Our days are going to make pretty lame "olden days."
Here's another one to file under "things nobody besides myself could possibly be interested in." I was downtown with an hour to kill so I peeked into the Cultural Center gallery to see what was going on. If you haven't been inside, it's on the corner of Washington and Michigan in a gorgeous building that served as the city's original library. It's worth a visit just to see the huge Tiffany domed ceilings and mosaics - just wait til some relative comes to visit and you can take a break from showing yet another person around Millennium Park, go across the street, and enjoy the air conditioning.The current exhibition is something with fairly limited appeal, like I said. How limited? Early 19th century needlepoint. I know, I know. Hear me out on this one.
What's on display is samplers that adolescent girls stitched between 1700 and the Civil War to work on their sewing skills, create a decorative genealogical table or picture for the wall, or simply use as a momentary distraction on the road to the grave. A lot of them feature an alphabet and a verse or prayer, all bordered by flowers and intricate designs. There were purely decorative pieces on display as well (my favorite being a U.S. map from 1809 where the country just fades away into the vast Louisiana territory in the west, just beyond regions tagged with signifiers like "Creek" and "Choctaw"), but the samplers caught my imagination. When you look at these dingy scraps of silk and burlap, you're essentially staring at somebody's homework or crossword puzzle from two hundred years ago. They created these handicrafts (as I occasionally do in Winter) to kill time, not to preserve the memory of their daily lives for the ages.
All of this leads me to wonder what sorts of artifacts will be left over from our own era. If most of our writing and photos and music is stored on a hard drive and immune to the mark of time, well, I'm glad we're still creatively productive but a PDF file is one lousy artifact. All in all, we live in an age of disposable, mass-produced objects, and I'm not going to go so far as to declare that a positive or negative thing (well, the factory smoke required to produce those disposable things is destroying the planet, but I digress). It just makes it difficult to guess what sort of everyday item will be on display in the Cultural Center two hundred years from now, when so few things are handmade and therefore so few things reveal something about the person who created and used them. Something will certainly remain of us. I just don't think I can guess what it will be.
Labels: Chicago
posted by Leah @ 10:03 PM
1 Comments:
I read once that our knowledge of the prehistoric past comes from sheer happenstance; the shelves and displays full of bones and teeth and shells and flint tools are all we have to study solely because those are the only things that fossililzed and thus remained to this day. Everything else, the soft, delicate parts, are lost to eternity. Maybe 70 million years ago the earth was ruled by massive land-dwelling intelligent jellyfish. We'll never know, because all we have now are dinosaur bones and the occasional plant impression. In much the same way, the future will probably only know us through the random junk that survives-- all the random crap we carefully and meticulously saved, the giant piles of unbiodegradable petroluem derivatives that will outlast the sun. Our great-great-great grandchildren, when they learn of our dark age, will visit museums filled with near-mint Silver Age comic books and baseball cards, unopened Star Wars toys in their original packaging, libraries filled with back issues of National Geographic and Reader's Digest, giant piles of faded plastic products stacked as high as mountains. Our memories, our art, our intangible works, if they aren't still under copyright (which may be truly limitless by their time), will be lost in the mists of backward incompatibility, consigned to those very same piles of useless, unrecycleable, unbiodegradable plastic bags and cups and spoons and styrofoam lunch boxes, relegated to the same fate as the giant sentient jellyfish. And they'll never know, and they won't feel any worse off for it.
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