onetransparenttwodenseandimpenetrable

Trying again to think about categorization – after successive days at The Suffolk CC Archive, MEAL and then The Costume and Textile Collection – thinking about the idea of using tags to access the work and that each object has to have a unique set of tags to be able to distinguish it for any other object and then of course to find it within a collection. Eventually you have to have so many that you would have a direct copy of the object and then you would have to have the object.... which reminded me of Borges - On Exactitude in Science...In that empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. The following generations, less attentive to the study of cartography, came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome and quite useless and it was abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in all the land, no other relic is left of the discipline of geography. Thinking about ordering these collections and rethinking how to access them sometimes feels like this. The Mourning Crepe I recently looked at has the most extraordinary qualities, one layer its transparent two it becomes dense and impenetrable.