|
It is Your Curators' ambition for you to learn a little something about the history of collecting, and to enjoy the experience of being permeated with the fascinating, wonderful, seductive, and extra-oridinary worlds surrounding us at all times. Within its structures, expository aesthetics, and displays, the collection embeds a mapping of the histories of collecting, from saintly relics to Wunderkammern, from public museums created in the wake of the Enlightenment to the degraded forms of such collecting -- namely, the Dime Museums. Each system developed its peculiar logic for exposition, ordering the total relationship among objects while excluding some from the collection altogether. Then there are the world's fairs and theme parks; these too are fruitfully situated in the histories of collecting. Our horizons will embrace the attic, medicine cabinet, Wal-Mart, Porno-Palace, and the city itself as curious developments in the processes of collection. |
|
|
|
As meditation and mediation on the theme of loss and gain, the Museum brings visitors into witness of abjection, focusing vision onto ruins, trash, scabs, which have been scavenged and exalted as 'cultural and historical curiosities.' Which is to say, the projects of historiography and ethnography alchemically process the wastes of the world into spectacular treasures. Unutterably sad ephemera, the objects of all museums gather dust and wage battle against decay, all the while posturing as essence or past. The secret project of the Museum of Ephemerata is to play out loss and gain by imploding the walls of the expository space and infecting the unarchived with the sheen of museumatic mummifications. After visiting our collection, guests may come to realize the degree to which their surrounding environs have already been processed as still life and suspended animation, that they are living within the Museum of Ephemerata. The toothbrush becomes an heirloom, and the city dump, a vast archive. |
|
Now for the history
we tell ourselves about the Museum of Ephemerata. It was founded in Tucson, Arizona,
November 7th, 1921, in the early afternoon, by Madame Mercury Curie and Rolls
Joyce Jr., born Rasputin Zaplatynska, brother to Katherine Zaplatynska, Great
Grandmother to Scott Webel, current curator, with Jen Hirt, of the collection.
Mr. Joyce and Mme. Curie met in Eastern Europe in the late 1890's, both showing
a keen interest in travel, archival research, and epistemological sabotage. The
two became itinerant curators, organizing exhibitions of art, natural history,
ethnographic material, &c., throughout Europe. In 1901, they pooled their personal
collections to form the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata and immigrated
to America, convinced that European traditions of collecting prior to modernization
(particularly the Wunderkammern) were endangered species in need of a habitat
for rehabilitation, a sort of zoo for museums. Settling in Tucson in 1921, still
very much an 'Old West Town,' Curie and Joyce created a permanent collection with
the desire to situate new forms of collecting in historical continuum and rupture
with their antecedents. With Joyce's death in 1942 and Curie's in 1945, the Museum
fell into the hands of their heirs, there being no one to curate the collection.
The displays were haphazardly boxed up and distributed among Curie and Joyce's
relatives, largely forgotten as a crackpot project of the families' black sheep.
|
|
 Curator Jen Hirt at the Museum's 1999 Tucson Location. |
Scott Webel became
interested in the tales of the Museum passed down to him through his grandmother,
Helen Webel, Rolls Joyce's niece, who had inherited two boxes of Museum material
(including the two cartes de visite, the nautilus shell, and a note on the replica
of the soul of Chopin's last piano). Your Curators, Hirt and Webel, laboriously
tracked down two more boxes of exhibits, the contents of which constitute most
of the material in the permanent collection and some of its cabinet displays.
The Museum reopened in Tucson, November 1999, where it enjoyed installation at
two houses and one art gallery. After moving to Austin, TX, Summer 2001, the collection
was installed at the Pillsbury House on San Gabriel and 22nd Street, from whence
the retrospective photographs were taken. The collection is currently being installed
in a house in Hyde Park; rumor tells of an Abject Collection ... a shelf of Snowglobes
... a display on Coney Island's amusement parks ... a jackalope ... Proust's pillow
...
|
