You have to wonder when the United States is going to kick its cultural amnesia and get on with some real, workable, world-historical consciousness; when it’ll finally enter History rather than just history. My guess is in a century or two, when we’ve joined the underdogs and the past seems prettier and not so conveniently forgotten. But History is not so much forgotten here as it is repressed and replaced; forced so far down that it pops up with the weirdest, WTF symptomology.

The wingèd bulls, or Lamassu.

To give you an idea of what I mean, just look along the side of interstate 5-South, in Los Angeles. There you’ll find a series of figures jutting into the sky above the freeway: enormous wingèd bulls with bearded human heads advertising discount shoes. The historically-inclined will tell you that these guys are, in fact, replicas from the palace of the ancient Assyrian emperor, Sargon II. That same individual might also be astute enough to tell you that the whole place— the Citadel Outlets Mall— is itself a replica of Sargon’s fortress, Dur Sharrukin. It’s got the works: the crenellation, the wingèd bull guardians or Lamassu, the stone panels depicting a band of kooky Assyrians on the war path. All in all, a pretty strange branding sensibility.

The Great Dur-Sharrukin, now with validated parking.

Assyrians were one of the most hated of all empires; reviled throughout Mesopotamia for their incredible bloodthirst, sadism, and early perfection of war. Having an Assyrian-themed outlet mall is a bit like having a Nazi-themed farmer’s market. This analogy holds especially well when you consider that it was the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, that destroyed Jerusalem and managed to “lose” ten tribes of Israel in the process. We in the States are, of course, are strongly jaundiced owing to the Biblical tradition, and a little further scholarship reveals Assyrians to have tended the light of civilization, in the nobler sense of the word, for centuries. They had art and architecture, astronomy and mathematics, libraries and great centers of learning. But because of public relations efforts, on the part of themselves and others, Assyria has come to be popularly synonymous with the celebration of violence and the flaying of the vanquished… Which brings me to my original question: why Assyria? Where did that come from?

From the Annals of Annur-Nasir-Pal: "I made plunder; much booty I burned with fire; many soldiers I captured alive; of some I chopped off the hands and feet; of others the noses and ears I cut off; of many soldiers I destroyed the eyes; one pile of bodies while yet alive, and one of heads I reared up on the heights within their town; their heads in the midst I hoisted; their boys and their maidens I dishonored..."

Here’s the short answer: the Citadel Outlets were originally the Samson Tire and Rubber Company. It broke ground in 1929 and lifted the Sargon aesthetic because the owner, Adolph Schleicher, wanted a vaguely “Samson and Delilah motif,” as the website explains. So, there you go: it was a flip of the coin. A subconscious slip in the titles.

That whole era of Los Angeles, it seems, was obsessed with antiquity, as a decorating motif. There’s Grauman’s Egyptian theatre, built in 1922, just before the discovery of Tutankamon. On Sunset Boulevard, for years, you had the hulking and decaying Babylonian set from the D.W. Griffith flick, Intolerance. Some reproduced parts from that set— huge elephants balancing on 6-story pillars— today lord over an outdoor mall in the middle of Hollywood. However, this cheesier kind of revivalism, love it though I may, is a very different experience than replica.

For me, there is something haunting in the specificity of the Citadel Outlets. Here I am, in an township of Los Angeles called Commerce, in the dust and hazy heat, a little dizzy from soda overload, and I look up to see Sargon the Second, speaking again after nearly three millenia. Granted, this time around, he’s selling women’s jeans and surfboards, but if you squint, you can just barely imagine yourself in Mesopotamia at the dawning of the Prophetic Age. You’re at least partially transported. However crass its purpose or origin, replica can always serve as Monument and Memory, even in a town as tabula rasa as Los Angeles, California. You just have to get yourself in the proper mood.

I’ll give another example. In the world capital of crass, Las Vegas, Nevada, on the strip, is a casino called Paris Las Vegas. For its exterior, the casino basically spliced together some of France’s most postcarded architectural landmarks— the Louvre, the Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, and L’Arc de Triomphe— and called it a wrap. I assumed that those little pieces of France would only hold up from a distance; that the viewer would approach the Arc De Triomphe only to see the dinner menu flashing on the inside. But no. Come closer and you’ll notice that the Las Vegas version, standing two-thirds the size, has all the same inscriptions as the original… All the same generals and battles from the Napoleonic Wars. An exact replica. Friends have pointed out to me that, in some ways, replica is a pretty unimaginative form of design. But as far as unimaginative things go, you have to admit, it’s one of the more edifying.

Paris Las Vegas

After expressing my enthusiasm for the Citadel and Paris Las Vegas, natives also kept mentioning this other place, Forest Lawn Cemetery, final resting place for such American god-kings as Michael Jackson and Walt Disney. Aside from its famous dead, though, Forest Lawn also boasts a large collection of Michelangelo replicas, housed in a large mausoleum. La Pietà. Day and Night. Moses. His David adorns one of the driveways. But the real treat, the brochure tells us, is the stain-glass reproduction of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. It has an automated unveiling, every hour or so. A recorded narration sets up the backstory before the curtains open to an over-radiant burst of choral music.

La Pietà

But still…. I walked over to La Pietà and— have to admit— I was struck. Both with the original form and the second-order experience of replication. That here, in Glendale, California, I could warm my hands on some real, auratic glow from the Italian Renaissance. I compare that to a recent trip to the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, where I walked through actual ruins, got within spitting distance of real Assyrian sculptures, and just couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was too much pressure, or too concentrated. Who knows.  I supposed I wasn’t in the right mood. Back at that mausoleum in Glendale, however, I was really bridging Time and Space. And it makes sense. Mausoleums and museums should blur at the edges, or even perform the same function. They are both where the Living go to commune with the Dead.

How wonderful would it be if cemeteries could really speak? If every grave could tell the story of its owner… Literally. I’m picturing every gravestone with a pair of headphones, through which visitors could listen to the life and times of the deceased— in their own crackling voices when possible. Every stroll through the cemetery would be a reinforcement of the human continuum.  Maybe, graveyards could one day have archives at their center, rather than churches.

Previous periods had better excuses for History-loss. Isolation. Failures in technology. Pillage and plunder. Records warped by imperial or Catholic revisionists. Not us. We have the means. And however weird and crass and unimaginative our reminders might be, at least they carry on the didactic duties of human memory— provided people bother to glance at the plaques or google the stuff when they get home. Besides, in the gaping absence of real antiquities, we need something to get the ball rolling.

As straightforwardly as I can break it down: the Jurassic, brainchild of eminent scholar David Wilson, has for twenty some years housed a collection of arcane and fantastical phenomena from the shelves of natural history and natural philosophy. And as the visitor soon realizes, it does far more than simply display them. With an artfulness and care rarely seen on Venice Boulevard— or, for that matter, in contemporary life— Wilson and museum staff present and represent their objects of study with such aching Beauty, that even after drinking them in for hours, the visitor still thirsts for more and returns home with a serious case of “archive fever.”

Enter its darkness and the mind instantly begins to dilate. Adjust to its pace. Listen through phone receivers to drawn-out deliveries about man-made precious gems. Turn the corner and watch a 3-D nickelodeon expound on new learning in the Renaissance, in simultaneous German and English. Peer under the lens at micromosaic floral arrangements and microscopic sculptures of Disney characters carved from human hair. Read of the arduous journey of a clan of scientists on the trail of the stink ant of Cameroon and the deprong mori. Or, enjoy the suggestive cases of denigrated folk-remedies that might— the museum hopes— hold that same critical kernel of efficacy that led Fleming to the miracle of penicillin. Finally, after hours spent below, join museum staff upstairs for tea and cookies and regain your equilibrium… A perfect Thursday afternoon.

Before long, it becomes pretty evident that some percentage of the plaques, artifacts, exhibits, and references are, shall we say, “mythologized” or “mythologizing.” Not false, not imaginary, and certainly not misleading, but slightly mythic or placed in just the right flickering candlelight, so that the visitor comes to an even deeper appreciation of the natural world.

Lawrence Weschler, in his charming treatment, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, sees the Jurassic in continuum with the Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, of the Renaissance. These precursors to the modern museum were usually large rooms stuffed silly with all manner of specimen, rarity, hoax, and technological innovation–the kind of place where human horns, miniature still-lifes, and perpetual motion machines could share equal stagetime without any overarching theme. As Weschler notes, their sense of plethora surely arose out of that sudden widening of the Renaissance worldview. Just as knowledge had begun to spread with the Gutenberg press and the migrations of the plague, its domain suddenly doubled with the discovery  of the New World. Europe found itself deluged with weird shit from previously unknown lands, and was, as Weschler says, constantly having its “mind blown.”

Some of these collections were owned by monarchs, like Rudolph II or Charles I of England, eager to flaunt their mastery of the cosmos with the ownership of a microcosmos. Others were put to nobler purposes and used to spur some of the greatest thinking of the day, such as the collection of Athanasius Kircher, Jesuit scholar and darling of the Jurassic.

The introductory video, to the visitor’s immediate left, had a bit more to add on the placement of the Jurassic among its predecessors. After some words on the origins of museums, from Noah’s Ark to those haphazard collections of Renaissance élites, the video peaks in praise of the Philadelphian painter and naturalist, Charles Willson Peale. Peale opened the first truly public museum— for every man, woman, and child—  in the magnanimous mode of “rational amusement.”

C.W. Peale and his Museum

“Peale fervently believed,” the video continues, “that teaching is a sublime ministry inseparable from human happiness, and that the learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar – guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.” It is from this period, this spirit, claims the video, that the Jurassic draws its energies.

My take on the Museum of Jurassic Technology stems from these genealogies. We know that, with the discovery of the New World and the recovery of Antiquity, there was an explosion in the possible objects of human knowledge, but the bigger questions were how Europe was organizing all these new thoughts and discoveries; how it was coping with this messy glut of new data. If we’re to believe the line that Foucault tells us in The Order of Things, the humanism of the age envisioned the world  as a boundless web of meaningful resemblances, in whose infinite variety Man could dare to read the “prose of the world,” presumably authored by the Almighty. By hints and signatures— by signs and portents— Man could spot hidden roots and match the similitudes between distant realms, and so by doing, approach the divine interpretation of things.

As Foucault says, “The face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words— with ‘hieroglyphics,’ as Turner called them. And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book; it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves. All that remains is to decipher them.”

Central to the thought of this epic, to its episteme, is the figure of the microcosm. The careful observer could use the microcosm as a kind of decoder-ring, by diligently noting connections within his microcosm that might also be playing out elsewhere, on other levels. And this is precisely how Athanasius Kircher put his little microcosm— his Wunderkammer— to work for him. Unlike the collections of the bloated monarchs, Kircher actually took a stab at their underlying meaning. Infact, Kircher epitomized this hermeneutic approach to knowledge more than nearly anybody else. Look over his life’s work: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Noah’s Ark and biblical exegesis, fossils, the discovery of microorganisms, and clocks built on the principle of magnetism. It just screams “Renaissance hermeticism,” doesn’t it?

Somewhere around this time, however, in Europe, all the categories of thought underwent some serious shape-shifting. Perhaps the overwhelming variety was starting to get to them. The “plethoric yet absolutely poverty-stricken character of this knowledge,” as Foucault puts it, was not getting to the bottom of things as hoped and a new ordering was quickly becoming necessary. Things needed to be sieved, reduced, and economized to make it readily digested by the human mind… Enter Newton and Descartes.

The Logic Alphabet

It is this change in European thought that the Jurassic swoops in to address, even if it sounds a little bombastic to say so. This is the era in which, lamentably, the poets and the natural philosophers begin to part ways. Prior to the rationalism of the Classical Age, figures like the Jesuit Kircher might not have been content to merely prove the truth or universality of a scientific claim, it was just as important to explain its significance, usually by weaving it into the Christian picture of things.

What Mankind needed badly during this crisis were some really outstanding poets and meaning-makers who could absorb the discoveries of science and then phrase them in a such a way, that they instilled in us proper marvel and deeper meaning. Kircher would count as one of these meaning-makers. Another was the great Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Bruno was one of the first to openly defend the heliocentric theories of Copernicus, even before Copernicus himself, who meekly offered it to the world simply as a “mathematical expediency.” Bruno went much further, however, and leapt to the conclusion that this solar system of Copernicus was only one of an infinite number of worlds, presaging our current cosmological picture. In these worlds, Bruno claimed, God was eagerly allowing every possibility, every kind of people, every custom, and every morality, to play out. Bruno was no scientist, though, and often embarrassed himself in public debate with his half-baked quasi-scientific discourses. Instead, he arrived at his defenses poetically and was, in many of his rhapsodic writings and ramblings, often poeticizing new science to the point of religious ecstasy.

Giordano Bruno, author of The Heroic Frenzies and Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

I see the Museum of Jurassic Technology as performing the same task. The motto of the museum says it all: Ut translatio Natura— “Nature as Metaphor.” It’s not enough, as science and science museums often do, to simply showcase science under glass as fact and law, in some agreed-upon order. In their presentations, representations, and formulations, the museum can and should phrase its phenomena— from bat echolocation to theories of memory—  in a form poetic enough to stir the viewer or visitor into near-mystical oscillations.  It’s not just what but how the stuff is said.

Perusing the exhibit on the interwined lives of neurobiologist Sonnabend and amnesiac singer Madelena Delani, for instance, with its startling picture of memory and forgetting, we are not just learning some new fact to stick in our caps, we are exposing our very categories to rewrite and metaphysical somersault. Which is why the exact percentage of poetic license that Mr. Wilson and museum staff take with their representations matters so little to me, especially with lesser-known phenomena that I would never have seen anyways. This license— the obscure references, deadpan anachronisms, occasional retreat into Latin and German, scattered portions of joshing and invention— is supposed to defamiliarize rather than familiarize… A revelation not just of facts or laws, but of their true, uncanny character.

"Tell the Bees... Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition."

Weschler describes the Jurassic as demonstrating “the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temperament,” and even if you are unsure of these terms, you still get the drift: the museum marks the revenge of meaning after it was downplayed out of modern science in the Classical and Enlightenment Age. Refreshingly, the Jurassic does not do this by belittling or disavowing science,  like many pre- and postmoderns, but by providing a much-needed supplement that has been left out in the rush of Western rationalism.

The exhibit The Lives of Perfect Creatures serves as a perfect example. It is a portrait gallery of all the dogs sent into space by the Soviet space program, beginning with Laika, the very first Earthling ever to enter and perish in outerspace. The gallery has enshrined a very singular act in the annals of human history. Here we were, with centuries of science and technological progress coming to a head, with the great geopolitical powers eager to show off their entry into the Space Age, and what do we do? We offer a sacrifice— and a sacrifice of the innocent, no less. Only with the blood of Laika and a dozen-so other little doggies was outerspace made safe for human trespass; only by offering these “perfect creatures” was Man in his profaneness allowed to enter this sacred and forbidden realm. Goes to show: even in this most modern of all acts, we still lapse into ancestral habits in times of true crisis.

Laika, the first.

But I should probably stop here, since I’ll never get to it all. My hope is that the visitor will eventually get beyond the first and easiest concerns about its presentations— about hoax, art-historical similarities, and even self-aware museology— and spend ample time with the specifics themselves. This is the real Philosopher’s Delight. The best way to experience the shudder that the Jurassic is so damn good at delivering.

Lucky enough for any Angelenos, there are a number of public events coming up that might draw you in. Lawrence Weschler is doing some sort of spring residency thing at Occidental College, and those of you who missed his recent lecture on the Museum of Jurassic Technology can still attend his Cabinet of Marvels on April 24th. This cabinet will host none other than the man of mystery himself, David Wilson, speaking— if I got this right— on the mystical origins of the Russian space program, as well as other speakers. Otherwise, just promise me you’ll stop by the Museum next time you happen to be Westside.

Learning from Las Vegas was a real watershed moment— or maybe I should say a real Waterloo moment— in architectural history. This book was the first, fully-formulated backlash against the dictates of Modernist architecture, however polite in its tone. Running contrary to every last tenet of the International Style, the polemic warmly extolled the symbol and ornament, fun and dysfunction, the ugly and ordinary, the redundant and duck-shaped— and nearly everything else that had been shaved from the severe, honest, and “functional” forms of the era.

The book itself was the result of a 1968 architectural study by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Stephen Izenour, and several of their students at the Yale School of Architecture. For months, the group studied and documented the commercial vernacular of Las Vegas, as symbols-in-space taking precedence over forms-in-space. Architecture, they insisted, always has and always will communicate. Architecture always blends meaning and form. Even the proponents of Modernism, who purportedly banished the symbolic, were like it or not, still communicating with an end-of-the-century industrial vocabulary. So Las Vegas wasn’t novel in this regard, but it was, in all its flash and distraction, “the phenomenon at its purest and most intense.”

The group thunk and studied and documented the Las Vegas Strip, trying to discover the “system behind flamboyance.” They studied signage, motels, diners, casinos, parking configurations, void-to-fill ratios, and funny photomontages resembling Mexican bingo cards; trying all the while to absorb its lessons with a fairly Pop disinterest of its baser aims.

Considerable evidence from this study is now housed in a satellite of the MOCA that sits in the shadow of César Pelli’s blue-glass leviathan, the Pacific Design Center. The exhibition itself offers little new to readers of Learning from Las Vegas, aside from the films playing on the back wall and a few other knick-knacks. The exhibit is pretty much the book made life-size in gallery form. I paid a visit nevertheless, along with fellow Philadelphian transplant, Jesse Moynihan, more as a gesture of sympathy than anything else. Venturi and Brown are Philadelphians, as you may know, and their Eastern engagement with Southwestern architecture mirrors my own recent experiences within the Angeleno landscape.

Which makes sense. Los Angeles and Las Vegas are of a piece. Venturi and Brown were themselves contiguous with much of the Pop theorizing going on then in Los Angeles— that attempt to make sense of a young, new, exploding American Baroque. Ed Ruscha had already, in 1965, created long photomontages of the entire Sunset Strip with a camera strapped to the back of a truck. Venturi and Brown borrowed this “autoscape” documentation to grab the rhythms and hidden order of the Strip and city in Las Vegas, and you can see these on display at the MOCA exhibit.

When you wander around Los Angeles, you still see plenty of those mid-century, much-denigrated styles like “Googie” and “programmatic” architecture. Googie architecture— or “populuxe” as it’s supposedly also known— is a style that you all recognize: that semi-Jetsonian space-age aesthetic of atoms, boomerangs, and French-curvy blobs that springs to mind when you mention “Californian diner.” It’s here on every corner. Even loopier though less prevalent are the vestiges of programmatic, or novelty, architecture where the entire building will serve as a sign. Venturi famously classified this as a “duck,” in honor of the duck-shaped Long Island Duckling. Here in Los Angeles, we’ve got no ducks, but we got donuts, hot dogs, derbies, giant globes, and countless smaller examples of sculpture overtaking honest form.

Norm's googie diner near the Pacific Design Center

Angeleno architecture is studded with mythic elements, though many belong to an American mythos generated by Hollywood and television. And thanks to the weather, even funny, little details like lettering and paintjobs still remind us of sixty years back. The California we always pictured before we ever came. This is the prime virtue that ought to be pushed, the phantasmagoria— only in the rich, self-conscious way it is in Learning from Las Vegas.

I get the sense, however, that our mythic shapes are endangered in Los Angeles. In later press, Venturi and Brown mention often how the Las Vegas of their polemic no longer exists, for numerous reasons. Unlike the works of canonical architecture, the subjects of their study were seen purely as commercial fixtures and thereby doomed by innovation to the Neon Boneyard. Sadly, this was the fate of many of the landmarks of googie and programmatic architecture everywhere; torn down as businesses went belly-up.

In Los Angeles, as in most places, I see a once-exaggerated jukebox vernacular succumbing to that committee-approved look we’ve come to expect from the commercial sector and the Land of Beige. This signals an end. As Venturi and Brown put it “Commissions produce mediocrity and a deadened urb. What will happen to the strip when the tastemakers take over?” What has happened is that the American commercial vernacular has run through a kind of dialectic. Once a source of inspiration against the strictures of Modernist theory, it has now formed its own “tastemaking” strictures, its own bland internationalism, and even seems destined to undo all its former doings.

Take the Hollywood sign. Venturi and Brown claimed that the Roman triumphal arch was the forerunner of modern signage, and nowhere is this more evident than with the Hollywood sign. It not only welcomes us, it is the very icon of the American dream factory. Despite all this though, the sign is endangered by the very forces that put it up there in the first place. Originally, it was nothing more than a real estate advertisement reading “HOLLYWOODLAND”— an article of pure enterprise. Only with time and mythologization did it become what it truly is. Now, after some recent real estate dealings, wouldn’t you know it: the land around the sign is once again being considered for the development of luxury homes that would obstruct the view of the sign, but offer a breathtaking view of the city.

These kind of shenanigans are enough to challenge Venturi and Brown’s hope for a true “architecture of inclusion.” Or at least, they force the question of how we might retain the essential boldness we see in both Mies Van Der Rohe and mid-century Las Vegas.

"U.S., Russian Satellites Collide"

But Breaking News didn’t quite work this angle— and so much the better and wiser, I realized. That idiom, though less explored maybe in a gallery context, gets plenty of rotation already, in exacting parodies like The Onion and Stephen Colbert… so there’s less reason to explore its well-worn avenues.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, instead, seized the content of headlines for their source, and in an interesting way. Celebrity deaths and public shaming, air disasters, health scares, tidbits of world gossip— things that occupy us for a matter of weeks then fade away forever into Oblivion. The great Now of telecommunications— the same shit on different days that demands worldwide attention without ever explaining why it deserves it.

What Boyce and Link seemed to be doing was trying to counter this Forgetfulness. To playfully expand this paper-thin Now— the newsfeed for the last year— into something a little more memorable and monumental; albeit lightly and in tokens and models… To give it a little more weight and reality.

For instance, the Airbus that skimmed to a landing on the Hudson last year, announced in the Breaking News blotter as a “Miracle on the Hudson.” That crash was miraculous and remains to this day the world’s very best illustration of the word “elation.” At the same time, there was something silly about the whole undisaster. The passengers almost looked bored waiting for rescue on the wings of the floating aircraft. And this incredulity gets captured nicely by the Breaking News team with a wooden, Playschoolish recreation of the event, sitting on the gallery floor.

"Miracle on the Hudson"

Another object that really made the fleeting concrete is their recent celebrity death memorial; a wall of black, stacked, faux-marble, inscribed à la Maya Lin, with the names of the deceased. J.G. Ballard. Robert Novak. Les Paul. Chanel. Farrah Fawcett… A monument not as much to any particular celebrities as to the strange character of celebrity mourning. You read all these headlines of infinite glibness and cannot connect whatsoever with the sentiment. You might, for example, read of the great death-triad of Fawcett, Jackson, and McMahon:

“I know we all are going to die at one time or another but the thing is we never know when or who will go next. I was so shocked to hear of these three dying. We look at these celebrities and think they will be here forever. After seeing what Farrah went through with her battle to survive it made me realize they are all just like us. They are humans too and they do have their problems also. Just because they are big stars doesn’t mean they are trouble free in life.” –Jan Barrett, Michael Jackson Dies–Makes Number Three in the Celebrity World, Posted on June 26th, 2009 at Blogger News Network

Judging from this passage, I imagine that the author should be moved to tears by the Breaking News memorial, which takes her eulogy to its ludicrous conclusion by setting the sentiment in eternal stone.

The Wall of Recent Celebrity Death.

So, Breaking News, rather than adopting the forms and format of the News idiom, took it the opposite direction: pulling these stories and moments out of that idiom and serving it up to us in a more concrete way. And though many of these stories— like the dying chihuahua— were not exactly world issues, there is something to be said for deflating sensationalism into small, palpable toy-models that sit comfortably on a desk. This way, they can finally be considered, collected, and properly measured; rather than just being flashed across the screen and washed away on a wave of cultural amnesia. They even went so far to make one of the pieces— the one about the typhoon in China— an interactive piece of the sort you may find in a science museum…  A making present of distant events, which oddly enough, actually works. I will most likely remember these news items for some time to come.

In the end, though, the Breaking News team still slipped in a few newsy accoutrements, like logo pens, a news blotter, and the name of the show written across the back wall in true newsroom font.  Just some fun, to appease gimmicky folks such as myself.

pens News goodies, available at Berlinchen.

Breaking News, Little Berlin, October 2-31, 2009.

This is what initially sprang to mind when I saw Erica Prince’s “werks by jerks,” in the Far In Far Out collection. With a mix of collage, color, and drawing, Erica has designed warmly-colored interiors with a methodology very similar, I’d bet, to the way a girl of eleven might arrange her fantasy dollhouse. I can even picture Erica now, placing a cushion here, an armchair there; tilting her head and testing the effect. The construction seems as if it would be so gratifying— in the act— that they could be done purely for the enjoyment, viewers or no. A very pure activity. In this respect, they remind me of those rainy-day occupations of the Victorian era: scrapbooks. I saw one superior example, given to my friend Abby Sullivan by a relative, in which the girl had pasted together pieces of magazines and advertisements into her ideal family castle. Each page was a room. It was eerie and meticulous; somewhere between a dollhouse and Une Semaine De Bonté— done only as a private vision, for private enjoyment.

Erica’s stuff had the same ring. Not that she’s exactly riffing off scrapbooks and dollhouses— it’s not that literal. Just a continuation of energies. The same lady-like attention to curtains, cushions, and chandeliers. The same presence of improbabilities, like bears and legolike architecture. The reason I’m so intrigued by the crossovers between toys and the plastic arts is because I have always considered culture as just a very memorable and fervid form of freeplay. This is not a new idea. It was made explicit in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in his conception of the Spieltrieb, or “play drive.”

For Schiller, the play-drive helps us navigate between rote necessity and aimless freedom. Culture should neither be fulfilling some pre-appointed function— like making license plates or products for an art market— nor pointlessly screwing around and making nothing of lasting worth. All culture strikes this balance, but every once in a while you see the principle nicely illustrated, as in Erica’s work. I also recommend checking out the “werks” by the others in the exhibition— Garrett Davis, Garret Crabb, and Mylinh Chau— to which I have nothing interesting to add, but are definitely worth seeing.

Far In Far Out continues at the FUEL Collection, until October 24th.

In about half an hour, Hellman managed, what seemed to me, a great paleontology of the widget— or a glimpse of such a discipline. Clutching a ream of loose notes, he spoke of the objects of manufacturing— both products and the means of production— as the paleontologist would speak about flora and fauna… The morphology of widgets with their “arms of wood and teeth of iron.” A branching taxonomy of widgets that would neatly differentiate “hats” from “caps,” and at least five distinct phyla of “book.” Widgets that populated by-gone ecologies. Widgets that thrived, mutated, or faced certain extinction with deep shifts in American manufacturing.

Much of this was there in Freedley’s book, Hellman claimed. Published in 1859, the same year as On The Origins of Species, I imagine Philadelphia and its Manufactures is as much a document of a cultural moment, as it is simply a history of manufacturing. And with the curio cabinets on the wall, and the overall parlor aesthetic of Art in the Age, the whole exhibit really threw me back into the hubris of Victorian thinking, with its love of time and taxonomy.

Even when Hellman spoke about American industry moving over seas, I closed my eyes and pictured the widgets crossing seas and continents in search of easier climes. Workers and unions, that once thrived in symbiosis with these machines and objects, soon perished with the disappearance of their little metal symbiotes, or under the looming deathcloud of Automation.

Hellman never really summed up his lecture this way, or any other way. He just reeled off one “concrete universal” after another, bang, bang, bang; then passed the mic over to Phillip Taylor, a lithographer who told of the demise of his trade. Taylor seemed to me like one of the last speakers of a dying Native American language; which, figuratively speaking, he was. He knew the trade inside and out. Waxed about then-new, but now-forgotten innovations. The lost arts and dying idiom that this exhibit and lecture are doing their best to preserve.

The exhibit continues at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (116 North 3rd), until August 30th, and historically-minded folks can find the text of Philadelphia and its Manufactures online at:
http://www.archive.org/stream/philadelphiaitsm00freeiala/philadelphiaitsm00freeiala_djvu.txt

Philadelphia and Its Manufactures.
1859 & 2009
Photographs and Objects
From Factories Here and Gone.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Installation shot from Collections Show at Copy. Image features Neon Pink Things collected by Callie Konane Rickards (center), Andrew Jeffrey Wright‘s Family Circus books collection (left) and Erica Prince’s Best Friends photos collection (right)

This month, at Copy Gallery, Luren Jenison curated a Collections Show, with entries gathered from the private caches of various New York and Philadelphia obsessives. Slews of ski masks, records, stationery, squeaky toys, succulents, weirdo children’s videos, Family Circus Books— pinned up and spread out like cases of dried butterflies.

Leslie Rogers’ paper bag collection

Three or four entries, in particular, really rang with earnest obsession. Leslie Rogers has been, for some time now, in love with the brown paper bag. She hoards them, saves names and bag-bottoms, follows news in the industry, tabs them with spreadsheets and manila folders, and even makes her own, Leslie Rogers-brand paper bags wholly from scratch. The names on the bottoms, she tells me, refer not to companies or facilities, but to living individuals. They are signatures; team leaders of quality control, perhaps. This is what initially intrigued her about the brown paper bags. The facture as much as manufacture.

PaintCo’s beer can collection

And to the right, stands a collection of 20th century beer cans, in varying stages of decomposition, by PaintCo, on a rack lovingly built to purpose. A white can generically labeled Beer sits a few shelves above its cousin, Lite Beer. A few cans have imploded into little aluminum supernovae or mangled rust-bunnies. Others are just pleasing as reminders of by-gone design sensibilities.

I stared over the collections and thought: there should be a gallery— or a micromuseum— dedicated to a weekly rotation of these kinds of collections. Curio-cabinets of human fixations. The public would never tire of it.

K-Fai Steele‘s collection of office stationary gathered from her temp jobs in New York from 2004-2007.

What is so transfixing about these fixations? Partially, there’s the raw archaeology of it all. The strict taxonomies. The old questions answered. A recent girlfriend of mine, for instance, would always stumble across brown paper bags imprinted with her surname, Salazar. And now, thanks to Rogers’ dogged investigations, I can trace the origins back to Elizabeth, New Jersey, straight back to the Duro Bag Corporation. Or, through beer cans bent and perforated into drug paraphernalia, I get a better picture of tribal practices in Providence, Rhode Island, during the year 1986. I understand the whole of culture better through some of its smaller parts — tiny pockets of my environment, newly illuminated.

Colt Hausman’s club flyers from 1994-95 found on the streets of New York, collected while he was walking to school in 5th grade.

But the Mind of the Collector is what really gets me; the genesis of these desires. Every collection has its story, usually with a pretty casual beginning. An initial find, followed by a close match, and then another, then another… until the collector develops an eye for the item; a connoisseurship that wants nothing more than to showcase them in all their pleasing, candy-aisle variety. Adam Wallacavage‘s Squeaky Toy collection comes to mind, or Jenison’s own accumulation of colorful, plastic-wrapped wine bottles. The desire is contingent, weird, and so specific that it seems to land the collector somewhere on the Aspberger’s spectrum.

Installation shot featuring the author of this post under Ben Peterson‘s ski mask collection and an example of Alexandra Segreti’s hand-painted movie poster collection. Left is Erica Prince’s best friends collection.

Nevertheless, it is no less real or wonderfully compulsive for the collector. Everyday vision switches into new, adoring detail. The collector gets this white-hot desire for something previously so undesirable, for the seemingly stupid and undeserving. PaintCo recalls “I started to be able to predict where I could find really good can deposits. Down in the woods. Places that seemed right. I learned all about the different brewing companies, and could tell the year by the size of the openings. I had this idea that the more you searched for something, the more it revealed itself.”

Installation shot, Jeremiah Hensen’s card collection, NY pickups from 2006, Adam Wallacavage‘s squeaky toys, Brendan Kellogg‘s kinetic sculptures with planar and hinge elements.

The nice thing about the Collections Show is that it allows us to see the social utility of our imbalanced fascinations. It welcomes obsession; rather than the proportional, reasonable, and loveless way in which we usually hoard our everyday artifacts.

Luren Jenison’s collection of plastic cord wrapped wine bottle collection. The show’s curator, one of Copy Gallery’s founders, did a wonderful annotated list for the show. She wrote about her own collection as well: I started finding these neon plastic wrapped wine bottles in thrift stores in North Philly while shopping for stuff for work. The first time I found one I couldn’t believe it was real — so neon and intricate. Then I kept finding more and more. I have tried to figure out where they are from and who is making them. At first I thought it was some crazy lady in her row house who substituted macrame or needlepoint for this wine bottle wrapping. But as I found more in different places, I have clues to lead me to believe that they are from a specific table wine vintner in Spain.

–Brandon Joyce is a founding father of PIFAS. We look forward to bringing you more of Joyce’s philosophical musings in the future.