Our wonderful group of Artifacts Aired exhibitors follow in a long line of artists who collect, whether it be objects relating specifically to their own practice or otherwise. Below are four notable examples of artist as collector.
See more on Portia Munson's work here: portiamunson.com
The archaeological methods that Dion adopts to assemble this work are distinctive. The artist spent two weeks with a team of invited archaeological experts and volunteers beachcombing on two sites on either bank of the river Thames. These sites, both of them close to London’s city centre, were chosen in order to gather any material that tide or wind might make available. The results are remarkable for their variety: bottles, shards of glass, plastic and iron, buttons, teeth, bones, identification and credit cards, clay pipes, toys and pottery. Objects were cleaned, catalogued and ordered according to type, weight and colour, and arranged within a large, doubled-sided cabinet of curiosities – a container with strong allusions to Renaissance and Victorian traditions of excavation, collection and display." - Michael Shanks, Mark Dion and 'Tate Thames Dig' 1999 - an extract
See more on Brunswick journal: part 4 from the Newcastle Art Gallery Collection
""What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up," he advised in his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). "Now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a colour patch on the side for the month of the year."
He wasn't joking. From 1974 until the end of his life, Warhol kept a box beside his desk into which he swept all the ephemera that passed through his hands. When it became full, it was taped shut, dated and sent into storage. By the time of his death, aged 58, in 1987, Warhol had filled more than 600 boxes.
He came to see them as a conceptual artwork in their own right, a sprawling self-portrait that also captured the spirit of his age. He called them his Time Capsules.
Today, the boxes are kept in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh where they form an invaluable - and largely untapped - archival source for studying Warhol's life and work." - Alastair Sooke: Lifting the lid on Warhol's Time Capsules, Jul 2007
We highly recommend any artist, collector or prospective student of Museum Practices Cert IV visiting the blog of the team unpacking and cataloguing the 610 Warhol Time capsules here: The Warhol: Time Capsules: Blog
PORTIA MUNSON | 1961, Beverly MA, USA
"I like to think of our culture as being defined by the objects we mass-produce, consume, and throw out. I collect these objects and assemble them into dense installations, using trash that usually ends up in yard sales and landfills - what I like to think of as the dark side of the mall. I organise this stuff into patches of varying shades of green, resembling a suburban lawn. Of course, green is a color that represents nature and it is interesting to see what is mass-produced in green plastic and how color is used as a marketing tool. Almost anthing you can imagine that has a relationship to nature can probably be found in green plastic - fly swatters, army stuff, yard tools, astroturf, lawn furniture, weed killer, toy dinosaurs, bug spray, plastic plants, garden hoses, Hulk hands, green slime, plastic cucumbers, and so on. I like to think of each object in Lawn as standing in for the millions of multiples out there exactly like it." - Portia Munson, an interview with Gred Deering, p 14, Portia Munson catalogue and interview, 2006
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| Portia Munson, Green Piece; Sarcophagus, 101 x 210 x 147 cm |
See more on Portia Munson's work here: portiamunson.com
MARK DION | 1961, New Bedford, MA, USA
The archaeological methods that Dion adopts to assemble this work are distinctive. The artist spent two weeks with a team of invited archaeological experts and volunteers beachcombing on two sites on either bank of the river Thames. These sites, both of them close to London’s city centre, were chosen in order to gather any material that tide or wind might make available. The results are remarkable for their variety: bottles, shards of glass, plastic and iron, buttons, teeth, bones, identification and credit cards, clay pipes, toys and pottery. Objects were cleaned, catalogued and ordered according to type, weight and colour, and arranged within a large, doubled-sided cabinet of curiosities – a container with strong allusions to Renaissance and Victorian traditions of excavation, collection and display." - Michael Shanks, Mark Dion and 'Tate Thames Dig' 1999 - an extract
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| Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999, 266 x 370 x 126cm, image courtesy of the Tate Museum |
PETER ATKINS | 1963, Murrurundi, Australia
In the late 1980s Peter Atkins began composing visual journals comprised mostly of non-precious, found objects carefully re-presented in formal arrangements. Atkins' collections offer no obvious hierarchy or economic value but rather reflect a highly personalised approach to selection and display and serve as a time capsule of the artist’s life at any given time.
In one panel in Brunswick journal: part 4 his son Cato’s fingernail clippings are labelled and archived. In another, videotape found by the artist as a long glittering thread trailing from a tree in a Brunswick park is glued to the panel creating a monochromatic abstraction. His journals function simultaneously as an ode to art history and a record of a personal encounter. " - Strange Cargo, Newcastle Art Gallery touring exhibition, 2006. From the online education resource, available here [PDF]
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| Peter Atkins, detail from Brunswick journal: part 4, 2002, mixed media, 12 panels, 30 x 30cm each |
See more on Brunswick journal: part 4 from the Newcastle Art Gallery Collection
ANDY WARHOL | 1928 Pittsburgh PA, USA - 1987, New York NY, USA
""What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up," he advised in his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). "Now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a colour patch on the side for the month of the year."
He wasn't joking. From 1974 until the end of his life, Warhol kept a box beside his desk into which he swept all the ephemera that passed through his hands. When it became full, it was taped shut, dated and sent into storage. By the time of his death, aged 58, in 1987, Warhol had filled more than 600 boxes.
He came to see them as a conceptual artwork in their own right, a sprawling self-portrait that also captured the spirit of his age. He called them his Time Capsules.
Today, the boxes are kept in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh where they form an invaluable - and largely untapped - archival source for studying Warhol's life and work." - Alastair Sooke: Lifting the lid on Warhol's Time Capsules, Jul 2007
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| Marie Elia, Warhol's Time Capsules Project Cataloguer, image courtesy of the Time Capsule Blog |
We highly recommend any artist, collector or prospective student of Museum Practices Cert IV visiting the blog of the team unpacking and cataloguing the 610 Warhol Time capsules here: The Warhol: Time Capsules: Blog
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