CHAPTER ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses Raging Dyke Network (2012), an artwork by the author in which the multi-view postcard came to represent a radical feminist network active in the 1990s. Commissioned by the Glasgow Women’s Library, Raging Dyke Network was realized through collaboration with one of the Library’s volunteers. The chapter elaborates on the collaboration’s significance as a response to conditions set by an activist who donated materials to the Library in 2000. This donor made explicit who could have direct access to these materials and who could not. The chapter examines how collaboration mediated with the donor’s agency, her exclusions, ethical challenges and aesthetics that were attached to the deposits and then to the artwork itself. From this, the chapter reveals how a landscape postcard collection became a metonym for a network of unidentified women who shared separatist gender politics. It also attends to the landscape imagery in the original postcards, and recent shifts in the cultural landscape of LGBTQ. The chapter articulates the territory that artists and their collaborators are in, when alternative voices, located within an archive collection, reveal difficult and even alienating past histories. It concludes with a sequence of double pages showing the picture postcard journey of Raging Dyke Network (2012).

BOOK ABSTRACT

Collection Thinking is a volume of essays that thinks across and beyond critical frameworks from library, archival, and museum studies to understand the meaning of "collection" as an entity and as an act. It offers new models for understanding how collections have been imagined and defined, assembled, created, and used as cultural phenomena.

Featuring over fifty illustrations and twenty-three original chapters that explore cases from a wide range of fields, including library and archival studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, sound studies, folklore studies, game studies, and education, Collection Thinking builds on the important scholarly works produced on the topic of the archive over the past two decades and contributes to ongoing debates on the historical status of memory institutions. The volume illustrates how the concept of "collection" bridges these institutional and structural categories, and generates discussions of cultural activities involving artifactual arrangement, preservation, curation, and circulation in both the private and the public spheres. Edited collaboratively by three senior scholars with expertise in the fields of literature, art history, archives, and museums, Collection Thinking is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection and conversation.

This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in how we organize materials for research across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With case studies that range from collecting Barbie dolls to medieval embroideries, and with contributions from practitioners on record collecting, the creation of sub-culture archives, and collection as artistic practice, this volume will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about why and how collections are made.