The substitution of ancient monuments in 18th Century drawings and engravings for torn scraps of corrugated cardboard is a strategy to combine and collapse reality and artifice, history and myth, with dramatic and incongruous alterations in scale. One layer of representation and meaning is superimposed on another, elevating cardboard waste to the cultural equivalent of antiquities and the remnants of an ancient people and their beliefs.
It is a deliberate absurdity to ennoble one while trivialising another, and to gently mock the antiquaries’ passion by showing them draw, measure and survey utterly worthless objects. That meaning, significance and cultural value can be extracted from or attached to this waste material is, on the one hand, the fundamental purpose of archaeology and, on the other, the transformative aim of Western Art.
The past is always viewed through the lens of the present; in it we hope to see our own values and ideals reflected, to find reassurance and precedents to legitimise and validate the institutions, traditions and authorities of our own times.
The antiquary may search for origins, for antecedents and foundations; however, the cardboard ephemera of discarded packaging speaks not of origins or beginnings, only of final destinations.
(Images are inspired by the illustrations of William Stukeley, the 18th Century antiquary).