Kim Noble is a fifty-three-year-old woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (also known as Multiple Personality Disorder.) Fourteen of her twenty personalities are phenomenal artists, all displaying vastly different and extremely unique artistic tendencies, preferences and techniques. The collection can be viewed here, where pieces are organized in alphabetical order under the personality name to which they belong. Once categorized under their respective personality names, there seems to be no visible method of arrangement, as the pieces are not presented in any chronological or chromatic order, which leads me to assume that it is preference that guides the arrangement. In the case of displaying the collections at live shows, samples from each artist’s work are shown, but the pieces remain with others from the same personality. This works to maintain the great distinction between Noble’s artistic personalities so that viewers don’t mistake the same style as coming from more than one personality.

Understanding that each personality’s style is distinct from the other is all one needs to do in order to easily group the paintings. Abi, for example, paints delicately, illustrating a monochromatic background with a single subject that consumes only an eighth of the painting and entitles the works with short phrases describing the every-day things that the subject is doing or being. Anon, however, paints with heavy, oil-based paints, illustrating ghostly figures and applying mysterious and dark titles involving “the edge.” Much different still is Key, who paints cryptic tribal graphics and geometric designs on boxes covered in black cloth.

Key’s art in particular illustrates that the collections of Noble’s artistic personalities are not limited to canvas, but do seem to be exclusionary of art forms outside of painting/illustration. With Key’s diversion from the rest of the collections, however, it does not eliminate the possibility of Noble developing a 15th artistic personality that prefers sculpting or wood-carving, etc.

The very clear divisions between each personality’s collections, however, does seem to limit each artist to a particular medium and specific style. It is here that the possibility of something silenced arises. When Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the archival building, wherein he writes, “The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension,” (19)  is applied to the world of digitized archives, the framework of the collections and unifying/separating characteristics can be seen as the walls and the structure without which the archive loses its power. In the case of artists without Dissociative Identity Disorder, it is not uncommon to see creative nature expressed in many forms and through many mediums. Why, then, can we suppose that Noble’s personalities are extremely distinct in their artistic expression? Or, is it likely that outlier pieces from each personality have been suppressed in order for the “walls” and power of the collection to stand? If this is the opinion taken, (which I am inclined toward) is it Derrida’s “archival fever” (12) or the potential power in manipulating the archives that Mbembe describes that truly works in contradiction to the anarchival “death drive” (which here has not prevailed)? Or, is the “archive fever” inclusionary of the construing power that comes with archives?