Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That seemed to be… Franz
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Thelen: You turn them, would it be fair to say, I think we talked about this yesterday, you put a lot of ephemera together and you get a picture? Charles: If you can and if you are allowed to by the conservators. Thelen: But your instincts go that way, among other ways. I do not want to be… Charles: The clutter school of design. Thelen: It is the clutter school of design, there you go. Staples: I am going to bring in examples. Charles: It is what I was saying earlier, I think it is very good in To Try All Things at Monticello. By putting these different pieces there, hopefully we have not been the God to say look at all these people who were here, look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this. It is hopefully saying you look at, but you know to look at it. I do not have to lead you by the hand and you might only read three things here, but hopefully the juxtapositions have led your eye from here to here to here. You have as a visitor an Ah-ha moment. Oh look at that, that piece of pottery matches up with that piece of pottery. It is trying one I think to treat the visitor intelligently. And let it be a bit of a discovery, rather than having to be always so one went to two went to three went to four. Sometimes we do not know what actually did. You somehow know there is this stuff and this stuff and this stuff and this may have been an outcome, but you do not know the root. We will certainly air on giving the visitor more than less. Thelen: And trusting them. Charles: Yes, they have trusted us. They have come. They have put money and miles on their feet to come to this thing. I have written maybe there or other places, this is like a scholarly book and a Broadway play. Thelen: I remember your account. Charles: It has got to have the accuracy of a scholarly book, of a good one, it ought to have the kind of intellectual curiosity of all of that. This is show time too and big bucks involved, not to the degree of Spiderman certainly. You are doing a lot of these things in isolation and hoping that when the whole thing comes together it works. You do not have the benefit even of a dress rehearsal. At a dress rehearsal you can start rewriting scripts. For us by the time it has come together, well that panel only cost a couple of thousand dollars so are you really going to rewrite it and tell us to do it. This is sort of like Alice in Wonderland. I have really felt that at times. For a long time you are bigger than this whole thing. You might have a model of the exhibit, drawings, everything is in a quarter scale. You are kind of controlling it like a puppet master. You are trying to put your parts together. Then it goes out, other people do things, it comes back in, but you are controlling a lot of that, not all of it. Then you walk into it. Is it what you expected when you walk in? We try to control it pretty tightly. We want it to look like our drawings and we do a drawing down… we joke that Bob will tell you whether a screw is horizontal or vertical. He has sometimes. We really try to be sure that everything we hope is there is there in the end. Thelen: Does that set you apart from some? Charles: I think so. I think part of it is Bob’s background, that incredible furniture background of drawing, making patterns. The story he told yesterday eight times. He knows his materials, he knows how this all ought to come together. Fabricators have incredible knowledge and they usually know the most up to date materials probably better than we do at this point. At the same time, we do not want them making changes without us. Staples: [laughter] You do not need to see the whole thing. Thelen: I am looking at an extraordinary…what is this? This is the exhibit. Charles: This was done for the Ephemera Society, it is a one panel exhibit. Thelen: It is fantastic. It is called Coney Island, the People’s Playground. Staples: These are all ephemera from… Thelen: Coney Island. Staples: Right. Thelen: Postcards and letters, letterhead. Staples: Timetables. Thelen: Timetables. Is this a, oh the park! The horse, oh this is amazing! Staples: This is a photograph of Coney Island, behind here. Charles: It is Tulu’s Place behind it. Thelen: Wow, this is a great illustration of… Charles: this is Bob’s collection. Thelen: You both are kind of interested in ephemera? Staples: No question about that. Thelen: So this piece of it that is trusting the visitor, you are going to let me make whatever connections I want to make out of this, right? Staples: Yes, you have to. Thelen: I have to. You are not going to say you should look at the railroad timetable here on the second board, and then the concert, oh who is playing? The Russian Hasar band is playing and these guys strolling along, what is it a boardwalk or something? Staples: Yes, it is Coney Island. Here is the Steeplechase. Thelen: Here is the map. Charles: So all of these guys are your ticket that you would have worn if you were riding that. I do not know that we would ever do this in a client’s exhibit. Thelen: Why? Staples: I mean this is We the People. Charles: Yes, a long time ago. Now it is very hard to do this in a permanent exhibit because of the fading of the documents. Thelen: There is not a technology that can cover it? Or is part of the point that it is not… Staples: Well, it is light that is the damaging factor. Charles: You would have to reproduce everything and part of what we like is the real stuff. But, yes, we are a little crazy for this stuff. Thelen: Well the real thing, so there is also an assumption about the real thing. Staples: It is more interesting. You cannot duplicate this and get the sort of sense of texture and time out of it. Charles: We would, going back to that exhibit of the Souls in Our Family and those slave documents. [phone ringing] our tendency would be not to reproduce something at the exact size of the original and imply to people that it is the original. Even if you put reproduction… Thelen: Why is that? Charles: I think people come wanting to see [water pouring]. You come to museums not just for ideas, but to have a real experience. It is different than what you can have on your computer screen. [phone ringing] If you need to take it you can. Thelen: I do not need to take it. Charles: But I still love these things, a feeling is, our feeling is if you take a document like those slave documents from Jefferson’s farm book that is only about this big and blow them up eight by ten feet. One they can make a powerful statement, but there is no illusion that that is the real thing there. I have done it on fabric. Increasingly I have been thinking about things like if you wanted to do something on the Constitution, but you could not have one of the very first printings, but I find the newspaper ones just as important as the one at the Archives because this is how it got out to the people. [phone ringing] Or even to bring attention to it. Go ahead and take the call. Thelen: No, I will call back. Charles: If you blew it up big and maybe had the real in front of it, but you could blow it up big and put arrows to the three-fifths clause or the things you want people to read. Then you could put the real one in front of it to genuflect in front of. Thelen: [phone ringing] Aie-yi-yi. Charles: Just take it. Thelen: No, I am not going to do it. How do I turn this off? Staples: I have no idea. Charles: Dave answer it. Thelen: No I am not going to, this is ridiculous. Charles: I can probably figure out how to turn it off if you want to. Thelen: Maybe if it is open then… Staples: Then it will not. Charles: It will still ring. Thelen: It will? Oh, I know how to turn it off? Hang on. [beep] There, I am not as dumb as I look, what do you know. Kathy I think this call was from you, so I will call you later. When you listen to this transcription. Charles: This issue of the real versus the reproduction is an issue. Thelen: Let us talk about it some more. Charles: I think it is as much as anything a planning issue. This might lead us into travelling exhibits. If you are planning an exhibit where you want to focus on some original material that you know you can only have out for three months. Staples: Like the Franklin show. Charles: Like the Franklin show, what do you do? It is a design problem if nothing else. Thelen: In what way? Charles: Well, you have just decided to put up a show for three years and you have got a key document that you can only have out for three months. Thelen: I can see now that that is a problem. Charles: What do you do when it is not there? That was part of what I was saying, if you enlarged it very big. If it is so important that it is a major statement in the exhibit, you have to figure out techniques to keep it in the exhibit. Staples: This is the elephant and the mouse again, you know. You want that mouse to be important. Charles: It could be enlarged anyway, so and that might deal with it if you had it big and you had the original and then the original has to go away. I do not, I personally do not like to walk up to a case or a frame that is saying in the way it is presented, I am real, it has all the protection, it has been dolled up like a real piece and then it is a fake inside. It is just something that I do not like and I think… Staples: She is not just interested in the message, she is interested in the medium. Charles: I want to see the real thing. If you are going to tell me there are only twenty-five Dunlap broadsides in the world of the original printing of the Declaration, if I am looking at one, I would like to believe I saw the true cross. I think there is a problem with the public if, some people say, do not worry I will just put reproduction. I will tell you it is a reproduction and then you will understand. But I think as the visitor keeps going through and says reproduction, oh reproduction, oh reproduction, this is all reproductions, where is the real stuff? Thelen: I came here to see the real stuff. Charles: I think that it devalues the exhibit or the presentation in the visitor’s mind. Staples: That is where we are moving to, because the conservationists have become the gorillas. Thelen: Really? Staples: They do not want the cloth, the paper out overexposed. Charles: Because it fades. Staples: Light is cumulative, it is irreversible the damage. They would rather not exhibit the real piece, they would rather put it in a drawer. Thelen: If we go downtown and we see those lines going outside the Archives to see the true cross. Those are the real things. Would they be going, would anybody be going to see if they were reproductions? Charles: I do not think so. Thelen: I do not think so either. Charles: At Gettysburg for instance, you are doing a lot of work at the park. Almost every piece of paper that you see in those cases is a reproduction. It has been reproduced to the original size. [phone ringing, answered by Bob] It is just not something that we would do, let me just put it that way. We would do anything we could to avoid it. Part of it, that is a visceral statement that I do not like it when I see it. Thelen: The book that Roy and I did based on interviewing fifteen hundred people that discovered that museums were institutions that people trusted more than any other for history. [phone ringing answered by Bob] Basically what they said was it is the real thing. What I heard in that is that so people know if they are in touch with the real thing, then they can imagine it could be something else. Other words could have been written, a different hat could have been worn and they connect with it. I think that I am, what I am doing is that we found exactly that visitors do thing that way, which you also think. That somehow becomes part of social, your vision of what you want visitors to experience or what you expect visitors to experience. Charles: I want people if they are coming, I want…in one way I want they, maybe this is a very populist view, we have had the pleasure of seeing the real thing of handling the real thing, you want them to have that pleasure. Thelen: And it is a different thing than seeing a reproduction. Staples: Remember Wood Washburn. Charles: When Wid was into holograms. Why would you even have to keep a real thing? Thelen: Well I just read something. Charles:We had so many arguments. Is not there now a kind of movement, the artifact list museum? Charles: On ideas and themes, sure, no question. This was one of the great moments of our lives. This was a book we designed and Bob and David Allison who was working with us were doing all the photography. Staples: I think that might have been Rick Stedphy. Charles: You think it was Rick, seventy-six? Maybe. Bob called one day, I was at the office, he said “get down here.” They were down in the reception rooms at the archives. They had, these are the minutes of the Continental Congress out on a table set up like this with the books and so on to take this picture. Tipped into the minutes, they are no longer there. For conservation reasons have been separated. But tipped into the minutes at that point was the Dunlap broadside. These minutes say, “the Declaration being again read was agreed to as follows.” That is the moment that we are a country. Or that we have declared our independence. We just as follows, I mean read again as follows, you know. So they have been working overnight, they have agreed on things, they have gotten it off to the printers. We know now because of different printings, they did a couple of press runs to correct typos. Now they have brought back the document and they have put it in here. I love this. Thelen: I can see that. I get it. It is amazing. Charles: This is just such an incredible document which is not together anymore. It says everything. Staples: While you are there go to the Emancipation Proclamation. Charles: It is Thursday July Fourth et cetera. [papers shuffling]We were talking about Emancipation Proclamation. You tell your story Bob. Staples: That is the Emancipation Proclamation on the Lincoln desk in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House. Now you see how beautiful that multipage document is with all the ribbons and stuff? Charles: So Bob and Lee Tyson and the photographer took it to the White house to photograph it. Staples: We had to get it delaminated. Do you know what that means? Thelen: Well I know what laminated is, I assume delaminate. Staples: Right, laminated is putting plastic on both sides and squeezing it. It was laminated and Lee asked to have it delaminated, free it up so that we could shoot it like that. We thought that was the salvation to this document. We returned to the Archives and they laminated it again. Charles: It is now been delaminated again. Thelen: It is very hard to read, by the way, in the Archives. Staples: Nonetheless, it is real. Thelen: Yes, it is the real one. Well, laminated of course. Did not Lincoln laminate it? Charles: A placemat. Staples: It looked just like Howard Johnson. Charles: Anyway that book got us into a real thrill of real documents. Thelen: Touching the real documents, thinking about how to present it. Staples: If you look at the upper corner of the page, I think. There is a small little inch square picture, a detail. We did that on every document and that is the table of contents in the front. Thelen: Here? Oh, I see. So finding some little snippet that is… Charles: The key point. Staples: An indicator of what document you are looking at. Charles: Is her window closed? Thelen: There is some stuff coming together here about ephemera about the real thing, about unmediated, about lived experience. Charles: I am going to show you my favorite piece of ephemera, we are getting off exhibits, but not really. Thelen: Not really, I mean this is a key. Staples: It has certainly been a key part of our lives.Well, we started out with Computer Perspective at the Eames office and I met all these dealers and these collectors and then we each became kind of focused on one particular point of view and here we are. Thelen: Here we are. Staples: Ephemera has been a big part of our lives. Charles: Took me ten years to finally get to own this. Thelen: Let me see what it is. The flying circus. [paper russling] Staples: This is something that Barbara genuflects over. Charles: Well, I coveted it and spent a lot of money on it. Thelen: Daniel Hurtzog, I see it is there, I also see German. [pause]Born without wings by the above means, flying. Charles: Running a carousel. He owns this carousel and he is touring it and he is probably sitting on his little table playing drums. This is the horse that is taking it around. It is Bucks County 1848. Here are the little Pennsylvania Dutch guys with their little flat hats. Thelen: Look at that. Charles: Some of the other things I know these little horses have no legs. That is a traditional thing with traveling carousels so that they would not get broken, they are just made without legs. When I first heard about this long before I owned it, I got his death estate records from the county. This presumably, this merry-go-round is sold for twenty-five dollars, his drum set is sold. Staples: And his thrashing machine? Charles: Yes, it cost more, like fifty. Thelen: He is displaying this at the house of somebody. Charles: I need to do some work, I understand that this may have been like a local tavern where he is displaying it. Thelen: Is not this interesting, he writes Friday F-R-E-I, he writes, Fritag would be the German. He has kind of mixed English and German here. Charles: But born without legs, I mean talk about… Thelen: To support himself by the above means. Charles: What I know, just because of what I know about carousels. I do not know of any earlier image of an American carousel. There are earlier German and French ones and English. I am quite sure that this is the earliest image of an American carousel. I would be astounded if another one came forward. Here is a guy with no legs operating a carousel. This cannot be unique. I mean somebody without legs is not going to go into this business. It has got to be a fairly common business. Staples: Like Sears Roebuck ought to carry them. Thelen: Amazing. Just amazing. Charles: What a story one could create on this. You could recreate this carousel. I tried to talk to Old Salem at one point, that they ought to have a carousel, why not, based on this one. Now people talking about people with handicaps, how did people support themselves? Thelen: It truly is great. Charles: Who is travelling with him? He cannot be doing this alone. There is a lot, I mean, I think I will not say in every case, but in most cases, you can tell more of a story with the documentation than with the artifact. You might have the most beautiful pot and I would love to have the beautiful pot to bring people in, but if you have the information about the glazes, if you have the information about the sale of the pot, who bought the pot, what is the marketing. There is a lot of richness that can be developed or in a case like that, I think that broadside would tell more than one of those horses if it survived. Although the more collectible thing would be to have the horse that survived. Thelen: That is fascinating. Charles: I have said to friends who collect individual figures, I have admitted that I have spent more on a piece of ephemera about a carousel than they may have paid for a figure. Staples: You must be crazy. [laughter] Thelen: You just said, Bob just made sense to you. This comes out of your experiences at Eames. Staples: I did not say it makes sense. Thelen: Right, you did not use those words. Staples: Ephemera has been a big part of our lives since, I would say since computers. Charles: Since Computer Perspective. Staples: I did not even know the stuff existed, all this little itsy-poo crap. Thelen: How did you find it? Or who found it? Staples: Through this business, or this step by step. Bill Ridens to Charles Grey to Penny Baker. Charles: We wanted to mark time. I think we talked about that yesterday. Thelen: Right, we did. You were going to display these things. Is that the first time? I guess we did say that yesterday. Charles: It marks… Staples: It was not the first timeline that we did at the Eames office. It was the first time that we did a timeline in 3D. Charles: And using most of this kind of stuff. This kind of stuff, it was made for a moment. Thelen: Well, there you go, it was made for a moment. Charles: So it talks about that moment. I think one that really brought it home to us at Chicago history in the history galleries originally we did a case on the Haymarket Riot. The guys we organized the riot were put on trial, I guess some of them may even have hung. Right, for instigating a riot. I think part of the defense and I am making this up a bit because it was a long time ago we worked on, was that no they told everybody to come peacefully, there was nothing that said to come with your arms. In fact, one broadside, I mean there were a lot of broadsides that look all alike, one of them said at the very bottom in small print, bring your arms or arm yourself. The Chicago Historical Society has a copy of that broadside and it is real. So for two things, one there was here is evidence that maybe even was used at the trial that no these people wanted to arm themselves and were told to arm themselves. Secondly for historians today, the fact that that one piece of paper survives where all the other evidence was people were not going to be armed at this or were not told to be armed is very very important. 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