Reliquarium.
A glimpse inside one of the panels of my pharmacy prescription case — they’re surprisingly deep — lined with cava corks.
As I continue to arrange mementos (many of which were gathered this past year) in my very own ‘pharmacy reliquary’ I can clearly see the influence of:
- wunderkammers (see: Augsburg Cabinet, The)
- Beneš, Barton Lidice (whose work is featured below)
- (distressingly) Collyer, Homer & Langley ¹
- Cornell, Joseph
- the modern antiquarianisms of one Hovey, Hollister
As you review your adventures & contemplate ways to improve your lives in 2012, I hope you are surrounded (but not smothered, har har) by the people & things that you love.
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We all have things that only we know are relics. A slip of paper with a lover’s phone number, the ticket to a movie we’ve kept for years, or a handkerchief with a scent of perfume. Left to history, these objects fall by the wayside. We all have a drawer full of them.
… My apartment has become a [huge reliquarium], a vault of memories. Without the stories, these objects mean nothing, but when they are mounted they become special. & when the provenance is attached they become interesting, & when they are combined with many more similar objects in a collection, they become art.
Barton Lidice Beneš, Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils, & Other Metamorphic Rubbish
Both photographed with my Droid, using different apps.
¹ I’m only being partially facetious when I say my reliquary is sorely lacking: ‘baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child’s chair … more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine & engineering & more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T with which Langley had been tinkering, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks & fabric, clocks, 14 pianos (both grand & upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone & records.’
Thank you, Wikipedia.
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