There are two main lines of interest for the content of ephemeral objects; their print values and personal narrative. When looking through the Ephemera collection it became unsettling to consider the personal nature of the histories being uncovered while contemplating the use of them in our research; much like sneakily scourging through someone’s rubbish bin. Although the majority is massed produced and many are collective documents such as concert or circus programmes, there are very personal items such as letters, bills, cards, invitations, certificates that have been collected in preference to an endless amount of other printed culture because of value placed upon by there original owner and then subsequently institutions.
The collected ephemeral is an object of many ideas. It is an entangled object, where by its complex story involves a dense weave of characters, ghosts, and events that is almost impossible to unravel.
The Collection of ephemera from within the lifetime of the collector is a mnemonic interest. It represents a struggle to maintain memories charging the object with the responsibility of their safekeeping. The memories held with in or locked out by the object are connected directly to identity on multiple scales.
‘
Objects as mnemonics are a complex business intertwined with past experiences, current
constructions and orientations towards future aspirations.’[1]
The collection of ephemera from a history that is not your own is an exercise of “Possessive
individualism”. [The individual surrounded by accumulated property and goods resulting in the
making of the cultural self.[2]] Collections have hierarchy of value to make the “good”
collection. Whincup describes the ‘object as a symbol’ as ‘an agent of cultural
construction…exemplifies past and present.’ he continues to discuss how symbols are
inherent parts of a structure that people exist in and read. ‘The inability to recognize the value
of these constructions place people in other social spaces.’[3]
Arbitrary systems form value and meaning, change historically and socially. The Value of an
object before it enters an institution is personal, and often only rational to the individual. Once
with in the system the object transforms to a specimen of linear history for those visitors that
‘don’t know any better’. Conflicting notions of “ownership” occur when the history of the object
is blurred between personal and collective.
C.M. Hann in, Property relations: Renewing the anthropological tradition describes:
Property, [as] not a thing, but a network of social relations that govern the
conduct of people with respect to the use and disposition of things.[4]
The inability for parties to recognize the values of others results in a lack of judgment to the correct use, nature and respect of the other’s right to ‘property’, and leads to cross-cultural plundering on both sides. This can result in a fear of engagement that produces a psychological sense of taboo through time lost discussion.
I don’t want to enforce a subject of Taboo, but I think it is wise to note the difficulty of representing the concerns of both the individual and collective. These concerns of an inability to critically engage with and honor collective print and personal histories of these objects reminded me of Luke Wood’s essay Trespassers Will be Prosecuted: A B-Grade Horror in
Four Parts, where he discusses the life of his display face McCahon. He describes how wrongful employment of McCahon display face in the McCahon Retrospective at Wellington City Art Gallery by Saatchi and Saatchi produced a freak show [5]– dishonoring the original content of McCahon’s paintings and the histories of the artist’s script that his display face was
based upon.
Wood notes that a corpse can never be re animated ‘whole’ or perfectly as-it was. Reanimation is “an approximation” and should be carefully re-introduced back into culture. McCahon’s use of use of ‘lofty, poetic, and often biblical texts’ and; his formal points of reference… from comic books, advertising, and signage,’[6]allowed Wood to make a decision to allow the use of the display face by Charlies Orange Juice. The decision was keeping in honor of the aesthetic origin of McCahon’s script in roadside hand written fruit stall signage.
The book Joseph Churchward by David Bennewith is a example of honoring histories in a critical manner. A published collection of the life work of a some what disparate figure in New Zealand history at the time, Bennewith started his project with the goal of answering personal curiosities such as; Was Churchward still working? Was he in New Zealand – and if so,
where? What would provoke this man to join a boffin-like fraternity of type designers?
The following pages are an unraveling of a history as it comes to light of Churchward’s, personal and commercial life through the representation of ephemeral documents. Content is honored in attention to display, reproduction and materiality. Bennewith exposes his own research process in admitting letters, interviews, and a fluent personal writing style that avoids a cold historical analysis of Churchward. In considering these two texts it seems grave robbing only occurs when the grave is a shrine of the fanatic mass that have no regard for personal histories. The dishonoring of content and history of the display face McCahon is a practice found often in ethnographic surveys of artifacts in museums. The relatively unknown (like Churchward) is honored in recognition before giving the possibility of being robbed.
References:
[1] Whincup Tony. Imagining the Intangible in Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual
methods and the Sociological Imagination, (2004) pp.81
[2]Clifford James, On Collecting Art and Culture, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Litrature, and Art, (1988) pp.217
[3]ibid.
[4]Hann C.M. Ed. Property relations: Renewing the anthropological tradition, (1998) pp.4
[5]Wood Luke, Trespassers Will be Prosecuted: A B-Grade Horror in Four Parts in Printing Types: New Zealand Type Design Since 1870, edited by Jonty Valentine, (2009) pp.51
[6]ibid pp.50
No comments:
Post a Comment