Trying again to think about categorization – after successive
days at The Suffolk CC Archive, MEAL and then The Costume and Textile
Collection – thinking about the idea of using tags to access the work and that
each object has to have a unique set of tags to be able to distinguish it for
any other object and then of course to find it within a collection. Eventually you
have to have so many that you would have a direct copy of the object and then
you would have to have the object.... which reminded me of Borges - On Exactitude in Science...In that empire, the craft of
cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered
the space of an entire city and the map of the empire itself an entire
province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting,
and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the
same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. The
following generations, less attentive to the study of cartography, came to
judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome and quite useless and it was abandoned
it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of
the map are still to be found sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in all
the land, no other relic is left of the discipline of geography. Thinking about ordering these collections and rethinking how to access them sometimes feels like this. The Mourning Crepe I recently looked at has the most
extraordinary qualities, one layer its transparent two it becomes dense and impenetrable.
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