Cultural Capital and the museum as a publication
This project satirised the art market and irony of privately collecting stolen or commercialised art to appear cultured.
As an analogy of the questions of ownership, authenticity, reproducibility and recontextualization of mythos surrounding historic objects in the public domain I created a catalogue of readaptions of the monkey paw following it entering the public domain in the late 60s. I Emulated conventions of ‘tacky’graphic design in tourist curio shops in order to highlight the less than salubrious origin of many antiquities on the art market and their reduction to financial assets as auction houses function to make a profit from the past. Along with this auction catalogue I made clay reproductions of all references to the monkey paw in popular culture and presented them in a seedy spiv suitcase.
Sculpted Mgbedike mask and monkey paw with a Bulul.
Screenprinted Monkey Paw Tote bag with the ISBN of the short story
The lucrative aspect of the reproduction of cultural heritage in tourism was reflected in the tote bags I screenprinted. There is an element of cultural capital in owning a tote bag with a Basquiat emblazoned on it much as there would be in owning an antiquity or a canvas bag with an obscure cultural reference to the mythos of monkey hands.
This commodification and re-contextualisation of meaning is also reflected in the cultural artefacts I decided to present. I designed a Mgbedike mask by amalgamating reoccurring designs I’d seen in masks created by the Igbo people of Nigeria
Monkey paw sales catalogue containing all instances of monkey paw references in media upon W.W.Jacobs story entering the Public domain.
The monkey paw from the Simpsons Tree House of Horror and purveyor.
The catalogue included "previous lots" which were screenshots of online auctions of actual cultural artefacts (pictured here a Mgbedike mask).
The Mgbedike mask was used in dances known as masquerades to contact gods and spirits of village ancestors. The traditional art of mask making has gradually ceased to be a privileged, status-related practice because of mass production and commercialisation for tourist-orientated markets. As such faithful reproductions of traditional masks with identifiable geographical and cultural origins have weakened overtime as practitioners of masquerade converted to Christianity and countries such as Zimbabwe reproduce masks disparate to their heritage because of cheapness or ease of access. Their marketability is forever entangled with the art market for influencing art movements such as cubism, fauvism and expressionism thus they have taken on a further cultural significance by virtue of being in the museum public domain.
Similarly, Bululs (the wooden seated figure) are nowadays mostly manufactured for the tourist trade. The Bulul I presented belongs to my mother as she is Ifugao diaspora. Creation of a bul-ul involves alwen bul-ulritual by a shaman to ensure that the statue gains power. An Ifugao former shaman stated that the last traditional rituals were held in the 1960s, again bringing into question the cultural significance of these objects outside of museum preservation where their historical cultural significance to ancestor worship can be documented and preserved.
