This archive is a collection of hierophanies. 

Deriving from the Greek phainein, to show or bring to light, and hieros, the holy, Mircea Eliade defined a hierophany as a “manifestation of the sacred…something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our ‘profane’ world.” He goes on to say that, “by manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.” This is my experience of the objects in this archive. They are of and in this world, in some ways profoundly profane or mundane (a mangled plastic toy soldier, a disintegrating wallet) and yet they point to something other.

Igor Kopytoff offers an atheistic approach to understanding such objects in “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process.” The sacred functions as a foil for his definition of a commodity, something that can be exchanged. He writes that “non-saleability imparts to a thing a special aura of apartness from the mundane and the common.” Interestingly, non-saleability can be an indicator or result of very high or very low potential monetary value: “many singular things (that is, non-exchangeable things) may be worth very little…To be a non-commodity is to be ‘priceless’ in the full possible sense of the term, ranging from the uniquely valuable to the uniquely worthless.” That duality is very present in this archive. In many instances these objects are literal refuse. They each have long biographies, as Kopytoff would say, in which they’ve taken various incarnations, saleable and non-saleable (the arm of a baby doll, once part of a saleable whole, discarded, dumped by Robert Moses in Dead Horse Bay, becomes part of the beach ecology until found and removed, on a particular day). Plucked from their previous contexts they are given new meaning and stature. Eliade identifies separation as key to sacralization. These objects were either found or gifted; in either instance their collection was a response to their perceived innate separateness, apartness, elseness, sacredness. The act of collection itself being a separation, their sacredness is reinscribed. Their definition now in a formal archive further reiterates that process.

Eliade does not seem to entertain that the hierophany may be in the eye of the beholder. To him manifestation of the sacred is explicitly the work of the divine. My inquiry is agnostic and a study of subjectivity. The meaning that saturates these objects is for me sometimes traceable to their path into my life—the person who handed them to me, the place and time that they were found, their perceived biographies—and sometimes mysterious, entirely emotional. To other people their meaning is even more obscure. But again, their separation from previous contexts of commerce, discardedness, function, nature, etc. “imparts an apartness,” and so this archive becomes a communication, a way to translate my experience of these objects as hierophanies to other people. 

The visual quality of the recordings echoes this. The objects are placed on the scanning bed of an Epson WF-2750 printer/scanner with the lid open and the lights off to minimize light leaks. The effect is that each object is captured receding into a void with a very shallow depth of field. Blurring and obscuring, due to the limitations of the recording implement, appropriately shroud the objects in mystery. Scanned at various resting angles, some parts of these objects become knowable, but the objects as a whole remain ultimately unknowable. This functions as a commentary on the subjectivity and precarity of sacrality as well as of memory—the slippage that occurs. Even when we make or keep physical monuments, they themselves decay. Memories, tokens, and the meaning of those things are all subjective and ephemeral and can be captured only imperfectly.

This archive is a result and reflection of “Imperfect Archiving,” which Be Oakley defines as “a making use of any knowledge of ‘archiving’ and ‘collecting’ by means of uninformed, spontaneous, naive and failed notions of what an archive can be. It’s a freedom of creating your own knowledge, understandings and actions not tied down to accepted professional notions of being an archivist.” In a sense, this archive is a recreation of an existent one—just some things that I have kept—created imperfectly, naively, as a response to deeply personal, subjective knowledge. The recreation is an attempt to understand this understanding, and to communicate what is personal and subjective. It is a hierophany of hierophanies.