Snail trails and alternative momentum: the Fine Art Critical Practice Archive

Interest in art school histories and the archives that support them has grown over the past decade, yet institutional recordkeeping practices and collecting, where they exist, do not tend to capture the kind of records that are most useful for research into art school pedagogies or their relationship with contemporary art discourse. This article gives an archive studies perspective on the Fine Art Critical Practice (FACP) Archive, a collaborative project to collect archival sources documenting the history of the FACP degree programme at the University of Brighton, UK, to be held at the University of Brighton Design Archives and activated through involvement of the FACP community of staff and students. It considers the records of interest to that community may lie in the context of an art school archive within an institution. It goes on to consider the example of a body of papers received from a former member of FACP staff, Mick Hartney, reflecting on some of the questions raised by this mode of collecting in terms of archival arrangement and knowledge production for the project’s future phases.