Of Records and Records: Siemon Allen at the Art Fair

By Chad Rossouw

Collecting is a strange and engaging habit, and one that we all partake in to some extent: photographs, friends, porcelain frogs. Collecting inflates the importance of an object through the acts of acquisition, cataloguing and storage. In a formal collection, as opposed to the casual collection of soft porn in a barber shop (though the difference can be hard to tell), rarity becomes apparent. Rarity is peculiar in that the value of an object isn’t always its worth as a product, and the relationship between the labour and the object is completely downplayed. In fact it is often the quirks and the errors that make an object more valuable. Not only the first edition of James Joyces’ Ulysses, but the one with the errata on page 73. Other ideas also shift the value of an object in a collection: what is its collection history, who owned it first, or even just a sentimental value placed upon it by the collector. Whatever makes it unique to own increases it value.

Fine art, of course, has had a long and productive relationship with collecting. The Medici family in Florence were the first and most famous collectors of art (outside the church) in the Western world, and set up an economy of art making that is reliant on the vagaries of collectors' taste (and their perception of the uniqueness or specificity of the product) to create value. And we artists still grapple with this idea on a daily, starving basis.

As the field of collection moves outside the normal spheres of stamps and vintage cars, and the idea of value becomes less monetary and more personal, it becomes more and more specific. Think of the movie Trainspotting, whose title compares the collecting of sights of trains, a surprisingly popular and ephemeral hobby, with the small and specialized field of heroin addiction. How does one express the value of seeing the LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard, in deep turquoise, pulling a full rolling stock out of Grantham Station?

One of the ways of expressing this value has been Internet communities, which have vastly expanded the appreciation of certain domains, or collection sites which display the nuanced and varied world of collecting, such as MooM. Artist Siemon Allen plays with some of these issues of collecting, and indeed the meaning of specific collectable objects, in his work.

Siemon Allen is a US-based South African artist. In the 90s, while living in Durban, he founded FLAT gallery, an experimental space; half-living room, half-gallery. Since moving to the States his work has mostly involved collecting and displaying vast amounts of information. In Stamp Collection, he presents a collection of South African stamps, in Newspapers a collection of clippings from around the US mentioning South Africa. These two works have been shown in multiple configurations, but always in a broad swathe of information so that a viewer looks for the patterns and anomalies that will serve to define the collection.

At the recent Joburg Art Fair, Allen exhibited Records as part of the gordonschachatcollection special project. The gordonschchatcollection brings out an artist every year in collaboration with the Art Fair to lend a bit of biennale finesse to a commercially driven fair.

In Records, Allen has scanned 12 rare discs from his collection of South African records. These are printed on a massive scale on velvety paper. The resolution of the scans is so high and the detail so intense that it was a struggle to see them as prints, and not actual objects. The collection of music, like the collection of stamps and newspapers, carries a history of the country. They literally are records of styles, of the changing cultural landscape. Together, they speak of how people represented themselves musically. The discs are, of course, also records of music, physical imprints of audio sensation. Printed, and mounted on the wall in an unplayable size, they become mute and the aspect that is revealed is the history of the records themselves. In the enlargement, the tiniest scratch on the surface is visible, as is the texture of the label and the wearing away of the ink. The records become physical bearers of their own history, the marks of the passage of time.

It becomes an interesting shift when he takes a collection and turn it into art, upsetting the normal route of taking an artwork and putting it into a collection. While it still privileges the unique and the rare, the quirky and individual, in this context it also values the damaged and worn. In a country like South Africa, where the scars of history are quite traumatic and something that every citizen has to bear, they become remarkably moving objects.