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Museum of the personal:

the souvenir and nostalgia

Thesis

Conclusion

My interest in the topic of the souvenir was initially sparked from my practice as a visual artist. I have always had a strong interest in "the land" as a theme and issue in my work. Some six years ago, I dealt with aspects of the changing landscape, memory and self-identity in a performance titled "Scalpland." This work involved a narrative text which spoke about my past home and its change, accompanied by me clippering off my hair. At this time, I began to look closely at the landscape surrounding the Sunshine Coast, a place where I had also spent time on childhood vacations. My memories of the Big Pineapple and the Big Cow sent me on a journey, revisiting those sights, giving me the opportunity to think about what drives people to create such monuments. About the same time, I began to question the various roles of exhibition and display of art, and the hierarchy of art objects from a more critical position as a curator and artist. What resulted from that convergence of ideas is a continuing project titled "Big Banana Time Inc." which still firing after five years.

Through this inquiry, it is has been my contention that the tourist souvenir object itself carries no stories except for the reminder of its mass-produced origins. This is of course true, but as I have discussed, it does have a role as a partial object that stands in for personal experiences. It is an object that mediates communication between people about past experiences which were shared or otherwise, by generating a story that is narrated by its owner - who endows authority to the object because it has a social context and meaning of significance to a place or event.

The social relationships defined in both material and emotive or psychological terms are initially investigated in Chapter One, where the discussion focuses on the character of fetishism. The role of consumerism, represented by the commodity fetish is presented as part of the process of establishing the context of souvenir, as well as its relation to psychological and anthropological descriptions of fetishism are issues presented in this part of the discussion. All of these relationships have impacts related to the past it is argued, and it is my contention that connections between nostalgia and fetishism act as joint symbiotic agents for defining the souvenir in any number of capacities. It is only when external forces impact on such associations, like proving the provenance of a museum collection, that such onerous disputes regarding authenticity are presented.

The relationship to nostalgia and home and family is also considered as a context for the souvenir. Familial ties, nostalgia and the home are argued here as the key identifying characteristics of identity and reflexive notions of the self. Nostalgia is a key-identifying characteristic of a souvenir, it is argued in Chapters Two and Three, because to hold on to objects is to make a connection to the past, whether it is to a site or an event. Also, the home is the absent part of the self whilst on holidays; when one is away, desires for home can also mitigate and aid consumption, with the results being the purchase of 'something to take home.'

In Chapter Four, the souvenir was defined primarily as a possession or a keepsake in the broad sense, as well as specifically in the context of tourism, where it appears firstly as a commodity, and then in terms of its transformation into a possession. The relationship between tourism and its objects locates practices of tourist consumption as having many contingent effects on a site. Encounters with cultural Others and notions of self, all operate as differing aspects of social relations. The role of the gaze and spectatorship is also considered as integral to the role of the tourist, acting as creating scenario which distances the tourist from the object of their desire - 'authentic' experiences of culture and its objects. It is then noted that authenticity is a feature that is ultimately created by the tourist, who acts a curator of objects, classifying them to a code that is valid only to them. These issues are becoming more crucial in critical discussions pertaining to objects, for instance, only last week I read a recently published (2000)text titled Souvenirs: the material culture of tourism which addresses many of the themes discussed in this research project.

In conclusion, it is not necessarily the type of contact one has with an object, it is its significance in the future after that object has been found, subjectivity is tied to the commodity object as well as non-commercial souvenirs. The object does not outwardly signify loss, as it is a "found object" of sorts¾but its narrative is distinctively bound to the past, making it representative of loss through the processes of fetishism and nostalgia. Memories of the past reclaimed via souvenirs enable us to tell the story of ourselves, an object autobiography, ultimately leading us to create the museum of the personal.

REFERENCES

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  4. Ibid p.5-6
  5. Ibid p.3
  6. Chapter One (p.14-50) Gammon, Lorriane & Makinen, Merja Female fetishism :a new look Laurence & Wishart Ltd: London 1994, provides an excellent overview of the three types of fetishism
  7. This version of the essay was located in Too Soon, Too late, an anthology of Morris's essay's published in 1998. An earlier version of this essay was originally published in Cultural Studies 2/1 (1988)
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  9. According to Dr. Walter McCrone and his colleagues at McCrone Associates, the 3+ by 14+ foot cloth depicting Christ's crucified body is an inspired painting produced by a Medieval artist just before its first appearance in recorded history in 1356. The faint sepia image is made up of billions of submicron pigment particles (red ochre and vermilion) in a collagen tempera medium. Dr. McCrone determined this by polarized light microscopy in 1979. This included careful inspection of thousands of linen fibers from 32 different areas (Shroud and sample points), characterization of the only colored image-forming particles by color, refractive indices, polarized light microscopy, size, shape, and microchemical tests for iron, mercury, and body fluids. The paint pigments were dispersed in a collagen tempera (produced in medieval times, perhaps, from parchment). It is chemically distinctly different in composition from blood but readily detected and identified microscopically by microchemical staining reactions. Forensic tests for blood were uniformly negative on fibers from the blood-image tapes. http://www.mcri.org/Shroud.html
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  11. http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?ti=06727000
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  31. Ibid p.115
  32. Riceour, Paul 'Narrative time' (Philosophy today: Winter 1985)
  33. Sandman, Good News Week 20/5/99
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  38. Ibid
  39. Ibid
  40. Douglas, Ian R. 'The calm before the storm: Virilio's debt to Foucault, and some notes on contemporary global capital' http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/~nideffer/_SPEED_/1.4/articles/douglas.html
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  63. Ibid
  64. Ibid p.3
  65. Ibid
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  76. Michael Moore investigated Disney's treatment of workers in a 1995 episode of TV Nation.
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  86. Ibid
  87. In the McLibel court case, it was proved that McDonalds openly use the 'hassle factor' as a means of getting consumers of their product. For instance, most children I know can't stand the food but want it because of the 'free' toy.
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  91. Ibid
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  95. Ibid
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  99. Shaw, C. and Chase, M. op.cit., p.3
  100. Ibid
  101. Ibid
  102. Ibid
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  104. Ibid
  105. Ibid
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  110. Ibid
  111. Ibid p.123
  112. Ibid p.121
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  114. Ibid
  115. Phillip, R. and Steiner, C. op.cit., p.12
  116. Urry, J. op.cit., p.2
  117. Fiske, J. Hodge, B. and Turner, G. p.117
  118. Urry, J. op.cit., p. 2.
  119. Ibid
  120. Ibid p.3-4
  121. Ibid
  122. Ibid
  123. Ibid p.9
  124. Ibid
  125. Ibid
  126. Ibid
  127. Lowenthal, D. op.cit., p.33
  128. Ibid
  129. Ibid p.39
  130. Ibid
  131. Ibid
  132. Ibid p.33