At the PhD Research Student Exhibition and Symposium March 2008 Brighton University, she used ‘Manifesto for X: a solution to the Yes/No quality of life’ to present X as a brand in absolute (positive) terms. She used the accumulative process of focussed acquisition of examples to substantiate the argument. Collecting and archiving visual materials (and ideas) is a recognised and ongoing method of acquiring creative skills, a practice integral to the academic study and profession of visual communication.
Her project, ‘The Museum of X’ is a virtual collection based on the letter and sign of X. It takes the form of an online archive of examples catalogued to enable open access, contribution and comment: a garden shed, an idea, a sound, a metaphor. It is a potentially vast (as vast as the imagination) archive within which to define the meaning of this familiar yet ambiguous sign.
Attitudes are evolving as to what a museum can be. The International Council of Museums defines the museum as, “A permanent institution in the service of society …open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment".
A museum can be the representation of an individual’s whims or a nation’s status represented through its acquisitions: macro or micro, personal and/or public. The Museum of Curiosity series on BBC Radio 4, “isn’t a place for desiccated medieval shoes or rows of moth-eaten stuffed squirrels. We don’t care whether something is old or rare or priceless or “important” or not … as long as it makes you rub your eyes, scratch your head or stroke your chin.”
Digital platforms provide for the new concept of a museum. As Paul K says in ‘O.K. Collections’ 2008, “surveying and collecting from existing digital material … is totally egalitarian and so becomes a function of dedication, time and searching and is not limited by what you can afford … a digital collection allows greater user control too with respect to accessing background information.”
Contributions to the vast, imaginary museum vary from the tangible (photographed but often ambiguous) to the conceptual; the emotion of gaiety, Heathrow Terminal 5, the colours indigo and true cyan, a toilet you can’t find, the sound of rhubarb growing, etc. I suspect that, as with many of the world’s museums, these contributions tell us more about the contributors than the subject. Is it necessary for either the museum or the objects within it to be tangible/experienced? In the ‘real’ museum items are safely displayed/contained in glass vitrines where they can rarely, if ever, be touched.
The Museum of X accepts all and any items, ideas and images. The accessibility and familiarity of X enables a multitude of interpretations, personal anecdotes and theories to be provided, in an archive entirely without boundaries. What does ‘X’ mean to you?
Cathy Gale is a PhD candidate in the School of Arts & Communication, a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Graphic Design with Photography at Kingston University and is Associate Lecturer at LCC.
