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Abstract
This paper challenges superficial views of ‘recyclia’ (or recycled art) so to consider more conceptual, holistic perspectives. In questioning how the ‘cultural and visual art world’ invests a new imagination and creativity onto abandoned possessions and derelict artefacts, the paper explores the recovery of social memory and the recycling of the past. With an emphasis on the conversion of Cornish shipping and fishing artefacts into recyclia and recycled narrative, the paper thus addresses the recycling of identities, histories and social relations. It does so from an interdisciplinary approach grounded in social anthropology, human geography and material culture studies. My main concern is to map out the journeys that certain tangible markers of prosperity and socio‐economic hardship take through official and low‐key recycling initiatives. Hence, the aim is to look at how Cornwall's historically significant nautical relics and waste are transformed into works of art and therefore into solid metaphors of cultural distinction. In this way, issues pertaining to cultural resurgence are knotted into the creative production for an ‘afterlife’ of things.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented on three occasions. In Newquay at the ‘Changing Minds’ session of the conference ‘Passion, Power and Possibilities: Challenging Conventional Wisdoms of Regeneration in Cornwall’. As part of the ‘An Anthropology of the Transformers of Waste’ workshop at the EASA conference ‘Face to Face: Connecting Distance and Proximity’ in Vienna. And finally in the seminar series of the International Institute of Culture, Tourism and Development, London Metropolitan University. Thanks are due to the participants of these sessions as well as to the convenors Claire Cohen (Cornwall Business School), Oliver Baines (Cornwall Rural Community Council), J. S. Marcoux (HEC Montreal), Lucy Norris (UCL), Susanne Küchler (UCL) and David Harrison (LMU). Additionally, for their critical comments thanks are due to Audrey Prost, Jane Barr and the anonymous reviewers. Finally, I am also greatly indebted to the many informants and friends who appear in the text under pseudonyms or their real name when consent was given.
Notes
[1] Conrad, The End of the Tether, 1.
[2] Anderson and Tabb, Water Leisure and Culture.
[3] Day and Lund, ‘British Maritime Heritage’.
[4] C. T. Mumford, ‘Clothing, Golf Bags, Computer Mice—All Kosher Now’. Cornwall Today, June 1998, 33–34.
[5] Abramson and Laviolette, Risk and Recreation.
[6] Munn, ‘The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Gawa Canoes’.
[7] Tilley, ‘The Metaphorical Transformations of Wala Canoes’.
[8] Laviolette, ‘Where Difference Lies’.
[9] Hoskin, Biographical Objects.
[10] Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.
[11] Geary, ‘Sacred Commodities’.
[12] Harvey, ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents’.
[13] Said, Orientalism.
[14] Szerszynski et al., Nature Performed.
[15] Cerny and Seriff, Recycled, Re‐seen.
[16] Cootes et al., Transformations; Durrans, ‘Braque's Batman’.
[17] Saunders, ‘Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory’.
[18] Varda, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.
[19] Ben Nicholson (1943), quoted in an Horizon interview taken from: http://www.archeus.co.uk, 1 October 2004.
[20] Cowan, A Century of Images.
[21] Crouch and Toogood, ‘Everyday Abstraction’; Laviolette, ‘An Iconography of Landscape Images in Cornish Art and Prose’.
[22] Busby and Klung, ‘Movie‐induced Tourism’; Kent, ‘Screening Kernow’.
[23] Brace, ‘Landscape and Identity’; Laviolette, ‘Cornwall's Visual Cultures in Perspective’.
[24] Parker, Chasing Tales.
[25] Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult; Wagner, ‘Our Very Own Cargo Cult’.
[26] Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
[27] Kemp, Things Reconstructed, 5.
[28] Cootes et al., Transformations, 31.
[30] Rowlands, ‘Remembering to Forget’.
[31] Gell, Art and Agency.
[32] Laviolette, ‘Surfers, the Materiality of Waves and the Protest against Water Pollution’.
[33] Kampion and Brown, A History of Surf Culture.
[34] Douglas, Purity and Danger.
[35] Laurier, ‘Replication and Restoration’.
[36] Busby, ‘“A True Cornish Treasure”’.
[37] Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country.
[38] Morphy, Aboriginal Art (Art & Ideas).
[39] Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture; Tuan, The Hydrological Cycle and the Wisdom of God.
[40] Laviolette, ‘Landscaping Death’.
[41] Gell, ‘Vogel's Net’; Küchler, ‘Why Knot?’
[42] Gell, ibid.
[43] Barley, Dancing on the Grave.
[44] Hale, ‘The Land Near the Dark Cornish Sea’.
[45] Bender, Stonehenge.
[46] Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors.
[47] Bartlett, Remembering; Forty and Küchler, The Art of Forgetting.