52. archival fever* is making elvis weak in the knees

Perhaps Elvis is just easily amused. Could be that he’s got a thing for sepia. Or maybe Elvis really never should have left the Victor Building. It’s there that he spent the summer of 2003, largely on its concourse level, thumbing through the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

In any case, he left and life went on. Elvis was sure that the AAA’s archives could never be surpassed, but in recent weeks, Elvis has been hording all sorts of goodies in Emma Lee’s bedroom. Recent acquisitions include a photo of Muhammad Ali, taken by Candace Bergen (yes, that Candace):

He’s also gotten his hands on a banned book from the Jewish Museum. Software was one of the first computer art shows, and for all its groundbreaking and innovation, it was a bit of a logistical trainwreck—the catalogue included a full frontal of one artists, which would not, and could not fly with the administration. Because of that, the show went largely undocumented. But thumbing through the log, the art was various degrees of amazing. Case in point: way before Nicholas Negroponte started making one laptop per child–before he even began the Media Lab, he made Seek, a piece about computers and gerbils. Computers were new and confusing, and apparently, in 1970, few Americans knew about gerbils, either. (They were relatively new to the US, having stayed in central Asia until the mid 1950s.) Here’s two of them in NN’s sculpture now:

* The reference to archival fever comes from the show at ICP earlier this spring. It was wonderful, full of archives real and imagined. A moment, now, for Cornell Capa.