Thursday 28 February 2013

Still Life With Oysters and Lemon - Review



This book by Mark Doty is subtitled on objects and intimacy. It is a wonderful rumination on the subject. There are many things I could say here about the beautiful poetic yet simple language or the art historical insights into still life painting, the lovely and sometimes moving personal anecdotes... But I'd rather you read the book to discover those things for yourself - a treat in store... I'm going to focus here mainly on Doty's ideas about objects and collections as is relevant to museeme. In many ways rather than a review, this is a mini essay inspired by the book.

However whilst I do not want to dwell too much on the art historical side of this book, it is just wrong to start any writing on it without mentioning still life painting, or in particular "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" painted in the 17th century by Jan Devidsz de Heem in Antwerp. At the start of the book Doty tells of how he fell in love with this painting, and how this is a possible emotion as a painting can affect all the moments around it. A painting can be an atmosphere. Everything within a painting can be transformed into feeling. This is particularly interesting when thinking of still lifes as they are of simple objects. Therefore something that seems to hold no deeper level - a simple depiction of objects can actually hold a vast depth of feeling and emotion - a still life thinks through objects, suggesting knowledge can be found in these everyday things. A still life infuses ordinary things with an infinite well of meaning. Yes we might not know what the painter intended or who owned the objects in the painting, but that doesn't stop us finding an emotion or meaning in it - of wondering about its stories. A few pages later Doty talks of how a painting has a magnetic pull similar to the resonance of strings. How painting turns objects into words waiting to be spoken. For me this triggers a lovely image of objects breathing words out of the painting like echoes - ectoplasm wisps of uncertain yet no less powerful human history.

As I read this book I made notes and now am painfully aware of how woefully inaccurate they are in terms of creating a coherent piece. So I will write this almost as a list of Doty's ideas and my reflections on objects and meaning - like a wisp or hint of an idea story in itself. I think to write too clinical a "review" of this book is to belittle its depth of meaning in a way - I will just seek to draw it out a little...

Doty suggests that the language of ideas is in itself a phantom language. I think by this he means that in reality for real meaning language is anchored in the physical world. That is not to belittle the abstract, but more maybe I would argue there is no true abstract - we are incapable as humans of truly communicating without the things around us. Doty says we are instructed by objects - they are containers of feeling, experience, memory and time. He then goes on to explain by telling a story about visiting his grandmother and going to look for bears in the mountain. This whole stream of memories is contained for him in a particular swirled peppermint sweet. I personally have no memories triggered by said sweets (though bizarrely now maybe I have absorbed Doty's - maybe now every time I see such a sweet I will think of grandmothers and bears in Tennessee...), but it got me thinking about whether there can ever be an "empty" object - can an object only ever be devoid of extra meaning if it has never been seen, which is mostly impossible when one thinks that so many objects are man made? They would at least have been seen by their creator who would have their own memories of making said object. Therefore as we go through life we are surrounded by things full of the meanings of others - we make our way through an invisible soup of meaning - of other people's memories that increases rather than depletes with time. I spent a part of this morning in charity shops in Plymouth and having spent yesterday reading Doty I could not see anything as what it simply physically was - everything was thick with stories. This wasn't an entirely new feeling for me - I'm obsessed with hidden histories and have always loved second hand things precisely because I like the idea that they have these previous lives - but I did feel a new intensity to it today. Or almost a new poignancy... Each shelf was like an abandoned sculptural still life - I felt myself feeling sorry for the things no one wanted any more that being so commonplace and shabby in many cases might end up being simply thrown away.

But I digress a little. Doty argues that objects, such as those belonging to his grandmother whose story and memory in turn were triggered by the peppermint's memory, are made poignant by distance and time. Something you only noticed as a child has a meaning that is different as an adult. For me it grows - almost like a tree with its rings for each year - we can tell the weather and any big natural event that happened - Doty's way of seeing his grandmother's objects are similar for me - they expand in circles of meaning till it almost seems bizarre that something could be just a sweet or a floral dress. Surely they have to be more - have some way of showing physically how they have morphed? But no - meaning is both visible in the mind and invisible to the naked eye. Having just innocently used the term naked eye here that too triggered an idea - perhaps we could see these memories as the eye's clothes - that no one can see objects from their own lives with a naked eye? This is where the layers, the rings, lie. Doty says that if he laid out these objects on a table it would be like a memory museum. I love this idea. It's like a table of ordinaries rather than a cabinet of curiosities, but in my opinion it would be no less curated. It would just be that they were curated for personal memories rather than personal feelings of curiosity. I would argue that in this way we inadvertently curate a lot around us - shelves and dressing tables - any surface where we innocently put stuff. In the future those objects in that combination could be infused with a meaning we would have never presupposed.

"The heart is a repository of vanished things." I loved this line - it felt like the first line of a poem to me. But what I also loved here and Doty notes, is that yes this line is true, but also if these things have vanished to us, that doesn't mean that they are not out there somewhere continuing their accumulation of meaning with other people's lives. There is a poignancy to the personal loss of objects, indeed it is the heart not the mind that Doty says is the repository, but for me there is also an implicit hope - almost like a child leaving home there is the excitement of what might be waiting for them. This ties in with how I've always felt about second hand things.

Doty quotes the poet Cavafy who writes about visiting a room that he once spent a lot of time in with a lover that has now changed. He says "They must still be around somewhere, those old things." Doty points out how that by visiting rooms we have once been in and imagining them how they were we are almost giving them back their bodies. That the objects in them at a certain time were what made this room what it truly was and that it has changed. Yet he says there is a wistful adult acceptance in this poem that things must go on without us, again almost suggesting that these objects have been let go for a new life. But where have they gone?

Doty comes on to talk about auctions as a redistribution of objects, and therefore I would argue, memories. He says he particularly likes yard sales as this is where the histories of objects are their most palpable. I would also say that this urge to buy second hand has something to do about how this gives objects personalities. He talks of liking a particular plate with a chip out of it as he can wonder how it got it. For me it is like being through so many owners builds character. I have always found it strange when speaking to people who don't like second hand things. Maybe they are aware of this history even if they dismiss it as nonsense and it makes them feel uncomfortable? But I have always loved owning something unique even if it is only made so by its flaws, people I love have flaws - it's what makes them unique - you wouldn't want to hang out with someone who was the human equivalent of the IKEA catalogue so why would you fill your house with it? I feel there is a strength in old second hand things - a reassurance that they have been through things. They help me out in some way going through hard times - this reassurance is a pleasure. A nourisher. Old things are nurturing to me. Life isn't clinical so why try to make it so?

Doty sees people who attend auctions as a tribe who understand that they are curators of objects - objects that could outlast us. I find that interesting. Museum curators think all the time about age and preserving things for future generations, but we rarely think about our mortality in relation to things we own. You might be outlived by that horrid Primark frock so you might as well preserve something old and beautiful. I don't mind being outlived by a '30s ballgown or a beautiful painting. Good jewellery and antiques have always been seen as heirlooms. I like how it gives the activity of going to a yardsale the feel of an important mission knowing that you might be rescuing something that might have been precious to someone in the past, and could be even more so to someone after you're dead. It's comforting rather than morbid. And it is a curation. Does that make a yardsale a transient museum - a museum takeaway - a travelling exhibition of personal history? He also talks of how objects can have a personal collective memory that I almost see as heriditary - he is drawn to things because his mother liked them for example. We are searching for specific memories, in the same way as we might be on the look out for a specific type of art deco desk.

Doty talks about our houses being like our biographies. For me this links with Proust, and Doty frequently mentions Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space", but they are both works I love and I think everyone should read, but I'm not going to dwell on now. I am going to think more of the objects in our homes. Doty talks at the end of his attic being so crammed that he knows the stuff is there, but how whilst each individual piece has meaning, en mass it can become overwhelming or even shameful. I guess this is where we touch on hoarding - unhealthy attachment to objects. But what I love here is how he describes his attic as almost paleontological. It has strata - one could excavate it. Go on a dig for memories, which is something that certainly comes up in my poetry book The City I have written with Ana Seferovic. 

But rather than ending on how objects can overwhelm us I would take us back to the still life. Like an attic of memories, the painter can only render what can be seen yet there is so much more there. Yes all of our senses are arriving via the gates of our eyes, but there is still more. For Doty this leads to the conclusion of the soulfulness of objects. That there is something about them that is akin to a spirit or a soul. People talk of the body as an empty vessel and if objects are vessels filled with memories, than surely they are soulful? But what is interesting to me is how these souls are given to them by humans not an all powerful deity. These ordinary objects are given souls by ordinary people. By us. And for me this gives them something that is more powerful than a religious relic we are told has a certain meaning. We create the meanings of ordinary things through a collective giving of memories - it is personal and unknowable and altruisitic. It is a gift that everyone will during their lives give. It is our invisible epitaph.

I could say more and I have gone off topic and left out so much. I urge you to buy this book here .

Wednesday 27 February 2013

Things we pick up along the way...

I was talking to my friend the other day about what we collected as a child and she mentioned how as they didn't have any money growing up her sister collected sticks. This made me remember how when I was young, even though we had money for toys, I was still like a magpie for seemingly dull objects - collecting pebble worlds whilst sat on the beach in Cornwall, or sticks in the garden or from the local woods. I didn't collect sticks as such, but I certainly accumulated lots of found natural objects and played with them - building miniature worlds, making up stories with stick people, squirreling away a particularly good find for building a future den...

I think we all have magpie tendencies. Yes we are obviously drawn to the physically appealing - I can spot a good pair of sparkly shoes or the perfect '50s dress a mile off - but what I've started to find interesting is the things we are drawn to that don't call out to us in an obvious way, particularly those from the natural world. Walking through the woods along the cliff path the other week I couldn't help but pick up this particularly good stick - it looked like a miniature tree house and was decorated with lovely moss. I still have it as if I might need it some day for making something, or might want to decorate it with little models. It bothers me the idea of chucking it away, just like a bird would not want to lose something that would work well in its nest. This made me remember how when I was touring Sicily in a theatre company eleven years ago now I found a really good staff-like stick whilst walking up to the temple at Segesta - now while I should remember the temple and the amazing nearby amphitheatre, which I do, they are no more vivid in my memory than said random stick. Is it that when we walk through the natural world we cannot help but want to collect things from it? Is this some natural instinct from thousands of years ago, or just a reminder that we are all connected to the natural world?

I remember being picked up from school once by my mother in her old battered Morris Minor that had moss growing on the windows, and climbing in the front seat to bash my legs against something strange on the floor. It was a giant, particularly pleasing, log. When I asked Mum about it, she just said "Oh that's Albert". Now whilst to someone not in my family this might seem particularly eccentric, and I find it very amusing/endearing, thinking back on it in this context again it was like Mum couldn't leave this log behind when she found it, almost like a grown up version of childhood stick hoarding. Virtually everyone I know when wandering on a beach can't help but collect pretty shells they find - was Mum and her log (no Twin Peaks jokes folks!) any different, except in scale and how taking home such a large object might be perceived as weird by others?

Linking this to curation and art and museums I don't think it is too far-fetched to link it to land art. Andy Goldsworthy uses things he finds that others might just take home, to make lovely site-specific natural art works that could be seen as curating the landscape he creates them in. Richard Long makes art works out of walks in the countryside - the walk itself and what he sees and finds becoming the work. An artist whose name I unfortunately can't remember (do tell me if you know) created a work that was left to travel down a river, so that the work itself was arguably brought to life by its process through the landscape and who might find and relate to it. Ana Mendieta used natural things she found as parts of performance art rituals...

I guess to conclude perhaps when we think of collections and the collecting instinct it is interesting to think outside of carefully and deliberately curated collections to the things we just instinctively collect as we wander around. Are they telling of a natural instinct - like a literal magpie? Do they say something about our relationship to the natural world? I would love to hear any anecdotes or about strange found natural collections anyone has... And now I'm off for a walk!

Andy Goldsworthy:





Richard Long:




My particularly good tree house stick!

Urville - curating an imaginary city.



Urville is the creation of the extraordinarily talented Gilles Trehin. Gilles is autistic and has been working on Urville since he was 15 (he is now in his early 40s), designing his imaginary city in beautifully detailed drawings and creating the history that goes alongside it. I have always been fascinated by imaginary cities (it's a subject I expect to revisit often on this blog) and Urville is the most detailed I have discovered, so for museeme I wanted to pay homage to this great achievement and talk a little about how I feel it is both a creation and a curation.

One of the first things I find interesting about Urville in this context is that it is an imaginary city situated in real history. Whilst the physical site of Urville is an island in the meditterranean off the coast of France, the written history is situated very much within the history of France. In this way the city works as an imaginary forum in which to curate the events of French and world history in a new way. The events of history take on a new light in an imaginary realm - we can see how Urville was affected by the French Revolution and WW2; we can see how its buildings reinvented themselves after stock market crashes; we can see how the high rises were affected by September 11th. In this way the fictional city is both acting as an archive (the drawings and designs almost like complex shelves) for real happenings, whilst addressing the issues that affected real cities and their planners post global events.

The city is divided into many areas, and the drawings have been divided into groups for each area in the book version of the project published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. The text that accompanies each drawing is interesting in that whilst describing events (more on that later) a lot of the text comprises of lists of dates and people that have been involved in the particular building or area illustrated. Whatever the reasons behind this, where I find it interesting is again in how this makes the city function as an archive - the imaginary buildings have almost been catalogued by their history and who has been involved with them. One could also see the buildings themselves as items in a collection created by Gilles. In this way I think Urville functions both as an imaginary and a multi-layered archive of real and imagined history, the history of each building and that of those involved, and as a catalogue of the work produced. We are even told what archaeologists might find if they looked under the city - again another layer of potential curation.

This idea of a multi-layered curation of imaginary place is continued for me in how the text tells of any film or book that may have been inspired by something that happened in a certain building or area. In this way the history of the city goes beyond trying to catalogue a physical history to a creative history, from building, to event, to inspiration, to art work. We are aware of imaginary works of art that in themselves also curate the city in our imaginations - curating the curated. We can never see these artworks or read the books set in Urville, but just the knowledge of their imagined existence somehow adds something to our understanding of the city. We know that it is a city that has the potential, just like a real place, to affect the world in many ways.

In the introduction to the Urville book, Uta Frith says that autistic artists are often seen as having an "obsession with the physical world and a neglect of the social". This could be seen in Urville in how the hundreds of people drawn are anonymous like mini statues or that residential areas are not really dealt with - we just see lots of buildings that we guess must be flats and no low rise or townhouses, but I would say that Urville doesn't so much neglect the social as see it through cultural and civic terms. There are enough public squares to make Richard Rogers dance for joy (in many ways Urville looks like his dream city...) and, particularly interesting for this blog, a museum for virtually every aspect of life it is a city of/for curators! We might not see the textile workers, bankers or fisherman and know what they get up to at home, but they each have their museums or, in the case of bankers,  monumental or iconic buildings. Museums also spring up to commemorate historical events, including social history - e.g. a factory might close and its building be turned into a museum about what was made there, in a way socially archiving the city's structure as it changes. It's almost as if the buildings are curating themselves! There are also social aspects in terms of how cultural events are archived - from the grandness of World's Fairs (another future topic) to a yearly Armenian music festival, as well as food and flea markets. Again these can be situated in real social history - he talks of Nirvana and The Pixies. Gilles's attention to detail is extraordinary. Having read the book I feel I know as much about his imaginary city, as I do about many real cities, in some ways making it just as real in my head in terms of how i archive city experience. I have a list of what I'd like to see and do there. I have imagined versions of real cities all over the world based on reading and images, and Urville is just as clear to me.

Dream versions of real cities is one of my pet subjects, and something that continually arises in my own creative work. Urville really fascinates me in this way, partly because as mentioned it is situated in the context of real French history, but also how for me it functions as a dream version of Paris, just as say Calvino's Invisible Cities are all a form of Venice. I know Paris fairly well and it keeps appearing to me as a kind of phantom city as my mind travels around Urville. I don't know whether this similarity is conscious or not - it doesn't really matter - but if we do acknowledge this similarity then it seems to me that Urville could also be seen as a curation of an imaginary Paris - a secret exhibition within Urville for those visitors who have some knowledge of the French capital. Yet unlike Paris, Urville is an island, and I love how in some drawings Gilles has included giant sailing boats, giving the city another level of imagination in that we can imagine where we would sail to from it - we are aware of a world beyond even when immersed in such detail.

Gilles also deals with dream as in utopian views of Urville in the area Cite Utopique. Drawing on a lot of the ideals that led to post world wars estates in many cities, Gilles has included one here, creating an idealised city in intention within his own imaginary city, also curating city planning movements as he does so. Many planning and architectural styles are included in Urville and these are catalogued, including the large 19th rebuild of Urville (echoing Haussmann and Paris) and the current trend for giant towers.

I could go on, and maybe I am stretching things too far, but I not sure it matters. Surely one of the interesting things about imaginary cities and any attempt to analyse them is their ability to trigger an infinite number of ideas that cannot really be proven. The creator might have intended one thing, but then no matter how much they are catalogued they to an extent take on a life of their own. The one thing I am sure of is that Urville is a staggering achievement and one I am sure I will visit in my imagination again and again.

The book version of Urville can be bought here .
Visit Urville at www.urville.com .
I have pasted some images below, but I apologise for the lack of accompanying text and close up detail. I recommend you buy the book!


Monday 25 February 2013

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects - Review


I stumbled across this little book by accident and was drawn initially by its title and then of how it was a memoir set in 1990s Paris - a city I was fixated with during my own late teens. And it seems the author Stephanie Lacava shared some of my own fixations with characters such as the Marchesa Casati and the clothes of Paul Poiret (the subject of my university thesis), which combined with ruminations on the music of Nirvana and cabinets of curiosities made me instantly like her.

It's a gentle little book whose atmosphere I found comforting, which is interesting in itself seeing that it chronicles a teenage breakdown. But to dwell on that seems to miss the essence of this book somehow. For me it was essentially hopeful - that yes we can sometimes lose it a bit, but rather than a grand solution it is often in the everyday that we find the things that help us - in the case of Stephanie Lacava, the objects she collected.

Starting with a collecting impulse that started as a child, she says "Collecting information and talismans is a way of exercising magical control," and whilst indeed control and order can be helpful when going through something, for me the key word here is "magical". Control is a word that sounds clinical and cold, whereas the power of objects is the opposite of this - they can transform the clinical into the magical - they can help us escape the ordinariness of our lives for dreams of a more exciting one, echoed in this book by how she always felt an outsider but could picture herself hanging out with Lee Miller or Francoise Sagan. Objects can transport you to another place -whether it is a fantasy one or into the past where one feels how you are as a person would make more sense. I could really sympathise with that growing up as a bit of an outsider - as a child I was convinced I should have been born around 1890 in fictional Prince Edward Island (Anne of Green Gables) where flowing dresses and quirky but feisty poetic rural adventures were more in fashion than Bros and pixie boots, I collected accordingly, and this like with Lacava, changed into the same date but Paris, when I wanted a bit more eccentric decadent distraction than was on offer in Somerset.

I guess this isn't turning into a book review as much as a selection of thoughts based on what Lacava says, but for me that was one of the powers of this book - that it really got me thinking about deeper things when its own dealings with this were quite subtle - as a book it encourages one to think deeply and gently rather than shoving ideas in your face, and I loved that about it. It was quirky and feminine rather than shouting look at me I'm so clever I can think all this deep stuff and have illustrations just to prove that I am a boutique book. Yes there are illustrations (and let me qualify after the previous sentence that I am definitely not anti-illustrations - I love them!), but what is interesting here is that whilst they were beautiful little drawings that added to the atmosphere of the book and I would certainly have included them, it was more the footnotes describing the history of certain objects that acted as illustrations of the wider text for me. The drawings were a lovely incidental.

Often I get very annoyed with footnotes in non-academic texts - I find them affected and contrived and a distraction from the main narrative. But in this book Lacava uses them in a way that avoids all this. If we see them as illustrations as well as factual asides, they function as to bring her narrative to life. On its own her narrative is an interesting thoughtful read about finding your place as an awkward  teenager in a foreign country, but despite the personal subject matter I felt that it was in her choice of objects that we really got to know the teenage her. Why do we pick out the details and objects to fixate on that we do? I get so frustrated with people seeing caring about physical stuff as shallow, and it is something that museeme is seeking to address, when it tells us so much and represents so much, and has its own multilayered historical personal narrative. We are what we find interesting, and objects arguably curate people who are interested in them in a collection of narratives.

Going back to the beginning of the book she talks of how children latch on to the security of objects. In her case there is a lovely anecdote about how she bought an acre of rainforest through an environmental scheme (something I also did when I was 11!) and then dreamed of escaping there, in the meantime filling her room with collections of frogs and turning her room into this imagined space through her collections. I think this ties in with what I was saying in a previous post about how as a child collections can aid our imaginations by encouraging dreamworlds, and that rather than unhealthily aiding introspectiveness, they enable an escapism that can be a positive thing - that I would argue is essential to developing into a creative adult. She touches on the danger of being too obsessed with objects to the point where there loss is a catalyst to a downward spiral - I can sympathise with this having most of my stuff in storage and how sometimes I almost physically miss its comfort - but I still don't think this negates the positive. Yes she talks of how she was lonely but at the same time surely it would have been lonelier without the worlds of objects and dream worlds to escape to? Rather than a cautionary tale (not what I think Lacava intended anyway) I see this book as a gentle celebration of stuff - of memory and personal history and hidden stories. Of how we curate our lives and places and memory through objects. This is endlessly fascinating to me.

There is so much that one thinks when reading a book that is inevitably lost by the time one comes to write about it. A book can function like an object in itself - hold forgotten stories and personal thought interactions - take on a new life of its own as each reader brings their own life to its interpretation. Therefore a review of such a book is maybe a false task. Rather I left the reading of this book simply thinking that I would recommend others read it and if nothing else I had found, in the words of Anne of Green Gables, a kindred spirit.

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects by Stephanie Lacava can be bought here
You can check out her website at www.stephanielacava.com

Saturday 23 February 2013

A 1950s boy - collecting.

Here my father - the children's television producer Dan Maddicott - talks about collecting as a child in the 1950s.
 
A fifties’ boy – collecting 

I was born  in 1947 and grew up in the 1950s. We made our own amusements then. Creating collections of things was one of these for me and most of my friends. We’re not talking here about necessarily things of any value – one of my  collections when I was nine  was a series of cards of football teams (I had no interest in the actual game) that came free with a brand of bubble gum that came in a flat sheet the size of the card - it was the sheer pleasure of building a collection that appealed.




My first and longest lasting collecting passion was for Dinky Toys. Living in Cheltenham, our house had a small conservatory and my Mum and Dad let me use the trestle table there to build a layout. They gave me an old bit of pink asbestos (!) salvaged from a re-opened fireplace as a kind of “play-mat” and on this I painted roads and rivers, built little bridges and toy trees and did everything a seven year old was capable of to create an imaginary world. But such a world needed vehicles!
Luckily for me, this was the heyday of Dinky Toys. Such was their popularity that there was even a magazine which announced new models and gave tips on building layouts. The Meccano Magazine was delivered every month to our house (Meccano and Dinky Toys were both owned by the same company.) On the back outer cover of the magazine, the month’s (usually) two new model vehicles were illustrated, and if I had saved enough money, my Mum would take me down to the toy shop in the High Street to buy one of them. It is difficult to imagine now having an eagerly awaited regular release schedule for new toys. But going to the toy shop in the High Street to see if my saved-for model had come in was a recurring highlight of my life at that time. No nasty bubble wrapping in those days - the large vehicles came wrapped in tissue paper in proper blue and white striped cardboard boxes.





        


The smaller vehicles, like cars and delivery vans, came in their own little cardboard boxes, usually yellow as far as I can remember.





Of course, Dinky also made petrol pumps (for my petrol station), pillar boxes (I have still got one of those) and racing cars. By the time I grew out of them I had a huge collection including a complete set of the racing cars.  





 Much later in life, in 1978, I met someone who, unlike me, had managed to save all his Dinky Toys from his mother’s efforts to de-clutter, and we became lifelong friends – a friendship sealed when, the first time I visited his flat I saw a glass case containing the complete set of racing cars, with, underneath the case, a pile of Meccano Magazines!  He even has some still in their boxes – a basic requirement for the real, usually adult, collector of Dinky Toys these days. They are most valuable if they have never been played with. But what’s the point of that!


Of course, as an avid reader of Meccano magazine I soon also developed an obsession for Meccano but I kept this separate. I built up my set year by year. Starting off I think with something like Set 3. The great thing about Meccano was that you could buy intermediate sets and build gradually. So Set 3A, would turn Set 3 into Set 4. It was great for my parents at Christmas time.  I think I got to about Set 7, when my Auntie Allie (not a real relation) decided to get rid of her eldest son Tony’s Meccano and gave it all to me. With this addition I calculated that I had enough to make all the models from the Set 9 instruction book. (Set 10 was the ultimate – sold in a huge multi-drawered wooden box like a plan chest. I never got that). Soon I was producing cranes, buses, planes and even a three foot long ship.



 In between times, I still found time to build a huge collection of Airfix model planes (1s 9d from Woolworths in the High Street) and one giant Revell Sikorsky helicopter, which took me weeks to make and  managed to fall off its stand and smash on the day I completed it. 





 I suppose the obsession with Dinky Toys and construction sets flourished because in those days, life was so slow and there seemed to be so much time. We didn’t have a television set and we didn’t have a lot of money to go out anywhere so we were left to our own devices at home. 


Like any boy now or then, crazes came and went, and most of them were related to collecting. The craze for collecting coach numbers in the coach station opposite my primary school was relatively short lived (though it was with great enthusiasm that I completed the complete fleet, more or less, of the green Southdown coaches), but as one craze petered out, another started. Having a school in the centre of town and being allowed to go home alone, generated some odd passions. The alley from the school to the bus stop housed a small printers and me and my friends vied with each other to see who could collect the largest pile of paper off cuts! We never used them for anything, but somehow we liked having them. Then there were the car brochures – cars were still in sufficiently small numbers to retain an air of exclusivity, and we tried over the months to visit all the garages in town to collect every brochure for every make. It says a lot for the tolerance of the motor traders at that time that we never got sent packing. But then we were very polite and, in our school uniforms, probably quite cute, or at least quaint! 

Collecting things that were free or cheap was an enjoyable and harmless hobby. One of my longest lasting collecting phases was that for Brooke Bond PG Tips cards. The same size as the old cigarette cards, these were stored by Brooke Bond in the between the paper outer and tissue paper inner of a packet of tea (loose leaf of course, no tea bags in those days.) Every Thursday my mum would have a grocery delivery from Mr Tilley the grocer in Bath Road, and when I got home from school, my first priority was to carefully open any new packets of tea and find the card. The cards were free, and you could send away for a free album to stick them in. I have still got my collection of Out Into Space, Wild Flowers and British Birds. Luckily most of my friends at school also drank PG Tips and so there was a thriving trade in swaps.










                                    
As I got older, my passion for collecting anything but things of real intrinsic interest faded. Nowadays I only really collect records and CDs and then only of people I really like. But a friend of mine, Phil Swern, a music buff a year younger than me, music question setter and Radio Two producer continues  an obsessive collecting habit which started when he was very young. He still collects every record that has made it to No. 1 in the British charts since the charts began in 1952. I doubt he listens to many of them very often. But I remember him telling me a few years back the thrill of finding the one disc he lacked at the time the 1953 hit Poppa Piccolino by Diana Decker. He found it in a car boot sale. I guess he would have been prepared to pay the earth. He got it for 50p. That’s the thrill of being a real collector.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Of display cases and shop windows...

The last post got me thinking about all my travels to Eastern Europe and the things I had seen there that are somehow relevant to museeme. Wandering the streets of Belgrade I was always fascinated by how the displays from shops migrated out of the windows to display cabinets in the street. Here is a particularly good example below.






I have even seen wedding dresses on headless mannequins in free standing cases in the middle of the pavement! There was no labelling and no real clear indication of which shop the dress belonged to. It was almost as if this dress and the objects in such displays have been abandoned by their sellers to attain a life of their own. I like the idea that in this way these objects become part of a wider identity of the street - almost like accidental street art - that is then "curated" by the viewer as they take in the street around them and register how it is identified for them.

These cabinets could also be seen as lost street collections - static found objects waiting for a collector to document them. Almost like the Bagpuss shop window but for ghosts! I am always fascinated by the life of forgotten objects. Bagpuss was one of my favourite childhood TV programmes for this reason. Apart from my love of big old stripy cats, I loved the idea that random things this little girl found were all hiding stories, and could be brought back to life by these stories as if by magic, and then left to be found by someone new who would then continue the story of this object's life. In fact thinking of it like that half my work could be said to be influenced by Bagpuss!


But back to Belgrade shop displays, as well as the strange street cabinets I would sometimes find a shop that was never open with a half done display:






Again it seemed to me that these displays, which were supposed to be about commerce, somehow had more in common with old dusty museum displays or abandoned objects. But here like in Bagpuss there seemed to be a backstory - had the shop closed and no one had bothered to clear away the old displays? Was there simply not that much to sell? Had these displays in abandoning their commercial roots somehow turned into something else - a collection, a curation of random objects? Why do the mannequins have no arms? Looking at this scene it feels like we are watching a paused moment in time - that something was interrupted and hasn't been finished - that when we go away maybe these objects and mannequins will come to life and finish what the shopkeeper started... Slightly going off point, this reminds me of a creepy bizarre window of mannequins I once saw in Istanbul:





Again I could not help but feel that there was something else going on here - some strange story possessing the objects. The mannequins are looking out of the window, which seems a conscious way of displaying them. Even in a shop where nothing is for sale, people still arguably think about how things are displayed as if they have to react to the display construct of a window or a cabinet. Shop windows are always curated and the design of them in large stores is big business. It's curation as advertising, but as I have shown this can sometimes take on a life of its own...

But I'm rambling. Back to Eastern European display cases! When I was in Bucharest, as I was fortunate enough to run workshops in the Peasant and Natural History museums, I again stumbled on little separate shop display cases and interesting windows:


But I also became really interested in the empty advertising cases in the metro stations. I was lucky to win a commission to make an artwork for the metro station (though sadly due to being funded by banks the recession somewhat scuppered it), and I used these cases as inspiration and filled them with secret stories of the city. It seemed obvious to me somehow after all my travels that these cases should contain more than adverts - that they were waiting for the unseen city to be displayed and brought to life again. Here's the model I made for an exhibition and the plan of what it would have looked like in situ:












Mythology and history was rising through the city in words, embroidered images and old photos, names of past residents were written on secret notes in bottles...

But again I am arguably rambling, so if I were to conclude I guess I would say that maybe all this shows us that cases and windows inherently display whatever is in them, and that whether it is a purposefully curated display, or something more accidental, it is always interesting to think how these displays work within the city as we walk around it. Are they in some ways a collection of the city's - the city as curator? How can we as creative residents engage with this? I would argue that we all engage with windows and displays automatically - whether by window shopping or the voyeuristic delight of staring in house windows if they've left the curtains open at night. Many people choose to close their curtains and shut out the world, yet also put pretty plants in the window when "curating" their front room. Yet maybe if there is a practical thing we could take from this, especially at a time of recession when there are so many empty shop windows on our high streets, it is that it is a shame to waste these spaces that communicate so automatically with a place's residents. I would applaud the growing number of schemes where artists have been allowed to occupy empty shops and create something interesting in the windows. The Derby city council's Empty Shops Project is a particularly good example of this. I would be interested if anyone has any other interesting examples of this happening, or images. After all, it's what Bagpuss would have wanted...

Tito's Batons - collections, gifts and dictators.

A couple of years ago on one of my trips to Belgrade, Serbia, my friend Mladen took me to visit the Tito museum. It was just as well I was accompanied as it entailed a somewhat complicated bus journey, but it was well worth it as it was one of the strangest museum experiences I have ever had. The 25th May museum as it is known (Tito's birthday) is situated next to his mausoleum, but while the mauoleum (known as The House of Flowers) is the reason many visitors flock to this museum, for me the really fascinating thing about this museum is all the objects Tito collected that people gave to him, most notably his collection of batons. It is a collection as eccentric as any you might find in an individual's house, yet the scale of this collection is quite astonishing. 

Made every year as part of his birthday celebrations the batons travelled from all over Yugoslavia to be delivered to Belgrade, as part of a mass relay race. I have even heard tales of them arriving by daring feats such as absailing and helicopters! There was an official baton each year, but what I love are the thousands (literally - there are 22,000 batons in this collection and it is rumoured that he was given more during his lifetime!) made by individuals or small groups, which are often deeply surreal. I love how an official collection of a world leader can contain so many things that would normally seem more at home in a homemade collection in an individual's house or a school art display. There is a real quirky individualism in them, which I find fascinated in the context of a communist regime. Below are some wonderful examples I took photos of.
















As well as the batons the 25th May Museum has an amazing selection of gifts given to Tito, including many by official organisations. Whilst one's preconception of an official gift to a leader would make one think of mainstream safe choices (though the British government's slightly surreal gift of place mats to the Queen recently might dispel that...), these gifts to Tito are almost like mini collections in themselves - surreal cabinets of curiosities, each like something lost from a mythical museum or eccentric's collection. And the potential for stories behind them too fascinates me - why did the Nuclear Institute give him a taxidermy snake and spider? Why do official organisations choose the things they do to represent them in official gifts? I think you'll find the selection below interesting in terms of this question!















The last one was from the Orthopedic Society - bit creepy... But this did get me thinking about collections in terms of gifts and dictators and how the weirdest collections can often come out of something, such as these gifts, that wasn't originally conceived of as a collection, and how these collections are then used in terms of how we perceive the leader they were given to. One of my most surreal experiences on this subject was on my first trip to Georgia, when in the town of Gori with a friend we went to the Stalin museum. This has to be the most consciously edited museum of someone's life I have ever visited. A highly curated life in fact, maybe the subject for a future post in terms of fame, infamy and public perception and memory. But to briefly make my point here, in the Stalin museum if you did not know your history, you would come out thinking that Stalin was a surprisingly okay looking in his youth revolutionary poet, who world leaders gave lots of presents, and then he died. No mention of the millions of deaths! And these presents are displayed as if somehow them being together like this is a collective proof that other leaders must have not thought that badly of him. Propaganda and rewriting of memory through accumulation of gifts and the inadvertent creation of a collection. Something to think about...




Wednesday 20 February 2013

The Time and Tide Museum, Great Yarmouth - museum as multi-sensory experience

I was recently lucky enough to be shortlisted to be writer in residence at The Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth, and whilst I didn't in the end get the job I did get a chance to have a nose around this great little museum.

The Time and Tide Museum is an interactive museum telling the history of the herring fishing industry in Great Yarmouth. Quite a niche market in terms of visitors you might say, but what the curation of this museum has done is take an interesting subject that most people might not realise is so and bring it to life in a way that goes far beyond the simple display of objects. For starters the actual physical space of the museum has an intrinsic meaning in that it is situated in a converted row of houses that would have been used in the herring trade, so straight away the visitor's preconceptions of a museum space are fundamentally changed. One feels like one is wandering into a personal, private space, rather than a public one, and this immediately aids the sense that one is travelling back in time to a specific point in history. The layout of the museum is also interesting in that it is linear. On entering one is drawn through a series of interconnecting rooms, taking the visitor on a literal journey through the exhibits that I think works in a similar way to a narrative structure - the layout of museum as storytelling - a simple possibly unintentional device that again contributes to the vitality of the exhibits.

In terms of object content the museum arguably cannot compete with a larger space although all exhibits are interesting. There is a particularly lovely selection of model ships that I would love to have had displayed in my own home. But again that is just it - there is a personal touch to this museum - a domestic scale that invites the visitor in and gives them a sense of investment in and involvement with the exhibits, that is echoed by the other more interactive displays within the space. 

Many museums have displays of model figures reenacting scenes from history, and these exhibits can sometimes seem a little fake or clumsy, but here the museum does something interesting that makes its displays stand out from other similar exhibits, and that I find interesting in terms of the new ideas for curation that appeal to museeme. This museum ask us to go beyond looking and reading and to use all our senses. As one walks through a display, smells of how a herring smoking room would have smelled are released instantly changing the atmosphere of the space and therefore how the visitor relates to it. In my own work I am always fascinated by the manipulation of atmosphere and how this changes our perception of a place and also evokes memories, and I love the idea of this being used in a museum. Smell is scientifically accepted as the most powerful sense in terms of triggering emotion and memory and so to use this in the context of a museum seeking to reconstruct a scene from history is I think both bold and brilliant in terms of how it enhances the visitor experience. The visitor's senses are also stimulated by scale - one walks through a display room and then into a room where the herring would have been hung and the ceiling doubles in height so that one's eyes are drawn up to the sky and the old wooden racks as if they are the vaults of a much grander building. The senses are immediately impressed and therefore again feel a new connection to this space and a connection to the stories it triggers. The visitor feels physically part of the history of this museum by how their senses react to it. There are also many educational activities - something I'm always pleased to see. My only small criticism is that I know there is a very impressive archive at the museum that I would have liked to have been used more in the display to balance the interactive displays on models etc, but within the scale of the space I think the museum works very well.

But one thing happened on my trip to Great Yarmouth that really got me thinking in terms of the ideas museeme seeks to explore. I arrived by train across the Norfolk Broads on an incredibly misty day and the atmosphere of the town was therefore beyond strange - I could hardly see more than twenty metres in front of me as I walked the streets! And it was freezing! It created such a strange atmosphere that I began thinking about how the atmosphere of the town itself affected my experience of the museum. Did some of the faded grand architecture almost mentally prepare me for travelling back to a bygone seaside age? Are all museums in a sense site-specific? Not in that they are literally static in one place, but rather that unintentionally how they are viewed is affected by where they are, and could this actually be manipulated intentionally in an interesting way when curating a collection? Site-specific art has long understood the implications of place on how a work is perceived, and I would argue that it would be interesting if museums experimented with thinking in this way. Saw themselves as a site-specific whole rather than a container. Could the atmosphere of the place they are in influence how work is curated and displayed? If I had gone to Great Yarmouth on a sunny day would my experience of The Time and Tide Museum have been completely different and would this have mattered? Okay I know, especially here in Britain, we cannot control the weather so perhaps it is slightly far fetched to think that a museum can be curated accordingly, but in terms of the less changeable aspects of site-specificity, I think there could be an interesting discussion here. Should museums think about the curation of their spaces in terms of their atmosphere as well as their contents is perhaps what I mean. Could more exhibits be brought to life and the stories of objects given more meaning if a more immersive experience was offered? Could this be a really useful tool, especially within smaller museums with limited space, to display their objects to their best advantage for a viewing experience? I guess that is museeme's thought for the day!


Tuesday 19 February 2013

The curating impulse - childhood collections.

I've been thinking a lot lately about whether curation, which is so often seen as some official museum and therefore in someways an artificial occupation, is actually quite an intuitive impulse that starts when we are quite young. I'm sure everyone reading this probably at some point in their childhood had a collection, whether it was ceramic frogs or troll toys or marbles or, as in my case, My Little Ponies (I had 37 and they were my most cared for possessions). I also remember being given, by my great aunt who lived most of her life in India, a selection of clay dolls representing every region's traditional dress, and I somehow knew that these were to be treasured and displayed together and looked after. That somehow this group of objects was stronger as a whole and represented something more than a random pile of stuff. I still have them to this day, kept carefully together in a box, and somehow the fact that I first had them and displayed them as a child, makes there significance as a collection even more valuable and apparent to me.

But I also think that childhood collections and what I would call the curating impulse are important, as they are when we first start to create something that is especially our own, that is unique to us. This can be incredibly important when growing up. I remember when I was little and the only girl with two brothers and surrounded by male cousins, there was something about having a collection that was just mine - that they wouldn't steal and play with - that was my own little world I could retreat in, that was incredibly soothing. It made me happy and it made me value things. It also wasn't a static collection but something I could always take with me - to school or more likely roaming the local fields and woods as I did. It was like a portable dream world, that also taught me to value things. I think early collections are also hugely important in terms of our creative development - the stories and games we make up around these possessions. We learn that objects can be the inspiration - the catalyst that takes us into dream worlds. For example I remember being desperate for Flower Fairies as I was sure that if I collected these they would take me to a new imaginary magical world. Now one could be cynical and say the marketing people had succeeded, but it wasn't so much about possession as creation and escapism - enabling even further realms for the imagination to travel to. I don't mind consumerist marketing working if that is the result.

I also think there is something about childhood collections that represents hope and aspiration. I remember collecting an entire grooming kit for a horse I would never have. I went to saddle shops and bought a hay net and a head collar, even though I had no horse to use these things. But that didn't really matter as this collection, rather than a heap of pointless unused objects, represented my dreams and in themselves allowed me dream even more - to feel that my aspiration of owning a horse was somehow not out of reach. Maybe this is how collections function throughout our lives - they give us something we dream of - whether literally or in terms of how they bring dreams closer. And as an adult the memories of these childhood collections still hold an importance - I am a bit of a hoarder but can usually take to charity shops stuff I've bought as an adult but no longer need, but these childhood collections I could never chuck away as they now seem to hold both memories and the hope that they represented. The smell of unused saddle soap still makes me feel optimistic. I have a basket of marbles that seems to hold as many memories and feelings as a teenage diary might have.



And now? Well now I sort of collect lots of things - from my guilty Chie Mihara shoe habit that I can't afford, to old travel guides, vintage Textron ads, 1930s tea sets, holiday souvenir jewellery, vintage dresses, random found objects, found photo albums, lots of moomin things, old embroidered pictures... But do any of them make me feel as emotional as a bag of marbles and a plastic pony? Probably not... (Applejack was my favourite).


Here at museeme I'd be really interested to hear about anyone's childhood collections. If you have one you'd like to share in photos, stories or just memories, do write and let me know. I would like this to be a recurring feature.

Curating Kazbegi - a journey along the Georgian Military Highway

As a writer who does a lot of site-specific work as well as a huge fan of travel writing, walking as art and an urban theory geek, the idea of curating a journey as a form of virtual museum - an ephemeral museum that can never wholly be reproduced - is fascinating to me. So my first offering to museeme is just that - a curation of the day I gatecrashed a tour guide trainee day trip by marshrutka (transit van/minibus) up the Georgian military to Kazbegi - village high up in the Caucasus, old gateway to Russia, home of a famous monastery on a hill, mythical last resting place of Prometheus. All photos my own, taken April 2008.





Hurtling out of Tbilisi on a sunny may day on deceptively reassuring roads after about an hour (I think - memory distorts such things) we came to Ananuri and its beautiful church. Ancient seat of the Eristavis of Aragvi we only lingered long enough to don a headscarf and pay our respects.


We passed by a battle of rivers black and white.





Hot springs painting the climbing earth.





Growing mountains.






 Krestovsky Pereval Belvedere - this is where mosaics compete for the view...





Curating a view with ideology? Who wins? We left...





 Waved hello to the mist ghosts...





 Church barns for horses...





Breathing rock up to snow...


Kazbegi. We arrived. The marschrutka broke. A young man with witch green eyes and a cigarette tongue laughed but wanted to help. You must climb, he smiled.





Past houses and pig friends.


It's getting closer!





 Snow descended like mist as we reached the top. 
Mount Kazbek lost in clouds and mythology, no voyeurism of chains and pecked livers of an ancient imagination. Just peace, and beauty, and cold white snow.

I will never forget how we got down again. Stumbled past confused monks, ankles bare through knee deep snow, and misguided canvas shoes soaked through, freezer wet, we ran, clung to branches, broke our fall with laughter and feet skiing and momentum of not caring what happened any more. Just to get down. To get warm. To drink coffee and cha cha fire up our throats, before hitching a ride on someone else's bus, back through the magic all clouded now. No view to chasms. No room for fear of crashes. Tbilisi, we are nearly home.

I was reading a short intro yesterday, by Tea Obreht to a photo essay of Clarisse d'Arcimoles. She talks of a revelation when a boy said to her "I don't need the picture, I have the memory." She started to question all her ideas of images and memory and photos - whether a photo can ever capture a memory, or is it rather too elusive? Is it simply futile to try and let others share in our memories or to understand there's by looking at photos, if the memory is something of its own, something personal and unknowable to anyone else no matter how much they try? Maybe this is very true - I agree that it is impossible to sum up a person or a moment, an experience, in a single frame. However in some ways the fact that we can never really know a memory as represented by its image makes it more interesting in terms of curating for me - you can set an image free - something that is so evocative for one person, an integral part of what shaped their life, can become something totally different for someone else - the start of a story or the trigger of an idea. The inspiration for new thought or feeling through an emotional response. This is just as valid and can make a selection of photos a museum no one can ever know in whole as it lives in all its viewers heads - the stories they have read into them. Not so much death of the author, as reincarnation of memories. Could this be said for all museums and exhibitions?