CURIOSITY C URIO OSITY CURIOSITY CLXXV A Paper Cabinet Pippa Skotnes Gwen van Embden Fritha Langerman Curating collections at the University of Cape Town Photography by Stephen Inggs LLAREC: Series in Visual History LLAREC: The Museum Workshop at the University of Cape Town 31-37 Orange Street 8001 Cape Town South Africa Copyright: 2004 by Pippa Skotnes, Gwen van Embden, Fritha Langerman and Stephen Inggs. All rights reserved. First edition Photographic donors: Orms Pro Photo Warehouse and PICTO, Cape Town Repro and Fine Art Printing: Scan Shop, Cape Town ISBN 0-620-33345-6 Dedicated to Lucy Lloyd, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Greenblatt and all other astonishing minds. CONTENTS Astonishment Astonishment Alterations Alterations Articulations Articulations Brilliance Brilliance Beauty Beauty Censorship Censorship Consilience Consilience Concentrations Concentrations Diversity Diversity Diary Diary Document Document Expansiveness Expansiveness Effluvia Effluvia Encapsulation Encapsulation Forensics Forensics Fugacity Fugacity Foundations Foundations Generation Generation Gathering Gathering Heritage Heritage Heritage Historicism (new) Historicism Historicism (new) Incubation Incubation Isolation Isolation Judgement Judgement Kingdoms Kingdoms Knowledges Knowledges Liberations Liberations Lustre Lustre Libraries Libraries Zoomorphism Zoomorphism Yearning Yearning |xam-ka-!au |xam-ka-!au Work Work Wonder Wonder Virtuosity Virtuosity Vision Vision Unmaking Unmaking Treasury Treasury Subjectifications Subjectifications Shorthand Shorthand Similitude Similitude Resurrections Resurrections Replications Replications Resonances Resonances Quarantine Quarantine Quadrivium Quadrivium Particularisation Particularisation Positioning Positioning Perspectives Perspectives Obfuscation Obfuscation Openings Openings Origination Origination Neotony Neotony Notes Notes Mobility Mobility Marking Marking Memory Memory CONTENTS 8 A Paper Cabinet: Curating The Left-overs In the 1990s three South African courts, the Magistrates’, the Supreme and the Appeal courts heard arguments for and against a book being a work of art. The defendant in the case argued that a book could simultaneously be an artwork and that if it were an artwork then its ‘artness’ was its primary identity, its ‘bookness’ secondary. The plaintiff argued that a book, however attractively compiled, was just a book and could, by no stretch of the imagination be considered art. In the end, the Appeal Court ruled it was less concerned with the definitions of what constituted book or artwork. If an object looked like a book, then it fell under the legal restraints pertaining to books, regardless of whether it was also an artwork. The identity or ontology of the object was determined by its appearance. For us as artists and curators, definitions and identities of objects are important, indeed, often central to how we understand our own practice. A collection of objects curated into a display may be equally convincingly argued to be a book as a sculpture. An installation of paper works and projections could be described as printmaking, a series of photographs as painting. For us, the definition of an artwork has less to do with its material presence than with the history of the discipline it brings with it into the zone of display in which it is encountered. All three of us graduated from Michaelis as ‘master’ printmakers. All three of us developed a sense of what constitutes the identity of printmaking from the way in which it was taught and practised within the department. Printmaking at Michaelis originated with Katrine Harries in the 1950s and she taught at the school for more than 20 years. She was trained as a lithographer and designer. Printmaking in her day was a discipline that developed through intense technical training and was nurtured by her great love of lithography and etching. She would sit on her high chair, in her red checked apron, puffing away on a Lucky Strike plain cigarette, drawing on one of the Solenhofen limestones (p71) she had arranged for the school to import from Germany while students ground the stone surfaces or polished copper plates to a mirror-like shine. We would make prints that perfected the technique of hardground or aquatint, or revealed a nuanced understanding of the relationship between water and grease, gum Arabic and chalk. Our concern then was to produce images that realized each discrete process in the making of prints. The taxonomy of processes was as important as the images we described through it. When Jules van de Vijver took over the teaching of printmaking at the School in the 1970s, emphasis was diverted away from the idea of the print as iconographic component of the illustrated book, and towards its realization as a series of individual images that make up the artwork as a whole. He insisted on the importance of the 9 tradition of printmaking and the origins of prints in serialised imagery, reminding us of the tradition of the portfolio or book of prints, exemplified by artists such as Goya or Picasso. Printmaking became less about technique than about a way of conceiving of an artwork – as an object or collection of objects where each component depended for its meaning and significance on all the others, and where understanding the work was about ‘reading the images’ in a circular, rather than a linear way. This sense of the past use of printmaking pervades its current use. Today at Michaelis, printmakers see themselves as curators of images and objects, producing books, portfolios, installations and video. As printmakers, their three-dimensional projects or curated displays depend as much on the history of their discipline as they do on a break with its traditions. We three curators of this Curiosity CLXXV exhibi- tion, as teachers and graduates, see ourselves as both products of our history and as participants in shaping it. What we have produced here is as much about printmaking and an understanding of its taxonomy as it is about curatorship, museology, installa- tion art and book-making; as much about our sense of what art is as about the diverse and curious nature of the scholarship in the university. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that this publication, which has been produced to accompany the exhibition Curiosity CLXXV, is neither a book nor a catalogue. Rather, it is a paper cabinet – a curated collection of the images and texts that have been assembled in the preparation of this exhibition. As a paper cabinet, it depends less on the linear readability of its sequence of pages, and more on the visual delight of its layout and the play between the various taxonomies that both govern display and describe the disciplines and curiosities we have sought to represent. Inevitably there will be areas of over- and under-representation. What we have featured here has as much to do with what seemed to us important and fascinating as with the unexpected discoveries that both appealed to our individual visual sensitivities and teased and challenged our expectations and preconceptions. Representing 175 years of the history of a university is, of course, an impossible task, or at least impossible for us in the seven-month period we researched and assembled it (and produced this publica- tion). We hope we will be forgiven for what will surely seem to some as inexcusable oversights. Yet while our attention may have focused more closely on some areas of scholarship or creativity, we hope that we have been able to use our own obsessions with objects, taxonomies and display to play with ideas and insights that bridge disciplines or dart through them and nurture curiosity. We began this project in May 2004. At the start we had the good fortune to make our first appointment with Professor Deon Knobel, head of Forensic Pathology. His was 10 an environment full of curiosity and curiosities and his willingness to share his consider- able experience and understanding of his discipline seemed to be part of the quality of generosity that characterises his academic life. This first visit was thrilling – it convinced us at once that the process of gathering material would be full of surprises. Like Deon (although no one is quite like Deon) we found other remarkable thinkers and generous scholars who gave us access to their ideas and objects. We carried a great many things out of people’s offices. We scrounged through drawers, browsed bookshelves, waited while keys were found to open long-locked storerooms, and we recovered treasures which ranged from lead blocks in a physics storeroom (p22), to stuffed mice from an office desk (p121), a photograph of Richard Nixon with Elvis Presley (p124), and precious documents from the UCT libraries (p42, 176) and the Irma Stern Museum (p182). Many of these objects when displayed immediately become fascinating mnemonics able to refer to a range of ideas and stories. Others were, as we frequently found ourselves declaring, were ‘pressed into service’. There is nothing, for example, particularly curious or informative about old boxes of discarded battery glass casings. Yet when organized into a cabinet about ‘replication’ and reshaped by light, mirror and reflection, they become quite transformed and their original function is displaced in the interests of representing something entirely different (p141). Our original impetus for the mounting of this exhibition was to produce something to celebrate the university’s 175th anniversary. We wanted to draw together collections of objects that could represent the various activities that characterise a university. Right from the beginning it was clear that UCT does not have a ‘culture’ of collecting and curating. While there are some established collections like the Drennan Anatomy Museum, the Bolus Herbarium and, of course, the libraries that are cared for by dedicated curators and librarians, there are uncurated collections in almost all depart- ments. Most of these do not have keepers and much has been lost or destroyed over the years for want of proper attention and adequate funding. There were a number of places we arrived at only to be told that the whole storeroom had been cleared out and all the ‘old stuff’ thrown away.