This photo is from the prm website...
The rest are mine. Oh dear...
Les Biggs watched what went on behind the scenes at the museum, and thought about the secondary, unseen collection. He responded to the meticulously written, typed and filed index cards, with drawings and photographs attached. There were 105 porcelain boxes; 96 sealed and displayed in a cabinet and 9 in other cases in the gallery with lids open and contents on view. I loved the language of classification he explored. Linnaen. Trace. Artefact. There were also lots of quotes. Here are some I've gleaned from peering really closely at my bad photos...
Anything becomes fantastical if you stare at it long enough. Gustave Flaubert.
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. Walter Benjamin.
Life doesn’t last. Art doesn’t last – it doesn’t matter. Eva Hesse.
The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise. Sol LeWitt.
And my favourites...
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire. Robert Louis Stevenson.
Art should be born of the material and the tool, and it should retain the mark of the tool and its struggle with the material. Man should speak, but so should the tool and the material. Jean Debuffet.
Found this link to other artists who have produced installations for the Pitt Rivers Museum.
And found some other work by Les Biggs. Love these ceramics tools...
