Nostalgia for Mud Written Thesis to Accompany Exhibition for MFA Degree by Shannon Robinson May 2006

Nostalgia for Mud written thesis to accompany exhibition for MFA degree by Shannon Robinson May 2006 Flipping through boxes of family photographs, I came across a fantastic visual to illustrate my lifelong frame of mind. Because it embodied my recollection of childhood, I removed it from the carefully catalogued file of years and stuck the photograph under my mother’s nose. I was in a frenzy. Here was proof of the early death of my innocence. “What?” she noted sweetly, “you were having fun.” It’s just less than three by five inches with the classic round edges of early Kodak. The muddy water of the Atlantic Ocean is tumbling as oncoming waves. Perfectly centered in the lapping foam is a face – eyes tightly shut, baby blonde hair plastered to forehead, a grimace. The angle of the head suggests the body is on its stomach, legs flailing out of control with arms rigidly waving in front. The grimace says fight. It is the ageless drama on dated color film. Sink or swim. The struggle to stay afloat while the tsunami of life crashes on top of you, dragging you under, pulling you back. Sand in your pants. And loved ones document it, citing prosperity, nostalgia, and good summer fun. Though perhaps the grimace is a joyful squeal. Cool water on hot skin and the adrenaline of keeping your head held high. The thrill of feeling your own strength and that baby step toward independence. And loved ones document it, citing prosperity, nostalgia, and good summer fun. I showed this photograph to everyone, proudly displaying the potential suffering of growing up. No one questioned the fear on my young face, captured so long ago. Even my mother admitted it looks as though I may have been scared, but who could know panic from pleasure? The strength of the image is in its ambiguity, its ability to intend delight yet suggest horror. One last time I picked up this object, this snapshot that instantly captured the enduring obsession with my misery and that tragic feeling I was born with my glass half empty. And for the first time, I turned this image over. It read: Shawn, Seaside Heights, 1982. It is my brother. When I acknowledged my discovery (and disappointment) to my mom she suggested, “Well, it could have been you.” Could have been. That darling little photo that served my memory, pride, and artistic vision was not my own. Nostalgie de la boue is French, though it is an American invention given a romantic tongue. Nostalgia for Mud. Transliterated it expresses a longing for the gutter, the obsession with self-degradation, the lowly, the primi- tive. It is the swan that wishes for the life of a duck. I find it not only relevant that my response to the photograph confirms I am such a swan, but that I spent my youth playing in the mud. My Barbie collection consumed the downstairs closet; my games remained in the toy chest; my playhouse went uninhabited. I preferred mud pies and mud patties. I was a digger and filled the backyard with holes. I would find a dead bug and show it to my mom. “Oh,” she’d remark, “it’s dead, but isn’t it pretty?” Yes, pretty. On Collecting Peering into the china cabinet in my friend’s home, a towering structure of dark wood and glass, I associated the trinkets within as her parents’ subtle suggestion of status and luxury. The cabinet was in the formal dining room, visible from the home entrance and always off limits to our play. A chill of excitement ran up my spine each time I ran by the room, listening to the rattle of the fragile porcelain figurines. Unnoticed, sometimes we would sneak into the room, mimicking adults while playing house. We would always creep, voices low, so as not to disturb the energy of sophistication radiating from behind the glass doors. The cabinet entranced me. I wanted my own. At my mother’s suggestion, I began amassing thimbles, the quilter’s thumb protector available in ceramic, leather, or steel. But I was more interested in the display box of tiny dark wood compartments with a glass screen. A few years later, I again attempted the role of the collector, announcing my passion for bells, decorative ones shaped like Disney princesses, a tiny jingle echoing from underneath their billowing dresses. I received many as gifts, except the idea of being given these ceramic figurines left me without a quest and I became bored. It was then I realized I had already amassed a collection that would consume a lifetime. Before all else, I am a reader. My parents read to me every bedtime, long before I realized words had sound, let alone meaning. In school, after my classwork was complete, my sanctuary was sneaking a book out from underneath my desk and reading a few more pages. At home, I curled up in bed and continued reading, chapter after chapter, unaware of day becoming night. As a timid and mostly sad little girl, I found solace in other people’s narratives. As I grew older, torn between the inhibition of my shyness and the anger of my depression, I continually returned to my books. I never reread a text, but would pull a certain book from the shelf, reacquainting myself with its age, its smell, its memory. Reorganizing the books, I placed ones currently deemed much loved on the most accessible shelf. My collection has grown with me, from two shelves in my childhood room to filling its entire wall, two free- standing bookshelves, and various piles on the floor. I have read all of them, able to recall that moment’s reason for leafing though each one. I am proud of every book, the creased binding and dog-eared pages as evidence of my time spent within its pages. Perhaps it is now large enough to be called a library. “So much is bound up with objects and their history, so many feelings, hopes and delusions we need to preserve in order to preserve ourselves (1).” Before the sixteenth century, collecting was associated with royalty. Wealth and education held life’s answers. However, when Europe encountered the New World, the exhilaration of the unknown trickled down the social ladder (2). Simultaneously, science was discovering new answers to questions that religion’s replies no longer satisfied. The printing press took literature out of the hands of the elite. A social revolution was beginning, driven by a sense of wonder. Philipp Blom notes that, with Renaissance wonder, economy’s walls tumbled down and “for the first time it became accepted that a fish market may be a better place to gather wisdom than a library (3).” Columbus’ voyage to the Americas enticed ordinary citizens to collect objects of mystery, as if a grouping of the unexplainable would, through careful observation, reveal its secrets (4). In particular, wonders of the natural world were a prime possession for many amateur collectors. New understandings of the earth, physics, and especially of human mortality, led to a fascination of all things unusual within these subjects. These collections of the marvelous, sorted, labeled and placed within display cases for adequate viewing, became known as wunderkammern, cabinets of wonder. As Renaissance life accelerated at an unprecedented speed, the wunderkammern outgrew their homes and hence the museum was created. This new institution reflected its origins; visitors would wander through crowded rooms of seemingly unrelated objects, order given to them by their curators. One such example of organized chaos was the Anatomical Museum in Leiden whose two-headed cat was displayed alongside a split carrot and conjoined apples under the title type of defect (5). Stranger still, the Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was an avid collector of biological specimens. His fascination with the human body dissolved the brick wall between subject and object, allowing human specimens to be viewed objectively and aesthetically (6). Known for his proficiency in preservation, Ruysch applied this skill primarily to children’s bodies. For preservation, he arranged still lifes, formally and traditionally composed, made from the oddities of his collection of human anatomy and the like. While these delicate presentations did not survive, the Russian tsar, Peter the Great, bought most of the rest of his collection (7). Blom notes, “the poignancy of death and rebirth, of excess and vanitas are all embodied here (8).” The idea of presenting mortality aesthetically, as Ruysch achieved, is still expressed today. The current exhibition Body Worlds at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (October 7, 2005 – April 23, 3006) displays more than 200 human beings in various ways: sliced into strips, poised in muscular action, and individual organs. While walking through the exhibit, I began to realize that, though these were the bodies of once living people were before me, I had no sense of individuality or identity. Stripped of facial skin (and often more) with no illustration or photograph of the body as a whole, I did not see people, but objects. Emphasizing the artistic rather than scientific quality of the show, Dr. Gunther von Hagens had titled many of the bodies displayed in motion. Printed on sleek metal affixed to the pedestal, the nameplates bore the year of creation as well as his signature. Though museums may be considered the world’s greatest collections, individuals such as Ruysch continue to amass private displays of natural history and cultural phenomena. In a time of Feng Shui conferences and Clean Sweep reality television, we cannot stop accumulating. We hold onto hard-worn clothes, obsolete equipment, and relics of our youth while reading self-help paperbacks on organizing our lives.

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