Lets talk about stuff
Following on from yesterday and the quote from The Times in 1900 about how we might decide what is valuable and what is valueless – I’ve been thinking about stuff. The National Archives, local archives, businesses and community archives, personal archives, artist archives. The list is endless, but how do we go about deciding what to keep?
Artists who defy the notion of being selective within collecting include Karsten Bott – with his Museum of Everything. He is included in this article ‘Collecting as Art’ where the writer Christian Marc Schmidt brings together a group of artists who have a practice that features collecting, grouping and categorising objects and images. The article discusses the ‘need to categorize as a basic human trait’ and I agree. The sorting, clearing and focused (and unfocused) collecting many of us undertake varies greatly.
Collections represent who we are and what we consider to be important to us. By extension considering the archives I am working with specifically, the items within the collection need to operate as a representation of a particular time or place, what happened there and who was involved. For this project looking at the five commissioners selected for in depth investigation, all have items in the archive, a fact which obviously informed the decision to look at them in more detail.
You can read Christian Marc Schmidt’s brief article here:
http://www.formfollowsbehavior.com/2008/06/25/coll…
Off to the archive again today so more later.
