Putting things in boxes
Have you noticed how there seems to be a trend in recent cultural events of putting people in glass boxes? In an unusual staging choice earlier this month, Azerbaijan chose to mount their singer for the Eurovision Song Contest on a see-through plinth, inside which a mime artist mirrored his moves like a shadow. On Monday, I went to see the live broadcast of the Royal Opera House’s Donna del Lago. A bit of a musical contrast agreed, but this also put its characters in glass cases, as the objects of devotion of the nineteenth-century Scottish antiquarian societies which were contemporary with both composer Rossini and narrative inspiration Walter Scott. Tilda Swinton has recently been sleeping in a box at MOMA as part of her collaboration with Cornelia Parker entitled The Maybe.
I’ve also been thinking about boxes over the weekend in a more academic context. I spent two-days at a thoroughly inspiring and exhausting conference at CRASSH in Cambridge, called ‘Ephemerality and Durability in Early-Modern Visual and Material Culture.’ Boxes were a recurring theme in the talks. We thought about paper carefully folded around objects, ‘nests of boxes’ as metaphors in Donne’s writings, letters enfolding ideas, reliquaries enclosing sacred materials, clothes encasing people, natural history specimens in both physical and narrative boxes, churches cloistering art works, urban spaces boxing in sounds and people, fortifications containing colonial power, account books storing up financial meaning. But, we also learnt to think outside of boxes. The whole point of the conference was discussion across disciplinary boundaries and how we might do this by, as it were, putting an object in a different interpretive box to look at it anew. It was such a rich conference that most of my ideas are still swilling around in ‘my breast, the chest of my mind’ – as Lucy Razzall quoted to us in her paper.
But, given that our associated ‘Things’ seminar podcasts hit the iTunes top global collection last month, maybe someone will put me in a box on stage some time soon too …