Ghosts and Objects at the Bancroft Ranch House Museum a Dissertatio
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (Im)material Encounters: Ghosts and Objects at the Bancroft Ranch House Museum A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Art History Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice by Katrin Pesch Committee in charge: University of California, San Diego Professor Lesley Stern, Co-Chair Professor John Welchman, Co-Chair Professor Norman Bryson, Professor Brian Cross Professor Amelia Glaser 2016 The Dissertation of Katrin Pesch is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Co-Chair Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2016 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page …………………………………………………………………. iii Table of Contents .……………………………………………………………… iv Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………. vi Vita …………………………………………………………………………….. vii Abstract of the Dissertation……………………………………………………. viii Finding Things…………………………………………………………………. 1 Compelling Repulsion ………………………………………………………… 4 Sunlight and Extension Cords …………………………………………………. 9 Thinking Through Things ……………………………………………………… 15 Between Spirits and Things .……………………………………………………. 23 Sketch #1 Sheet of Water ………………………………………………………. 28 Sketch #2 Sunken Ground ……………………………………………………… 36 Sketch #3 Dictionary Hill ………………………………………………………. 40 Sketch #4 Water Tower ………………………………………………………… 48 A Dance Around Things ...……………………………………………………… 51 Donate. Shop. Reuse. Repeat. …………………………………………………... 55 Some Folkore, Some Data, and Some Unexplainable Things ………………….. 62 Mannequin Hands ………………………………………………………………. 73 The Punch Bowl ………………………………………………………………… 80 More Stuff, Less People ………………………………………………………… 84 A Path Through a Wilderness of Knowledge to the Desired Facts …………….. 93 “Cowboys and …” ……………………………………………………………… 107 iv First Contact and Clothing …………………………………………………….. 111 Salvage Archaeology …………………………………………………………. 134 Bancroft Scraps ……………………………………………………………….. 137 The Birds of Bancroft………………………………………………………….. 157 Administering Memories ……………………………………………………… 161 The Collector and the Caretaker …………………………………………….… 166 Endnotes …………………………………………………………………….…. 169 References ……………………………………………………………………… 184 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Jim van Meter for sharing his stories with me. This project would not exist if I hadn’t met Jim, the director, caretaker and raconteur of the Bancroft Ranch House Museum in Spring Valley, California. Next, I would like to thank Lesley Stern who suggested I write about my film project on museum. Without her guidance, generous feedback, and support this text would be nothing like it is. I would like to thank John Welchman whose guidance and feedback during my tenure at UCSD has been invaluable. Many thanks go out to Norman Bryson for countless inspiring comments and conversations. Thank you also to Brian Cross and Amelia Glaser for their helpful feedback and suggestions during my defense. I would like to thank my peers whose company has made graduate school an amazing experience. Thank you for all the discussions, feedback, and support to Tim Ridlen, Alex Kershaw, Orianna Cacchione, Edward Sterrett, Drew Snyder, Sara Mameni, Paloma Checa-Gismero, and Catherine Czacki. Many thanks also to Tim Ridlen, Elizabeth D. Miller, Sascha Crasnow, Melinda Guillen, and Alex Kershaw for their help in copyediting this dissertation. Last but not least, I would like to thank Kate Edwards and Asia Marks for helping me navigate the administrative jungle of UCSD. The chapter “Dictionary Hill,” in full, is a reprint of the material as it appears in Sunshine/Noir II – Writings From San Diego and Tijuana, edited by Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller (San Diego City Works Press, 2015): 183-189. The dissertation/thesis author was the primary investigator and author of this paper. vi VITA 1999 Diploma, Fine Art, Weissensee College of Art, Berlin 2000 – 2001 Studio Program, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York 2013 M.A. Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department of Visual Arts, UC San Diego 2016 Ph.D. Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice Department of Visual Arts, UC San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Dictionary Hill.” In Sunshine/Noir II – Writings From San Diego and Tijuana, edited by Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller (San Diego City Works Press, 2015): 183- 189. “Stealth Killers: Rethinking the Notion of Environment in Claire Denis's I Can't Sleep (1994).” In Unweave #4 Spheres of Glass, co-edited by Katrin Pesch and Tim Ridlen with Elizabeth D. Miller, Melinda Guillen, and Mariana Botey, Discursive and Curatorial Productions Initiative (UC San Diego, Spring 2014): 61-69. vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION (Im)material Encounters: Ghosts and Objects at the Bancroft Ranch House Museum by Katrin Pesch Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice University of California, San Diego, 2016 Professor Lesley Stern, Co-Chair Professor John Welchman, Co-Chair This project aims to bring artistic methods of inquiry to bear on current debates about the ontological distinction between persons and things that have emerged in the face of ecological crises. My dissertation presents an experimental ethnography that traces material and immaterial encounters around the Bancroft Ranch House Museum in East County San Diego. An obscure national and state historical landmark, the small museum is housed in an adobe that was built by white settlers on former Kumeyaay land and then bought by the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft in the late 19th century. A historically contested site, the museum also acts as viii a social hub and market place for a medley of things ranging from artifacts to discarded goods. My work takes its cue from the museum’s unorthodox archive–– where the historical and the personal gather in relics as much as in refuse––to revisit matters that have shaped California’s social landscape, such as first contact, missionization, colonial settlement, water rights, and urban development. By following the daily routines of the site’s caretaker, I unravel how eccentric practices and unruly objects destabilize the official settler narrative. At the same time, the site becomes a probing ground to assess current discourses about object agency flourishing within the humanities, social sciences, and science studies. While it is important to reconsider who or what participates in the assembly of a social collective, as scholars such as Bruno Latour or Jane Bennett ask us to do, my fieldwork suggests that decentering the privileged space of the human subject cannot be at the expense of attending to repressed histories and social inequalities that remain unsolved. ix Finding Things This text is a supplement to a film that doesn’t want to be a film. It’s a text about a script that doesn’t want to be a script. But it may become a small book, a minor history, my two cents about a place. Maybe two cents won’t do it and it will take the whole glass of pennies and change collected over a period of time. This is how it goes: When the glass is full, you can take it to the supermarket and feed the pennies down a funnel into a machine that swiftly turns them into a piece of paper with a number on it, a receipt that signifies a specific value, maybe $8.74 or $13.42, depending on how long you saved. Research is not a savings account, but an option on a future. Thus the bits and pieces I collected for this project may still be an investment that pays off. This is a book about images and sounds, histories and voices that resist coming together as a film. This is a book about a place. It’s not a place, strictly speaking, because places are different depending on how you look at them, and who looks at them and why. It’s about the idea of environment that doesn’t exist as one thing but as something different for all those who perceive it. This is a book that is an essay, because I suspect that the place it is about affords an essay. An essay is an environment too, because depending on who describes it the essay is different things as well. A meeting between fiction and documentary; a string of opinions, not facts, articulated with a self-reflexive stance; an engagement with history, as stories about different times, places, people, and things. A coming together of knowledges, past and present, that inform and form it and the spaces in-between that may be vacant and unexplored, 1 2 or both. I suspect that the place I want to talk about affords an essay, but it’s been suggested to me that the way in which I want to talk about it may not afford a film but a book. Shifting formations of objects in this book shape a temporal landscape that reaches back into history and projects into the future. Located 12 miles east of San Diego, the Bancroft Ranch House Museum, a small museum in Spring Valley, California provides a fixed point within networks of different actors––people, places, animals, and things––that may change, wander out of sight, and meet in different constellations and locations. Like the rocks with engraved plant labels that are scattered across the museum yard, specific terminologies dot the pages of this book. The words and ideas scattered across this text, though, may not be references but actors themselves. The pattern they leave dates the writing but also connects it to others currently engaging with the fate of objects. This book begins with the question in mind: what’s at stake when the hierarchies of things that grasp one’s attention and