Panel 16: Kitsch, Toys and Trash
Vanessa Gill-Brown (Design & Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent), “Between the kitsch, the subcultural and the everyday: Wayne Hemingway’s
Land of Lost Content
”
In 2006, British designer Wayne Hemingway, best known for the fashion label ‘Red or
Dead’ embarked on an archive project with Stella Mitchell, curator of the British museum of pop culture ‘The Land of Lost Content’. Both independent collectors with huge archives of everyday ephemera and pop/mass cultural artefacts (many of which might be described as ‘kitsch’ or ‘cool’), they were motivated to create this digital archive by the desire to preserve and widen access to their collections of ‘lost things’ - things others may well have thrown away – everyday design, catalogues, badges, souvenirs. This paper will provide a brief overview of the resulting digital archive in order to present some analysis of its preferred approaches to cultural knowledge and value (Matienzo 2004), both in terms of its content (what is in and what is out) and in terms of its architecture, which has been built with a novel ‘ideal user’ in mind – this being the kitsch-literate design practitioner, whose logics and modes of understanding may differ from those of a traditional design historian or archivist.
It will also consider the role of nostalgia in the archive (Mitchell’s museum emphasises the idea of lost content as in happiness), versus the idea of the database as a post script to or revision of cultural history – the vindication of lost content; the fleeting, the low, the
‘fragments’ of ordinary cultural life, and consider the extent to which this archive functions as an enlarging expression of the collector’s ‘taste’ or ‘personality’ (Belk) or even the Hemingway brand. As hinted above, both the database and the Hemingway brand could be interpreted as trading in notions of kitsch. However, the assumption of critical distance from the object implied by the kitsch sensibility of the cognoscenti cannot be made unquestioningly in this case. Hemingway has loudly defended and celebrated ‘mass market’ ‘art’ and ‘design’, while himself having emerged from within a subcultural elite in the 1980s and 1990s, and having used the term ‘cheesy’ frequently to describe the archive’s content. The contradictions suggested by this highlight debates around taste, cultural value and defining kitsch more generally, which I will examine using the work of kitsch theorists (e.g. Olalquiaga 1992).
Whilst the collection appears to advocate the preservation of all popular ‘lost’ design
‘content’, I will explore the extent to which there an aesthetic sensibility at work which continues to exclude, and what kind of sensibility it is. Perhaps the archive is less a collection of ‘lost things’, and more a historical record of the tastes and preoccupations of a very specific, and signficant moment in British cultural history. Hopefully drawing on interviews with Wayne Hemingway and Stella Mitchell, as well as users and academics, the value of this archive of ‘disappeared’ mass objects (and the cultural questions it raises) will be evaluated, as it strives to gain acceptance by British universities and its future hangs in the balance.

Peter Wright (Design & Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent), “The everyday life of the archive”
Developing from recent debates around the visibility of curators and the development of their collections, this paper aims to make visible the active roles curators play in their selective highlighting of cultural artefacts. Through reflection on personal and professional experience I will examine the act of my own past acts of curation and ther attendant biases.
From 2006-07 I was involved in the initial selection of content and metadata for the new
‘Land Of Lost Content’ (LOLC) digital database of (largely) British pop cultural artefacts
(developed as a collaboration between designer/entrepeneur Wayne Hemingway, museum owner Stella Mitchell and their extensive collections). My role in the development of the LOLC archive will be reflexively examined in relation to the apparent aims and intentions of its creators.
The paper also draws on 11 years experience of running an institutional Art & Design slide collection at Nottingham Trent University.
Having since moved from curating to lecturing, my role in relation to the archive in recent years has shifted from curator to that of user. My new distanced perspective of the collection and its content has allowed me to assess more clearly my own aims and intentions when building the archive. From the very first selection and labelling of content I was aware of the potential for small cultural and historical revisions or even subversions, but only since leaving my position there have I been able to fully realise my own particular and partial impact on the archive’s content.
While running the collection a colleague commented that “the slide collection’s your baby, isn’t it?”. I denied this at the time but, on reflection, I can see that I initially approached it as a step-child, yet after years of close-contact, nurturing and promotion of the collection’s qualities, I can now see that I did come to think of it as ’my own’. As such, I suggest that the collection may now say as much about myself as it does about the accepted canon of art and design. Far from suggesting here that I was a terrible archivist, I share this anecdote in order to illuminate the tendency for levels of subjectivity to enter the curatorial process; a tendency difficult to avoid when associated with the personal investment a curator has in his/her collection, its contents and their dissemination. This tendency will also be examined in relation to the LOLC database through interviews with Hemingway and (hopefully) Mitchell.
Archivists often love their archives, and the rewards to be gained from carefully nourishing them will more often come in the form of the appreciation and use of the collection rather than the financial rewards (the job of ‘Image Identifier’ for the LOLC archive, for example, paid little more than minimum wage, yet there was an excessively large number of applicants for the post). I will question whether the adding of content which, in turn, adds to the curator’s own content, is (necessarily) avoidable.

Simon Orpana (English & CS, McMaster), “Tracing ‘The Lost Toy Archive’:
Subversive Simulacra, Personal Narrative and Redemptive Nostalgia”
While Kathleen Stuart admits that nostalgia can be a regressive activity binding us to reified reproductions of past experiences, she also theorizes a form of “redemptive nostalgia” (234) that attempts to sift through “the ruins of contemporary social relations”(236) as a form of forensic archeology that reconstructs meaningful narratives and offers possibilities for framing new relationships. My paper looks at personal experiences surrounding the construction a “lost toy archive” of my childhood, revealing a working method that combines theory and artistry in the appropriation and subversion of simulacra to overcome alienating effects of modern mass culture. By seeking out visual traces in photos, packaging, films and actual toys, of the mass culture of my youth, and by re-tracing these images, freehand, into a sketchbook, I constructed an archive that accessed forgotten memories and helped frame new personal and family narratives, even as it pointed towards new ways of understanding the mass culture to which these narratives were melded. Rather than simply amassing a collection of nostalgic mementos—so many comforting sign-traces or symbolic resolutions of the material and emotional tensions of youth—the re-inscription of these images into my sketchbook became a meditative exercise that suggested new ways of theorizing toy culture. It became clear that the action figure toys of my youth (the Star Wars and G.I.Joe lines specifically) could be read as simulacral representations of social relations that were in many ways missing or threatened by the pressures of modern society.
In addition to outlining this archival process and the reflections on toy theory to which it led, my paper examines these issues in the light of archive theory and ideas of the simulacral nature of postmodern culture. Specifically, I show how the artistic transformation of nostalgic materials attempts to circumvent what Derrida calls “archive fever”, or the tendency of the archival impulse to destroy that which it sets out to preserve. I would argue that, rather than becoming “an idol of its own truth in painting”
(Derrida 12), my tracings of nostalgic materials re-inscribes them into a series of simulacra that appropriates them to new hermeneutic use, summoning the archonic figures of my youth (and archive) in a way that “makes use of their authority to authorize the subversion of that order” (Durham 19). This subaltern use of the simulacra is a particularly postmodern tactic for re-inscribing local, personal and historicized narratives into a mass produced culture that presents itself as simultaneously a-historical, pervasive and intimate. This archival process thus offers valuable insight into the redemptive or revolutionary use of nostalgia, the productive intersections between art and the archive, and methods for the poetic subversion of modern mass culture’s hegemonic influence.

Andrea Kastner (Art and Design, Alberta) “The Urban Diary: Decoding the
City”
Ever since Beaudelaire’s landmark 1860 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” there has existed a concept of the mythical flâneur , that hero of modernity who is “at home in the giant cities and the web of their numberless interconnected relationships” (Benjamin:
Illuminations 165). I would like to demonstrate why the flâneur is a useful and relevant concept for the contemporary artist, as a way of recording, collecting, archiving and looking at the everyday.
Throughout the nineteenth century, from Beaudelaire to Balzac, the flâneur
became a recurring character in French literature, but the figure of the flâneur only truly gained its position within critical theory following Walter Benjamin’s writings on Beaudelaire. This is the juncture where the flâneur began to shift from the gentleman-stroller of midnineteenth-century Paris, to a more metaphorical figure that Benjamin uses to illuminate his own methodology in the Arcades Project, obsessively collecting quotes and traces of daily life to bring forth a unique way of looking at the problems of metropolitan existence and a radically different way of writing about history.
This paper will stress the importance of the theme of alienation, which is key to looking at the flâneur . The flâneur is different from the typical figure of the alienated stranger, in that their roles are inverted: “The stranger is thus a foreigner who becomes like a native, whereas the flâneur
is the inverse, a native who becomes like a foreigner” (Tester 68).
Furthermore, what makes the flâneur a unique figure, as opposed to the ordinary wanderer or stroller, is that it is an active role, similar to that of the collector or ragpicker, but whose collections are intangible information, which becomes distilled towards artistic or poetic ends. In essence, the flâneur is acting out an alienated relationship to the world in which he otherwise belongs, as a sort of allegorical performance of the collective alienation we all feel towards the cities which are constantly outstripping us by the pace of their progress. The contemporary flâneur is also working in a world in which the web of the city is no longer merely a map of the actual streets, but a virtual web as well.
Henri Lefebvre talks about how commodification has hollowed out the meaning of things in everyday life, causing a growing sense of alienation in our urban environments. The purpose of the artistflâneur and his surreal poetry of the city is to observe, to reveal connections, and then to use collected fragments to stitch back together the fabric of our lives. I will touch on three artists who have used the gaze of the flâneur in recent years in diverse and interesting ways: Annette Messager, Greg Curnoe, and Willaim Kentridge.
Though each works in very different media and methods, these artists are connected by a very rooted sense of place within their respective cities of Paris, London (Ontario), and
Johannesburg. Using examples of their work, I will expand on ways in which they create art that focuses on looking and noticing, decoding the city and “penetrating the mysteries of the everyday city of things” (Merrifield 8).