Written by Simone Hine and Kyle Weise
The teaching space within which this exhibition takes place was developed to support Object Based Learning (OBL). This pedagogical mode emphasises the importance of physical interaction with precious objects, and replicas, for engaging students and developing skills. Specifically, these labs in Arts West, provide a space for the activation of the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections within this context. The collection is instrumentalised by these spaces, and placed in the service of the pragmatic goal of OBL, which aims to enhance the transfer of knowledge through the mobilisation of all of the human senses within the learning environment.
For this exhibition, each cabinet within the space contains distinct objects or clusters of objects, united by this context. Across the cabinets, the artists and curators have assembled a range of items, mining fissures between the certainty and physicality of archived museum objects and the intangibility of our brief encounters with them. The artists here investigate the archive as an evolving process, where objects are altered by our interactions with them, and their significance ebbs and flows, as they are entangled within both institutional histories and personal memories. Sculpture, represented here by Elyse De Valle’s marble works, has an obvious materiality, a heavy three-dimensional presence. Melanie Jayne Taylor’s photographs and the Zoe Scoglio’s video work, treat their respective mediums sculpturally. Their works guide us beyond their flat representational surface and accentuate the ‘object’ qualities of their mediums.
De Valle presents marble sculptures that recreate objects connected to the life of Charles Francis Summers (1858-1945), a minor sculptor, and the son of the more established sculptor Charles Summers (1825-1878). The objects includes marble replicas of a chisel, a writing pen, and Summer’s journal. In creating these objects De Valle worked in the same medium as Summers, a marble sculptor. The work is imbricated in the artist’s research into Summer’s life, which has included visiting sites significant to his biography, and studying objects connected to him. The figure of Summers is used to meditate on memorialising, mourning and the significance of objects. While the work of the younger Summers remains relatively unknown, the context of the exhibition, in Arts West, allows De Valle to place her sculptures, replicas of items from his life, and ostensibly in his memory, into a museological context. If only briefly, and surreptitiously, Summers here enters the historical canon of the archive. Yet, inevitably, De Valle’s recreated history of Summers is bound, not simply to historical preservation, but to her personal history, and the faded memories of her own father, and the tools he used to make her childhood toys; tools that are now lost to her.
Melanie Jayne Taylor’s practice is primarily photographic and is based not only on the production of new images, but on processes of sorting, rearranging, combining existing images from her archive. Taylor often displays stacks of images, which are revisited during the exhibition, in a constant process: obscuring, revealing and re-contextualising the photographs. Digital and analogue processes combine in Taylor’s work, and the particular artefacts of each are embraced. Images are digitally spliced and printed from digital files, while also maintaining the distinct marks of their basis in analogue photography. Scratches, marks and the frame edges of the negative are all visible. The work presented here in Arts West, titled ‘Without Description’, have evolved from the process of Taylor’s recent relocation to Spain. In preparing to move and clearing her studio, Taylor gathered a box of loose 4x6 images: photographic prints that had been separated from their negatives and from others in the same series. These images are no longer associated with dates, locations or titles; these uncatalogued images, gathered in handfuls, were boxed and sent to Taylor’s new home in Spain. Having moved to Barcelona, and subsequently embarking on a residency at ACUR in a small village in Catalonia, Taylor discovered similarly undescribed boxes of photographs in the archives of the institution sponsoring the residency. The photographs Taylor produced during this residency responded to these uncatalogued images, and the narratives she began to construct around them. Presented here are images from this residency, as well as a selection from the uncatalogued box of images that Taylor sent to Spain. The images were offered to the curators to display and organise as they wished. As photographs move through space and time, they gather new contexts and new meanings. Taylor’s work emphasises that these re-contextualisations are inseparable from the evolution of their physical presence; as they are creased by human hands, wrinkled by atmospheric conditions, or simply faded by the sun. Images of ruins, the discarded and the forgotten, permeate Taylor’s images reflecting the ideas that drive their production and display.
Zoe Scoglio’s artistic practice, across video, installation and performance, concentrates on the interaction between the flicker of human life and the deep-time of the geological world. The video presented here, Landforms II, juxtaposes images of the artist’s hand with geological formations (rocks). The two forms are separated via the sharp lines and rectangular frames of the layers of inset images that compose the video. Yet, ultimately, the slow gestures of the hand and the rotations of the rocks are engaged in a dance, seemingly responding to each other in subtle ways. The scalar differences in the temporalities of the two protagonists in the video, the geological and the human, seem completely at odds, yet they are inseparable. Manuel De Landa argues for a geologic approach to human history, one that recognises that “human societies are like lava flows”, that is, they are distributions of matter and energy with nonlinear patterns of organisation. Furthermore, De Landa argues, human and geologic history are not strictly separable. So, for example, processes of mineralisation that occurred 500 million years ago allowed the materiality of the bone structure that is crucial to human life. Humans are now constructing their own endoskeleton around the world. This, of course, is the era of the anthropocene, one based around the extraction of minerals, and the reworking of the entire planet via construction, waste, pollution and so on. The Apple i-pad on which Landforms II is shown is an example of this process. It is a device that is composed of numerous rare-earth minerals extracted and processed around the globe, and reliant on energy-hungry cloud-computing infrastructures. The device waits only months from its delivery in crisp white boxes to become obsolete, toxic junk. The human hand, formed from geologic encounters now clutches devices also formed from, and irrevocably altering, the geological composition of the Earth, via cycles of waste and energy. The museum, and its structure of object preservation, is based around a clash of temporalities, attempting to separate its objects from the brief, biologically ravaged, time of a human life. Yet, these temporalities are not so easily separable as the continued stream of screen-objects around which our brief human lives are increasingly centred, imbricate our every gesture within the deep time of geological transformation.
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Objects that comprise an archive remain dormant, until such time that one accesses them. They are isolated, protected as best they can be from the natural environment and human hands. Access to the archive disrupts the stability of the object, threatening its preservation. But without such access the archive is drained of purpose and the perfectly preserved objects are rendered meaningless.
On the occasion of the exhibition “Excavation” a specimen from the Earth Science Collection of the University of Melbourne was sought, but due to specific conditions at the time of the request, the specimen was unable to be transferred across collections.
This sparked a discussion between the two curators, Kyle Weise and Simone Hine, in which Kyle mentioned a rock specimen that he recalled from his childhood. He thought it may have been his grandfather’s, which was confirmed, but it was unable to be located.
From Kyle’s description of the rock, Simone was able to ascertain that the rock specimen was a Thunderegg, and knew of a mine where you could fossick for these rocks. After a car ride to Mt Tamborine and much digging in the hot sun, a few rocks were procured. It seems that the particular specimen that Kyle remembered, which has a crystal formation inside a hollow rock, was much rarer than the curators first realised and not typical of the Thundereggs found at this particular mine. Nonetheless, Kyle found two pieces of broken Thunderegg that had the crystal formation that he remembered from his childhood.
One of the two pieces sits on top of a cross section of a more common version of the Thunderegg, a reminder of the role memory plays in the archive.
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Prehistoric volcanic eruptions created bubbles of silica-rich materials. Through processes of expansion and contraction, further silica-rich materials entered the inside of the stone specimen and solidified. Buried under the earth, this process has repeated, forming the centre of the Thunderegg.
Once excavated from the earth a cross-section was made.
Concealed, it is protected and the process of its formation continues.
Excavated and cut, the rock becomes a geological specimen.
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A rock lies under the ground. It is excavated, washed, dried and packaged in bubble wrap. This rock is transported to the University of Melbourne, Arts West, Object-Based Laboratories One and Two.
For one day it is placed in the University’s display cabinet. Visitors to the exhibition view the object.
Isolated in the cabinet, the item is given temporary status as a rarefied object. After this brief encounter with the archive, it will not be absorbed into the permanent collection. It will most likely be kept by the curators as a memento of the exhibition and the object’s fleeting encounter with the archive.
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"Object-based learning was an integral part of the student experience in 19th and early 20th centuries; but many universities, including UCL faced a downturn in favor and use in the later 20th century.
The true pedagogical value of OBL is only recently being realized as museums enjoy somewhat of a renaissance in use for educational purposes.
Helen J. Chatterjee. “Object-based learning in higher education: The pedagogical power of museums” University Museums and Collections Journal Volume 3, 2010. https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/385
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“… the cross-section of the instant, taken across the full face of the moment in a given place, resembles a mosaic of pieces in different developmental states, and of different ages, rather than a radial design conferring its meaning upon all the pieces”
George Kubler. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. 1962. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. p.25.
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“We have shifted from being a society that until the mid-twentieth century was based on a very restricted list of materials (“wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver and a few plastics”) to one in which a computer chip is composed of “60 different elements.” p.15
“The deep time of our planet is inside our machines, crystallized as part of the contemporary political economy: material histories of labor and the planet are entangled in devices, which however unfold as part of planetary histories.” p.56
Jussi Parikka. The Anthrobscene. Forerunners: Ideas First. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
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"The paintings at Lascaux had survived for more than seventeen thousand years, but they threatened to disappear forever as soon as we got too close. As early as 1955, less than a decade after the site was opened to the public, contamination caused by the near-constant swarms of breathing humans was starting to show. The thought of accidently losing the pictures was evidently too much for us to bear—we had to lose them on purpose, by resealing the caves and replacing them with a likeness of our own making. Plans for Lascaux II were drawn up, and a team of painters and sculptors began work on reproductions of several sections of the caves, with every contour and every mark replicated to the millimeter. The copy finally opened to the public in 1983, two hundred meters from the original site. Now nobody sees Lascaux I, but hundreds pass through the underground simulacra-sequel every day.
Amelia Groom," Permanent Collection" e-flux Journal #78 December 2016. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82883/permanent-collection/
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