Abstract
This article discusses the semiotic and affective affordances of a regional museum on the west coast of Australia’s only island state, Tasmania. Shorty’s Private Collection is a small museum displaying items collected from around the region, with a focus on resuscitated mining materials. The owner also creates figures derived from popular culture from these items. The article uses the methodology of creative non-fiction in order to situate the museum within the marginal community that it engages with, and discusses the museum in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and its potential to both establish and challenge dominant conceptions of the local and the limits of semiotic representation.
Highlights
Imagine the need to re-‐member through the constant repetition of images fixed, condensed, studied on, and made visceral, the need to watch, to chronicle ... the attachment to things that matter, the fascination of objects on which the mind can stare itself out
The main street which bisects the town is lined with the abandoned shells of grand old ‘frontier’ buildings, one of which houses a cafeteria that is closed as I drive through
After Peter Conrad passed through here in 1987, he added the place to his catalogue of Tasmanian ghost towns, noting ‘a rusted cannon parked in a field of daisies outside
Summary
Imagine the need to re-‐member through the constant repetition of images fixed, condensed, studied on, and made visceral, the need to watch, to chronicle ... the attachment to things that matter, the fascination of objects on which the mind can stare itself out. Like the practice of mining which once defined the places Shorty collects and once worked, Shorty’s collection—itself a view from below—unearths a region’s stuff and re-‐members it differently.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
