The Artist as Collector: Blair Brennan and Viewer-Constructed Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objects retain, through indexical traces, resonances of their former lives, and it is these resonances that are the foundation of artist Blair Brennan's practice. Guided by how Brennan and other Canadian artists engaging with collections then choose to display their collected objects, this essay considers how the spaces between those objects invite a multiplicity of potential readings and viewer-created narratives. Canadian artist Blair Brennan is a collector of resonances, or rather, of objects that resonate with a previous life. These include things as diverse as old knives, used toothbrushes, coffee stains, words, and scraps of paper with other peoples' lists. Assembled together, these and other nondescript items become the frame upon which Brennan builds his artistic practice. Inevitably, when objects are placed in juxtaposition, relationships develop between them. These relationships may be narrative and tell a story, or they may be methodological constructions created to elicit a specific reading of the objects. It is the complex interrelationship between the objects themselves that creates the space in which collectors negotiate their own meaning. Furthermore, when collections are placed in a context for public viewing, viewers also impose meaning by considering how the collected parts relate to the whole when perceived through their own experiential lens. This story might be different from the one the artist set out to tell, but is no less valid; rather, this difference speaks to the almost alchemical transformation that objects undergo as artists use and arrange them, and as viewers strive to make sense of them in the context of an artwork. This placement refigures the role of the artist as that of curator, because the artist, like the curator, makes the decisions about which objects to display and how these objects are to be arranged. The process of collecting, which removes objects from their former trajectory and determines which are significant enough to be kept, is an important dimension of this method of art-making. In deciding how objects are then arranged and displayed (and often integrated with ritual and language), the artist plays a critical role in how extrinsic and intrinsic meanings or narratives are created for viewers. Artists are assuming the role of collector, appropriating the practice of collecting, and incorporating additional layers of meaning into their body of work by taking advantage of the latent histories inherent in objects. In addition to Brennan, another Canadian visual artist, Kelly Mark, will serve to help illuminate this rich role of artist as collector. Canadian artists are not the only ones engaging with collections as the foundation of their work (indeed, American artists such as Joseph Cornell and Mark Dion easily come to mind). However, my focus will be on these two contemporary Canadian artists, who make intentional use of collected everyday objects. German composition artist Joseph Beuys will, however, provide a valuable historical point of reference for objects as bearers of hidden meaning in these discussions. There is something obsessive about collecting. Collections are potentially limitless, shifting their boundaries as new items enter the collector's peripheries, serving to enhance or complement an existing collection. The process of collecting implies that no collection is formed instantaneously, even if it seems that one is acquired it its entirety. New additions, or a potentially new direction for collecting, are always lurking in unsuspected places, and when a collector chances upon one, an inexplicable desire will often compel the acquisition. The artist as collector may believe that this addition will be of use in a yet-undetermined future project or in the conquest of the missing piece for a bigger work. What is fundamental here is process: the process that is required in forming a collection, the process of transforming an object and its meaning through its new-found place in a collection, and the process of finding that meaning revealed in its indexical traces and in the manner of its display. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".