The Archive of Family Treasure
Excerpts from a Conversation with Vera Gartley
April 14, 2004
Based upon Vera Gartley’s ideas on collecting as they relate
to her art practice and theory, our conversation revolved around two
of her exhibitions:
Collectively Speaking [1]
at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary - February 16 to May 26, 2002. In that
exhibition, Vera was invited by the Glenbow to assemble collections
of her mother’s belongings, her own work, and four of the Glenbow
collections into an exhibition. In putting Collectively Speaking together,
she used the contemporary elements of digital images, magnets, and LED
images.
The Gap, The Stride Gallery, Calgary, September 1998,
and at the Edmonton Art Gallery, November 1998 through January 1999.
Based upon the reproduction and collection of a family heirloom landscape
painting, the exhibition was built using audience interaction, digital
and analog technology. ‘The gallery space was used to symbolize
a gap - a sort of laboratory for experimental and spontaneous transmissions
of language and images, … undefined or immaterial space from which
the next thought may arise. ‘ (Description taken from the website:
http://vanitygallery.com/gartley/gartley/)
Vera Gartley started out teaching at eighteen years old, ‘with
a classroom of 30 kids in all grades.’ After four and a half years
of teaching in that general environment, she decided to study art. She
then taught art in high school for two years, children’s’
classes, and evening classes in Continuing Education before becoming
full time at the Alberta College of Art in 1974. Vera says that she
has spent more time teaching and studying things than producing art
and has come to consider that as a production in itself.
In the year 2000, she started a project of archiving her mother’s
belongings. Following are excerpts from a conversation that we had about
that undertaking.
Valerie LeBlanc: Are you from Alberta?
Vera Gartley: Yes, you have to say ‘all’
of Alberta. By the time I came to Calgary to study art, I had lived
in a lot of places, mostly in Alberta but 3 years in Ontario as well.
I was never long enough in any one place to call it home. I think that
has affected my practice and the way I think too.
VL: I think that is fairly common with Artists. You
have to move where the opportunities are.
VG: Well, no, since I have been in the art field, I
haven't moved that much. It was when I was young. My parents were schoolteachers
so we moved around, then my Dad joined the air force; and that meant
more moving. He died in the service, not in battle, but in the service,
and then my Mother had to find her way, moving from place to place.
So relating to art and teaching, I guess I must have been apprenticing
for teaching from a really young age. In my work, I probably had a mistaken
idea about art for myself for quite a long time. I thought, ‘
What you do is you paint, and so on.’ But actually, the teacher
in me was so strong that I realized years later, that it had entered
into my art practice. It really became evident when I did the landscape
project (The Gap) because it was an interactive thing, and then again
with the (archiving) project at the Glenbow Museum. (Collectively Speaking)
VL: I would like to come back to the landscape project,
but first, I would like to talk to you about archiving your mother’s
belongings and the Glenbow project.
VG: Well, she had a system of organizing that was probably
related to some kind of predisposition to orderliness, some kind of
perfection. I brought a couple of things to show you. She would decide
to collect something and she made a lot of scrapbooks. These are Walt
Disney images, these are meditations, and these are religious things
that came in the Edmonton Journal. … It was just her sense of
ordering things, and if you had looked into her kitchen drawers before
she moved into the lodge, there were plastic bags, all neatly folded
in the drawers, categorized into small, medium and large. And then there
were these, the household hints. (Also clipped from the newspaper) Here
are some pictures. (Vera brought a few photo examples along.)
VL: These are some of the pictures that you took, and
you mentioned cataloguing them before the Glenbow approached you. So
why was it that you had started to photograph these objects of your
Mother’s?
VG: I did it on a whim, to feel better, nothing else.
My Mother was upset at having to give up her home. She was almost 91
years old, and she had never had anyone help her with anything ever
before. Then she suddenly had to give up her home, pack everything,
and go into the lodge. It was hard on both of us. I was getting very
tired. My spirits were going down, from sheer fatigue.
VL: So this is a living archive of your Mother’s
belongings.
VG: Oh yes, she is still living. It started box by
box. I had just got my house cleared out after moving a couple of times
and next thing I knew, it was full of her boxes.
VL: You know the way you have done this, it almost
looks as if it is a catalogue of gifts; those ones that you can order
something by number.
VG: I put the numbers on them, just on impulse. I wish
that I had been a little more careful with it at the time. Here is one
with the final archive number in the lower left corner; I put her initials
in there. (CPG - Carolyn P. Gartley ) We wrote some of them by hand.
VL: You did magnets, with some of them as part of the exhibition.
I'll back up a bit, you mentioned that you had started to photograph
and to catalogue her belongings and then the Glenbow approached you
to do this show, but can you tell me more about why you had decided
to catalogue her belongings?
VG: Part of my philosophy, which I don't always manage to use very well,
is; ‘if something's going not so well, you look for a way to turn
it into an opportunity.’ So all of the boxes came to my house,
and I had helped to pack them. I didn't realize that she had so much;
she kept everything that anyone ever gave her. I thought, well maybe
I will just start taking pictures of these things. A lot of them were
kitschy, some of them were antiques, and some of them were beautiful.
VL: In terms of her belongings coming to your house, did you then have
to make a decision of what would be done with them, were some things
to be given away?
VG: Eventually yes, but at that moment I didn't think about it, I just
thought, we are going downhill and we better do something. I used my
dining room table, put some paper up, borrowed a digital camera, and
learned how to use it. I had never used one before, and one by one,
without any thought of what it was to be, or why I was doing it, we
began. It was just to help us feel better, and she would sit there while
I worked.
VL: So she would visit from the lodge?
VG: She hadn't even moved in yet, she was spending a couple of weeks
at my house until I could get her settled.
VL: What year was that?
VG: It was in February and March of 2000. She would sit at the table
and tell me where she got the thing and maybe a story to go with it.
All of that is on the website. And I would take the pictures, but as
you can see from the pictures, they turned out to be little gems. So
then I had all of these pictures that I loved, and I got some help to
download them. I didn't even know how to do any of that until then.
I put them onto disc, and then the Glenbow invited me to do an exhibition.
One thing led to another and I got the idea of involving the public.
I had just been to India and I started with wanting to set up the exhibition
as something ritualistic, hinting at a temple situation. I thought of
the magnet idea, a visitor would have something to take away, and what
they could offer in return was maybe to sit down and make a scrapbook
page at the end of the gallery.
VL: So you had items that were catalogued during the
exhibition?
VG: I had little facsimiles, mostly just pictures but
also feathers, and various things that represented the collections.
Visitors could paste them into the scrapbook pages. I had a bunch of
scrapbooks there over the three months; we couldn't keep up with the
pages that people made.
VL: Can I interrupt you for a moment? When we were
talking earlier, you mentioned that the website tends to fall short
of the overall sense of the exhibition.
VG: Yes, well it wasn't meant to represent the overall
sense of the exhibition, it was meant to be a component, just like one
of the images, and it did allow for more interaction. I thought that
people might like to go home and check the website for the archived
number on the magnet. Then they could find out what it was, and what
my Mom said about it. Here is an image of a little box with a pair of
earrings. It was a gift from somebody. There were a lot of the things
that she probably never used or wore, but because they were given to
her, she kept them.
VL: You mentioned that your trip to India was before
this? Can you tell me something about how the trip to related to the
exhibition?
VG: Well I had planned it, but didn't go until late
December 2000 and I returned in mid February 2001. That was after the
Glenbow had invited me to do the exhibition, and it influenced how I
researched on my trip. I decided to make picture collections while I
was there. They were of flowers, vendors, and flower offerings. Everywhere
I went, flowers had been offered. When you saw them with lighted lamps,
they were to make a wish for someone; perhaps someone deceased. If you
saw them floating in the water like that, they had been disposed of.
So as one of the six collector personalities, I showed these images.
My Mother's collection was of actual objects, and the Glenbow chose
the four others.
VL: Can I ask who were the other four collectors in
the exhibition?
VG: General Wolseley, Mrs. Strome (Strome/Shervey Collection),
Borys Malkin, and there was Dr. Edwards. (Edwards/Gardiner Collection)
Here are some of the Wolseley items. (Again, Vera brought photos out.)
See the silver tag here, he had an engraver hand engrave his name on
it, and there is one on every single object. Then the Glenbow has their
tag on it, which you see here. They were busy trying to hide the tags,
and I said, ‘oh no, don't hide them, keep them there.
Mrs. Strome, was a Calgary mother who saved everything that her kids
(the Shervey children) ever gave her, everything that her kids made;
all their stuff, comics, everything.
Then there was Borys Malkin, a Polish Collector. He was the sole person
responsible for over 60,000 items that the Glenbow has on South America.
He carefully archived everything. He continued to write to the Glenbow
once in a while and say, “You have five of these fire fans, or
something, and there is a sixth one that you need to complete your collection,
“ that was up until about ten or twenty years ago. And the Glenbow
used him for a long time until their administration changed. Then they
didn't use him as much for a while and they kind of lost out during
that time. So he was a professional collector, an anthropologist or
something. Here is something from Borys Malkin, from a collection of
dolls. This is the way he tagged them, using whatever he could find,
and then see the little Glenbow markings on there.
The fourth was Dr. Edwards. (The Edwards/Gardiner Collection) He was
a turn of the (19th to 20th) century doctor on a reserve in Southern
Saskatchewan. Gardiner was his daughter-in law who kept the collection.
So it was a family collection rather than one person but Dr. Edwards
had all of those ledger drawings from the native people down there,
wonderful, wonderful drawings, and then a lot of his own stuff was saved.
VL: On a more personal basis, I am wondering if you
have come to some conclusions of why people collect things?
VG: I don't think about it too much but from time to
time it comes up. Of course with doing this project, I started looking
at books about it. There was the ‘Walter Benjamin: Unpacking My
Library’. He was going through a process as he opened his books
and there were lots of them that he had never read. And then there are
books on museums and collecting but, for one thing, I think it runs
in the family. You know my grandmother had boxes and boxes of bits of
things everywhere. If I look at my cousins and some of the relatives:
an archivist, teacher, writer; they are not known writers, but they
tend toward those things. Saving, collecting, storing and ordering,
putting things into order almost seems to be inherited. I don't know
if it is genetically inherited, or if it is a learned thing, passed
down. From my point of view, I am trying to get things out of my house
but I notice this tendency. I have an obsession with collecting
information. I have files and files of things that I collect; quotes,
sources. A lot of it I save as possible sources for use in teaching.
I have thought that it gives one a sense of power. I haven't resolved
this yet in my mind, but in India now, people do collect coins and pens,
and stamps and things. But I think earlier on in India, they did not
collect. I don't have any way of proving that but I talked to one person
from there who said, 'oh yes, Indians collect.’ But then I talked
to someone who knew more of the history, and he said they didn't used
to. He said it is the western influence. So I thought, where does that
come, why do we do that in the West? Maybe it has something to do with
owning, or power, or colonizing in a sense. I remember thinking that
colonization falls under the need to collect, and I guess it’s
the need to have power over something. Personal collections might have
to do with having a little jurisdiction over something of your own.
VL: I also want to ask you if you have some thoughts
on why institutions collect. You worked directly with the Glenbow, so
you might have somewhat of an idea of what their sense of collection
involves.
VG: Well, to educate the public would be one obvious
answer to that, to educate the public about other cultures and about
the past of our own local culture. To preserve things that are becoming
obsolete quickly would relate to all of the Borys Malkin stuff. I don’t
think that you could find any of those artifacts anymore with the decimation
of the rain forests in South America. But why keep it, for future study
I guess, for solving social and science riddles later on maybe. It has
to do with entertainment too; it is a big thing lately.
VL: I agree with the idea that entertainment is a big
factor!
VG: Yes, more in the last decade really, for galleries
and museums. That's caused the Glenbow to change their approach. The
way they’ve been handling exhibitions, the admission, and the
way that they water down the show, much to the disgust of a lot of the
artists. It seems to be in order to make it entertaining rather than
true or something.
VL: Did anything change for you as an artist when you
started putting that show together, maybe through the process of taking
the photos with your Mother?
VG: It really affirmed once and for all that I want
to do more public / interactive things because of the teaching aspect
of it, involving people in the show. Levelling the hierarchies for the
viewing public was an issue in my landscape show too. It was a big issue.
It affirmed my tendency to notice things more in everyday life and to
start to use those more, simple things that were happening, like moving
my Mother. By turning it into a project, the tendency in my own work
became much stronger at that time. It seems as if my teaching and my
own work are intertwined in a lot of ways. I am teaching myself and
then teaching Students at the same time. Working with volunteer
help was a challenge. The Glenbow project was the biggest thing I ever
did. I learned something about organizing, about databases, and that
kind of thing. I had people do that for me but I had to learn it so
that I could watch them and understand what they were doing and use
the same vocabulary.
VL: Of course as the Artist, you were the creative end of it.
VG: Yes, and I had to decide not to have total control,
to let it happen. I could allow some freedom of control. For example,
I had a set of 300 trading cards that formed another component of the
show. When I went down there to put those together, I had stacks of
magnets, and stacks of trading card size pictures. So, I had my Mother
put them together. But, I would have liked to have thought about it
and matched those things, but I decided to let go of it. She didn't
have a clear idea of why I was doing this whole thing in the first place.
She would just take a magnet and put it on, and I just let it happen
the way she did it. She did the whole 300 cards, so there were aspects
of surrender. The thing that I noticed the most about surrendering to
something was when I had put up the very large images, each seven by
four feet. I really liked those images, so then to cover them with magnets,
I had to surrender the viewing of the image. And then I had volunteers.
I let them arrange the magnets the way they wanted, so the images became
completely covered with the fifteen thousand magnets. Then, that was
so interesting, I didn’t want the public to pull them off.
VL: I think I see what you are getting at with the
surrendering thing, but in a way that talks about ‘something is
being collected because it is in danger of being lost.
VG: That’s an interesting thought. And as they
came off, it changed at every moment.
VL: Like a big puzzle?
VG: They seemed to come off in patches. Then they would
look almost pixilated like digital images. I had only about 12 hundred
images in all so I had to repeat them many times to make enough to cover
the large images. I replenished them instead of letting them empty out.
Visitors took the magnets out very quickly. I wanted them to last longer
but they didn’t, so I replenished them a couple of times. There
were a lot of things that came out of putting the exhibition together.
… I became intrigued with the Wolseley collection. I didn’t
want to go into the military section to start with, and then I saw these
drawers of General Wolseley's artifacts. Then, for a while, I didn’t
want to look at anything else. It gave me an idea about the personalities
of collectors and the levelling of hierarchies. There was my Mother’s
stuff and then Wolseley's stuff. And his status gave me a lot of chance
to think about these things some more. I think that I was so engaged
with those artifacts because I had already been to India once, and then
I went again. Later it dawned on me that I had been very put out with
the British influence in India. I figured that India was spoiled because
of the 200 years of British influence, that kind of thing. And here
was Wolseley, who went to India to put down the rebellions.
VL: So you were sort of caught on both sides of the
fence.
VG: I guess I was kind of caught in my own kind of
levelling of hierarchies of judgement when that came up.
VL: I would like to ask you about The Gap landscape
exhibition now.
VG: That exhibition revolved around nostalgia, I think
that’s another aspect of collecting. The first painting was painted
at a country fair in or near Minburn, Alberta. My Mother claims that
she lived in Minburn, but they went to a sports day, or a fair, in another
town, very near. And she claims she saw somebody painting it. She would
have been about ten years old and she's 96 now, so how do we know? I
don’t know, but nevertheless, it was hand painted, and no doubt
she saw somebody painting ‘a painting.’ And it found a home
in my Great Grandmother's house. Mom doesn’t know how it got there;
whether my Great Grandfather had bought it for her or not, I don’t
know. Then it ended up in my Grandparents home and all of my family
grew up with the painting hanging there. My mother speaks of 2 or 3
other things on the wall but that painting was one of the most choice,
the treasured thing on the wall. And there were stories about it, like
how my Uncle was bouncing a ball and hit the painting, cracking it.
My Grandmother moaned and wailed, my Uncle told me that. When my Grandmother
passed away, a lot of things were put into boxes. Then the painting
surfaced again in about 1970. My Aunt was maybe looking in a box and
decided to have two copies made locally, probably by an amateur painter
from Westlock, Alberta. She had one made for herself, and one for her
brother, my Uncle. Then my Mom got the original and she commissioned
a local amateur painter to make her a copy and one for the first aunt.
I think her sister in law made one too but that one disappeared somewhere.
Then, who else? Well, my Mom made a copy of the copy when she was dabbling
around with paint for a while. Then a cousin of mine made a copy to
give to her mother, my Mom’s sister. And when I heard about all
of this, I asked my Mother where the original was. She said that she
was going to throw it away but passed it to a cousin. So she called
my cousin who still had it. I asked for it, and then I got the original
painting to show at Stride. I had the thought, ‘What if the copying
could go on forever?’ And that became the formation of the exhibition.
Public participation yielded 250 landscapes. About sixty of them were
from my students, some tried to copy it accurately from the little digital
print I gave them. The prints were handed out at the gallery or they
could get a copy off the web, paint it and email it to me, or they could
bring it into the gallery. And that was a case of surrendering too.
I thought, ‘What if the public comes in and sees these paintings,
realizes that they are copies, and what if they think that they are
mine?’ On the other wall I had these LED lit versions that I did.
In each of the two shows that I did, I wanted to have something of my
own, in an electric signage mode that I use sometime. So in that show,
I did five versions of the landscape, hung them on one wall, and the
painted landscapes on the other. A lot of stories came from it and I
made a book of texts. I audiotaped endlessly for that one. There is
a book ‘about this thick’ (Vera gestures) with transcriptions
of what I call, ‘landscape stories.’ It became another collection.
And I took clips of what people had said and categorized them in the
book.
VL: Would you like to add anything else?
VG: Well getting back to the saving of things,
it can have to do with thinking you are going to use them again someday.
That was probably the reason that my mother collected a lot of things,
for future use. I think some of this collecting maybe comes from the
depression years when you had to use everything.
- Valerie LeBlanc
August 18, 2004
Notes:
[1] Collectively
Speaking: http://vanitygallery.com/gartley/