From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium: Shifting Cultural Values in a Dismantled Slide Library

Abstract

Over the last decade, 35mm slide libraries that were used to support art history teaching in higher education in Europe and North America have been widely dismantled and dispersed. This article examines the cultural values that have been illuminated by debates about their decline and disposal, and the contexts and practices for their afterlife. Drawing on auto-ethnographic research, interviews with former slide librarians and surviving slide library material, the article pays special attention to one case study, formerly held at the University of Brighton, UK, to trace the slide library’s establishment and demise, examine the cultural labour of its production and maintenance, and evaluate its particularities and idiosyncrasies. Through this, the article outlines the values and meanings that were established and contested during the slide library’s working life and its 2011 dismantling, and considers how these have been repositioned in the intervening years. The slide library’s devaluation contrasts sharply with slides’ recent revaluation in scholarly interests in photographic materialities and media archaeologies, in the retro marketplace and in contemporary art practice. Together, these reflections and frameworks provide fresh perspectives on dismantled slide libraries and their remains.