David Sedaris Diaries by David Sedaris

Author:David Sedaris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art / Popular Culture, Art / Individual Artists / Artists Books, Art / General
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

No. 31 November 5, 1985 – January 8, 1986 (detail)

Envelope fragment with poem, Emily Dickinson, 1885

But it was this apex socialite’s accompanying flood of ephemera—the invitations, announcements, playbills, catalogs, newspapers, menus, and souvenirs—that reminds me of Sedaris’s diaries. With a hoarder’s devotion and diverse inclusiveness, Warhol created what he called Time Capsules, 612 generic storage boxes in which he would place seemingly random samples for later generations to ponder. From photographs to maps, a Mickey Mouse watch, and even a pizza crust, he created a fleet of cardboard Noah’s Arks. A mishmash of personal and cultural history and an archivist’s dream (and nightmare, I imagine), these boxes are stored and fastidiously cataloged at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although fascinating and encyclopedic, they differ from the curatorial and editorial finesse of David’s archives, and, for David, that’s really the point. Not to select everything but to impose an editorial viewpoint, an attitude, and a wit on the accumulated pages.

One of the most elegant and revealing uses of found ephemera and its integration into an artist’s work is that of Emily Dickinson and her envelope fragments. After her death it was discovered that she had kept dozens of carefully preserved pieces of used envelopes with sentences, brief stanzas, and complete poems written on them. They were recycled, impromptu journal pages, unbound and without uniformity but easily accessible in her pocket.

One assumes that her prodigious wordplay could be inspired at any given moment, and these carefully dismantled envelope segments were easily at hand. On their own they transcend the published poem, becoming sculptural artifacts of an artist’s mind and method, the thing and the thought beautifully and inseparably bound.

For David, perhaps, it is the hunt for or discovery of the discarded treasure that has the most meaning. Finding the overlooked visual poem is its own reward, but if it has a grammatically challenged note on it, or is an obscure news photo from a long out-of-business newspaper, it experiences a kind of rebirth when it is plucked from obscurity.

Like comets, cultures and individuals pass through space and time, continuously shedding a trail of debris and evidence. It’s as if David is an itinerant Odyssean astronaut, collecting samples as they drift pass. It’s no coincidence that he spends countless hours and walks a marathoner’s miles on the roads of his adopted West Sussex neighborhood picking up trash. Appalled at what people are willing to fling out of cars along beautiful country lanes, he also can’t look away knowing there are treasures wherever there are people behaving badly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.