Birmingham, England, from October 5 to November 16, 2013. Curated by Yasmeen BaigClifford and Mo White (2013: 2), the show attempted “a fresh appraisal of an abandoned medium,” tapeslide, as it was used by artists across the 1970s and 1980s. As White (2007: 60) writes in her unpublished doctoral thesis, tapeslide was “technically crude, cheap and eccentric”: its technical assemblage usually consisted of one or two carousels of 35 mm slides with an accompanying audio cassette soundtrack. The progression of the slide images could be activated by hand or set to advance at a pace controlled by the cassette. Tapeslide’s precarious form made it susceptible to disassembly, its material components easily scattered and lost. It was also materially delicate: individual images could be scratched or burned, and audio tapes might snap or unspool. The instability and ephemerality of the medium contributed, in significant part, to a notable paucity of critical attention from historians and theorists. As White writes (60 – 61), “Tapeslide has not offered itself up to be collected, archived or even adequately documented making the task of providing an accurate retrieval of its history difficult. [As the artist Judith Higginbottom notes,] the unpredictable nature of tapeslide led to much of the original material not surviving and that which did is difficult to access in archives.” The Vivid Projects exhibition included work by Black Audio Film Collective, Nina Danino, William Furlong, Sunil Gupta, Tina Keane, and Cordelia Swann. Gupta’s contribution consisted of “fragments” — the curators’ term — from his 1980 tapeslide project London Gay Switchboard. As the program for the exhibition noted of Gupta’s piece, “The audio track remains missing, a reminder of the fragile nature of early slidetape work” (BaigClifford and White 2013: 7).