The VEC Archives
The final category of VEC activity is the extensive (and growing) INTERMEDIA ARCHIVE, that is in a very real way a key component of Summers' art, not so much in what is collected, but in the gesture of creating descriptive entries (including log-in times and precise categories) for each object as it is added to the collection. This impeccable note-keeping and care exhibited for ephemera raises the act of collecting to the level of Sado (Tea Ceremony)--a gesture both precise and humanly generous to the present- (in artifact) -yet-absent artist--and is carried out by Summers almost as an end in itself. Some may see a similarity to Kurt Schwitters' Merz constructions, but Summers' VEC ARCHIVES is more systematically—even meditatively—done. Summers himself signals the importance (and the praxis) of the ARCHIVE in the Janssen interview (See reference 2), in which he tells of an early VEC action (1977) in Den Appel in Amsterdam. At the end of the performance the first VEC Mail Art Archive is destroyed, but as Summers says,"....noted artists participated in full knowledge of what would happen to their work at the end....A little documentation exists...including the shredded remains of the work destroyed." That is, destruction/ conservation of the object are obverse sides of the same coin: both extremes exist on the same continuum in which gesture takes precedence over content, action over being.
The VEC ARCHIVES constitute the palpable archaeology of the VEC agenda, with a chronology—and therefore an on-going narrative—of the activities, as well as a concomitant tracing out of the boundaries—of Summers' various interests. In addition, the individual contributions of artists known and unknown add to the multiplicity and complexity of this single project, which, finally, can be appreciated as a work of art in itself.
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