I, unlike many of my peers, am not a big fan of taking pictures. This is proven to me every time I log onto Facebook as my network of friends rapidly upload photos from their trip to Mexico, or their cousins wedding, or that thing they ate for lunch, or that party where everyone got drunk enough to enjoy dub-step. Instead I have always found myself inclined to memorialize important events more-so with physical objects rather than photographic documentation. This has resulted in two things, me continually questioning if I will ever end up on an episode of Hoarders and my collage from my trip to Europe this past summer. This homage to my recent travels is my version of a photo album that will never be seen on Facebook, and is the subject of my assessment on an object from my own personal museum.
I will probably never be able to thank the neighbor who decided to place their no longer used frame by the recycling bin on our floor, but I wish I could, for if it had not been for that, my ‘work of art’ would be more of a pile of European garbage on my bookshelf. Over three months travelling I kept the many things I made use of. My transit passes, my phone cards, my ticket stubs, and empty boxes of Marlboro Reds all blazoned with surgeon generals warnings, many in languages I am no longer able to differentiate from each other (I know Hungarian sounds prettier than Czech, but it all reads like Greek to me). The preceding is just to name a few as the frame is riddled with countless representations of specific moments all culminating to answer to the question, “So, what did you do this summer?”
Much as Berger highlights in his BBC series Ways of Seeing, the way anyone and everyone views my collage is subjected to their own relationship with the piece, which in many ways will differ from my own intention of creating it. One person took notice of remnants from a program about the performance of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe Theater. We shared a laughing bond over the inclusion of an actor made famous by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the cast description. Just as similarly someone took notice of the cardboard cut out of half a red car, equipped with black string for neck adornment. Although I got the half cardboard red car necklace at a music festival in Slovakia, where I hung out with my favorite bands on a tarmac all day and my favorite Central Eastern Europeans at their mountain pool house all night, the person viewing this detail would fail to see, or feel, any of that. I have a personal relationship with this ‘work of art’, it acts as a reminder of the ways I threw myself into situations I never want to forget.
The ways in which people interact with my collage will differ depending on their affiliations with the details, the whole, and the context in which it is seen. My mother will see it as an upsetting realization that I still smoke cigarettes. My friends will see it as an outlet if they feel like hearing a story of a ridiculous situation I found myself in. My acquaintances will see it as another typical manifestation of personal scraps in a frame. Nevertheless it speaks to my tendency to form bonds with people I’ve never met, places I’ve never gone, languages I’d never spoke, and all the objects that I used in the process of making these things no longer true. It speaks to my ways of feeling art in relation to myself rather than seeing it for its aesthetic value. Regardless people mostly just notice that there are only 19 cigarettes in a box of Marlboros in Turkey instead of 20.
First off, I'm with mom here: you've got to ease up on the Marlboro Reds. There's never a good time to quit and it only gets harder. But personal health issues aside, this is a really effective take on the assignment, and I appreciate you sharing it with us in workshop. The one thing I wish you'd punch up here a little more is to think about what this piece might reveal about you that doesn't have to do with things you chose for yourself, things about how you've been positioned by the culture rather than about how you've positioned yourself within it? That's not a criticism so much as a sense of the potential of this post to do even more than it does . . .
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