Story Of Things Research Articles

Lies I Tell My Father

How should you treat a parent who doesn’t remember you? Is it okay to lie to make them happy? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the narrator goes over to visit her Alzheimer’s father so her mother can take a break from looking after him. Like every trip to visit her father, the conversations revolve around him telling the same stories of things that happened 30 years earlier over, and over again. Conversely, he struggles to remember other parts of his own past, like a trip to Europe, as the names of his children. The narrator decides it’s okay to simply listen, agree, and lie in order to keep the peace. At one point, she decides to briefly leave the house and reenter to see if her father remembers she was there just minutes earlier; he does not remember. Finally, her mother comes home from her reprieve her she is able to go home to her partner and a waiting drink.

Playing in the Wunderkammer

In 2009 Manchester-based collaborative artists Carson & Miller were invited by Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections and the North West Film Archive (UK) to curate an exhibition which explored the museum and archives varied collections, ranging from pots, toys and Victorian ephemera to scrapbooks and albums. The exhibition was called 'The Story of Things'. Drawing on the tradition of the Wunderkammer and surrealist explorations of it, the curatorial selection and arrangements of 'The Story of Things' (or rather dis-arrangements) were based on contingency - a word which designates ‘chance’, ‘accident’, ‘a fortuitous happening’, but which also stems from the Latin word tangere ‘to touch’, implying ‘con-tact’, connection, affinity. This curatorial process took as its premise the Wunderkammer, displaying the “deliberately random and undisciplined journey” (Carson & Miller, 2009) taken by Carson & Miller. Roaming through the collections and archives available to them, the artists began to cross-reference the materials they found there, sometimes, as they explain, “relating things by type, sometimes throwing the unlikely together, sometimes remembering something they already knew, sometimes uncovering things unknown to them” (Carson & Miller, 2009). This paper will argue, by exploring Carson & Miller’s exhibition through both theoretical and practice-based perspectives, that the Wunderkammer opens up alternative, playful curatorial strategies (of placing and misplacing, joining and dis-joining, relating and separating objects from each other), “systematic bewilderments”(Ernst, 1948) in Max Ernst’s terms, which draw heavily on notions of childhood play and playfulness. The notion of play is present in a number of ways in the concept of the Wunderkammer, ranging from the Wunderkammer’s early association with an exclusive leisure activity to its later association with an activity which “anyone could master” (Gordon, 2006); from the significance of toys in collections to the similarity of children’s collecting patterns, to the surrealist understandings of the cabinet of curiosities. These playful strategies construct narratives through producing ‘fortuitous encounters’ and tease out the element of ‘wonder’ in objects and play with curatorial conventions and viewer’s expectations. The paper will argue that the Wunderkammer opens up spaces of what Gilles Deleuze termed ‘ideal game’, where one begins when one wishes and stops at will. This approach disrupts linear narratives and fixities of definitions, immanent in Western ideology and conventional curatorial strategies seeking genealogy, unfolding the meaning of the displayed objects and their relations as unfixed, rhizomic, shifting, spreading, wandering. Here ‘things’ and their meanings slip, and reveal what Bill Brown terms “misuse value” of objects, leading us back to the “tactile tryst” (Brown, 1998) of a child, a primal state of exploring and seeing the world. It will be argued that this playful approach, inherent in the structure of the Wunderkammer, challenges conventional optic vision associated with the exhibition environment, introducing haptic vision which does not move in one direction but is exploratory or ‘all-over-the-place’, focusing on the material details rather than the narrative line. The sense-making invited here has shifted from the conventional exhibition environment which focuses on genealogical, chronological, biographical or thematic matter, to making-sense, to an exploration which leaves linear narratives behind (an exploration which becomes sensory) and in which the playful juxtaposition of things reveals new links and relations, forming new poetic constellations, like Alice’s “world of twisted logic and nonsensical rhymes” (Carroll, 1865).

Could GP commissioning enable collaboration throughout the NHS?

Could GP commissioning enable collaboration throughout the NHS?

A story of things yet-to-be: the status of geology in the United States in 1807

Abstract In the 1780s observations of geological phenomena by American authors appeared in American publications. Europeans had also begun to explore the American geological landscape, notably the immigrant William Maclure. But an American geological community had not yet formed by 1807. Much of this apparent ‘delay’ in the development of the geological sciences in the United States resulted from the cultural and political realities of the new nation. In a new and democratic–egalitarian society, it took time to negotiate the nature of the appropriate public support for the practice of science. Individuals with the resources to provide private patronage for scientific undertakings were exceedingly few. The educational institutions that would ultimately be a major factor in the transmission and extension of geological knowledge were only then beginning to multiply and grow. In 1807 Benjamin Silliman completed his first year of science instruction at Yale, but offered only chemistry and mineralogy. Geology would wait several more years. Other institutions and individuals critical to the future of geology in the United States were ‘born’ in 1807 – including the United States Coast Survey, and Louis Agassiz and David Dale Owen. Roughly another decade would pass before a ‘geological community’ would emerge in the United States.

Universal museums, museum objects and repatriation: The tangled stories of things

This paper discusses the contribution of the 2003'Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums' to the debate on repatriation. The'Universalist' approach taken by the Declaration is first considered, noting the implications of its emphasis on art, the heritage of museums and objects, along with its focus on the sculpture of ancient Greece and the enlightenment origin of museums such as the British Museum. It is argued that it reveals an essentialist approach that derives from a particular Western perspective, rather than being truly'universal', and then considers whether a similar problem underlies many of the arguments advocating repatriation. The second part of the paper explores the opportunities offered by an approach which emphasises the'biography of objects'. This demonstrates how the tangled histories of objects and their many meanings can be considered. Repatriation is shown to be able to result in an increase in knowledge and understanding, rather than its destruction, and so meets the declared aim of the Declaration to'foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation'.