mechanical flea market for apparitions of curiosities
I’m researching flea markets and museums, specifically cabinets of curiosities and Andre Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’. Malraux talks about the world of reproductions forming a museum without walls that break socio-economic barriers of the institution of the museum. Cabinets of curiosities, of “liminal objects that lay on the margins of charted territory, brought back from worlds unknown, defying any accepted system of classification, and associated with the discovery of ‘new worlds’”, had three goals in mind: accumulation, definition, and classification. They vary from spiritual marvels and miracles of a medieval, ‘Gothic’ sort of fascination to coherent displays of the world from antiquity projecting to a “modern” world view. This is reminiscent to my perception of flea markets, which often employ carnivals and stress peculiar aspects of our culture, yet they sell and show antiquities from people’s homes. Hand-me-down jewelry, medals from WWII, used and abused lawn gnomes. The flea market lends to a compulsive ritual of returning; people will go every single week to the same flea market because of the circulation of objects. Museums however have the permanent collection, and then there are these occasional special exhibitions, people don’t frequent them as often and definitely not as compulsively.
As of now the program I am proposing is a flea market that acts as a scaffold to a museum for apparitions of culture, a museum sustained through the persistence of objects from the flea market that have lost their relativity in the present. These objects build and re-build the museum, an echo of the flea market; objects that simultaneously have the voice to re-enter market circulation. The museum, in effect, houses artifacts that have lost their value to the flea market; a market that expands according to the selling of one’s old junk becomes a valuable culture scaffold. A symbiotic relationship operates through the mechanical reflection of a cyclical culture. A museum of no value becomes a ‘museum without walls’. A flea market that circulates objects that are culturally alive is able to create an infinity museum that dwells in the personal relationship of the sold object (and the story that comes with it) and the new owner, an infinity museum perceivable only through its voice, the story of the object, passed on and changing.
sight and sound, echo and reflection.
touched and held.
The object travels from its display when it becomes seen and found; it gets picked up, touched and held, another time, place is remembered or imagined from this moment. A conversation between two strangers that meet through the object, a question, an answer; a story is told, held for later repetition. To hear an echo is to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ a space. The sound of these conversations, audible transactions, could lead one to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ an object before it actually is seen and felt. Flea markets tend to be these open outdoor spaces, loud conversations, boomboxes from people bored at their tables; museums on the other hand usually exist in large enclosed spaces, people attempting to be quiet. The intimacy of private conversations in museums often becomes violated and echoed, overheard; in a flea market, conversations that exist to be heard and made part of the community tend to become lost in the noise or in the open space. Visually, however, the two strive to catch the eye, a dazzling display of objects. In a museum, display objects are meant to be seen, the cabinet of curiosities tucked away in a case, drawers, behind glass panels. Perhaps in a program such as the one I’m suggesting touch could be involved in this museum, the intentional sound of these conversations of the flea market could echo in the museum, the privacy of experiencing an object in the flea market could be reflected in the design of sound.
SITE
I’ve been thinking about Asbury Park in New Jersey; however I haven’t been there in maybe four years, so I would really like to go back before I make any rash decisions. Particularly there is this casino there, which used to have an ice skating rink, carousel, etc., situated by the boardwalk by the shore. From what I know it’s been mostly abandoned, although parts of it like the lobby were being used pretty ineffectively (they have some outdoor concerts, events near there, the huge lobby holding just this one refreshment stand/ticket booth). The building’s slated for demolition; I found out after I was interested in the site that a flea market was unsuccessfully attempted (maybe not the best site then?).

Anyway, self-assignment:
1. Fix my précis, include my recent research, write more, simplify

2. Performative technique: I don’t know where to find this exactly, but research the layout of flea markets, (if there is any besides putting tables in rows). Then, and this gets sketchy, diagram through the understanding of the layout of display/sight, how sound would work there, relating this to the enclosed space required by an echo. On a more intimate scale of display I should be diagramming the categorization of these cabinets of curiosities, how that could lend to the echo of an image, object.

3. Read more, research the site, or other possible sites. Get this documentary on flea markets and watch it (saw it maybe a year ago, pretty good, interviews with people who go to flea markets and who sell at them, travels around the country, different sizes, different types of flea markets, etc.). I remember this one interview, the seller saying that actually a lot of them don’t even make any money out of it; it is simply this obsession with collecting, with circulating, interactions between objects they have come to know intimately and these strangers.