The John Affey Museum

The Catalogue can be read start to finish, browsed at random, or searched as an archive for keywords, e.g.:

~ Cognitive  ~ Fictive  ~  Museum  ~  Space  ~  We ~

Entries are numbered duodecimally with the dodecahedral Accessioning Dice (below), according to the JAM method.  The dice itself is numbered 000.0.  The sequence of quotations follows their order of appearance in an accompanying volume: The Fictive Museum by Clair Le Couteur.

Eric Gill (1882-1940) was named Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, and was a founding member of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry.  Since the publication of Fiona MacCarthy’s ‘morally blank’ Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God (1989) – and arguably far earlier,  given Graham Greene’s review of his letters – it has been public knowledge that Gill was a serial abuser.[iii]  Gill ran a pseudo-religious patriarchal commune where, seemingly with the consent of his wife, he continued a lifelong incestuous relationship with his sister, he sexually abused his daughters and even attempted sexual intercourse with his dogs.  Artworks depicting his daughters nude are on show in the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft’s current retrospective, the first to include the question of Gill’s ‘biography’ in a show of his work.[iv] [v]  In publication after publication, Gill’s work continues to charm cultural commentators; child abuse is downplayed, excused, sidelined – his daughter Petra led ‘a productive and happy life’ – and his work described in glowing terms.[vi]  Given the multiple ongoing enquiries into British establishment collusion in widespread child sexual abuse, and countless other despicable acts besides, whilst maintaining a façade of rational, institutional propriety, Gill Sans thus seems the perfect emblematic typeface for our project: a fictive museum concerning ethnology, cultural heritage, and colonial British modernity at the dawn of the digital age.

[i] ‘Stop Keeping Calm and Carrying On’, Type Writing (13 February 2013), <https://typewritingblog.wordpress.com/tag/keep-calm-and-carry-on/> [accessed 9 March 2018].

[ii] Steven Heller, ‘Gill Sans, One of the Most Popular Typefaces Ever, is Reborn for the Digital Age’, Wired (11 October 2015), < https://www.wired.com/2015/11/gill-sans-one-of-the-most-popular-typefaces-ever-is-reborn-for-the-digital-age/> [accessed 9 March 2018].

[iii] Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, ‘Perversity Raised to a Principle’, New York Times (7 May 1989), <http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/07/books/perversity-raised-to-a-principle.html> [accessed 4 July 2017].

[iv] Rachel Cooke, ‘Eric Gill: Can We Separate the Artist from the Abuser?’ Observer (9 April 2017), <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gill-the-body-ditchling-exhibition-rachel-cooke> [accessed 4 July 2017].

[v] Ditchling Museum, ‘Eric Gill: The Body’, [exhibition] (29 April – 3 September 2017).

The door to our museum – I call it our museum, though I am not exactly on the staff – is a very specific green. A sort of baize-green like a billiard table, or, for fans of period drama, like the door between upstairs and downstairs. I've just been shown a picture of this door by Dr. Adam Origen, self-styled Assistant to the Directrix, who's clearly had this Ur-door photograph taped to his fridge since he took the picture in Bath in the mid-’90s. It's a fine Georgian six-panelled door, a six-lobed fan light above. Nearly the spitting image of the door to No. 10, actually, barring the emerald green. I find out later that this lame aping of the British Establishment extends to the smallest details of Origen's 'museum'.

I say Origen's museum, and that isn't quite true. There are four people behind this insubstantial institution. The first, naturally, is its founder, he to whom Dr. Origen insists on referring in hushed tones of reverence, and always by his full name – John Henry Affey – whenever he comes up in conversation. Which is frequently. This John Henry Affey – and one really can hear the italics whenever Origen invokes him – is clearly the subject of some fairly deft hagiography. He's being set up (by Origen, if no-one else) as a Great Man in the old style. A visionary. I get two distinct intuitions about Affey, or rather about Origen and Affey. The first is that Origen was deeply besotted with him, and remains so. And I must admit from what I've learned of the man, he must have been seat-wettingly charming. The second is that, if Affey hadn't already existed, Dr. Origen would have had to make him up.

During the early ‘60s, Origen worked for John Henry Affey (1905-1969) as a personal assistant, a kind of valet-come-secretary. Affey was, as far as I can gather, mostly Irish, though raised on a tiny islet called Fey in the north Shetlands. He was short, little over five feet two, had surprisingly dark skin, and piercing pale green eyes. He worked, as did many Shetland men, for Christian Salvesen Limited, back when the company ran the British-Norwegian whaling industry in the Antarctic. During his travels, Affey collected artefacts from the Maori, the South Sea Islanders, the Sámi of the Arctic Circle, the Ainu of northern Japan, and many other indigenous peoples. A typologist in the Pitt Rivers tradition, Affey nursed a life-long dream of opening a whaling museum. Two things prevented him. The first was that he was storing his collection on Deception Island in the South Shetlands. The ring-shaped Deception is in fact the caldera of an active volcano, and eruptions beginning in 1968 caused the Hektor Whaling Station – also being used as a base by the British Antarctic Survey – to be badly damaged, destroying Affey's collection. It seems certain that the stress of this event precipitated Affey's fatal stroke of the following year.

The second thing, which may still prove to be a bit of a barrier (as though the loss of the collection weren't bad enough), is the reputation Affey had acquired as a crank. What queered his pitch to the ethnological crowd (though he didn't limit his... ah... radical conjectures to any one discipline) was his obsession – it's not too strong a word – with a “lost tribe” of the Antarctic he called the Ascensorescetis, the Whale Riders. Ropey Latin, I'm told. The most striking aspect of this lost tribe, and also the one most difficult to swallow, is that many Whale Riders lived their entire lives upon the open sea, never setting a foot upon the land. In fact, or so I was informed gravely by Dr. Origen, there was quite the taboo against it, though they did deign to walk about on ice, and apparently had a great fondness for icebergs.

I should at this point own up to my part in all this, before we're dragged any further down the rabbit hole. I'm an analyst, in the broader Jungian tradition, who works with institutions. I treat institutions as people, and people as institutions. And more than that, I analyse what M. Bachelard would term the poetics of space. Psychoanalytic feng shui. My job (or the reason I'm called in, at least) is to resolve conflicts. I'm hired to ameliorate symptoms when they become unmanageable ~ a loaded term for institutions. Of course, like any psychotherapist, what I reveal about the causes of certain symptoms isn't always welcome, particularly not when I start referring to other 'healthy' or 'productive' aspects of the institution as symptoms too.

Now and then, I work as a consultant with the Eisegetics Institute, a conceptual design firm. The John Affey Museum is a client of theirs, and they've called me in to put J.A.M. on the couch. I'm used to working with small institutions: single offices, focus groups, that sort of thing. I've long been complaining that I can never publish anything I find, an inevitable result of client confidentiality. The Eisegetics Institute offered me this one as a kind of joke, saying they'd found an institution well worth analysing, who'd agreed that any and all material I gathered could be published, as long as they didn't have to pay me anything. I thought what the hell.

As I've already mentioned, the John Affey Museum is really only four people, one of whom – arguably the most important – is dead. The second, Dr. Origen, was the man responsible for keeping the museum alive from the death of its founder in 1969 until his discovery of Affey's grand-daughter, Margaret O'Sullivan, in 1998. Ms. O'Sullivan (she whom Dr. Origen insists on calling the Directrix, which she is apparently fine with) lives in Mainistir na Búille, County Roscommon, Ireland. O'Sullivan's a local historian and genealogist, and works in Boyle Branch Library as an assistant. She learned of her hereditary position as director of the John Affey Museum in 1999, becoming 'Directrix' in 2004 after what I have been repeatedly assured by Dr. Origen was a “rigorous process of authentification.” I've talked to her only on Skype. She seems to view her position as a bit of a lark, Dr. Origen as infuriating but harmless, and she stated, when I asked her about the likelihood of the museum's ever opening: “Well, it'd be a long day's walk, you know, before we catch a glimpse of that. But I'm lighting a candle to Saint Jude, now and then.”

I've got an icon of Saint Jude on the back of my toilet door. He's wearing a fetching emerald green wrap, holding an oar in his left hand and, with the other, absent-mindedly caressing the big golden medallion of Jesus that's hanging around his neck. I forget this, until I see him there, shortly after talking to O’Sullivan. And suddenly remember I forgot to check to see if she had green eyes. Maybe you can't really tell over Skype. And here's where I try to write about how my job really works, which isn't something one can usually publish: it's basically magic. I could call it instead, and probably should, a poetics of synchronicity. Synchronicity is one of those ideas that have been adopted into contemporary culture largely shorn of their psychoanalytic roots; in this case, the idea is Jung's. Like Jung, I've come to believe that dealing with this concept is more than some intellectual game, Gedankenexperiment, or useful working hypothesis. Unlike Jung, though, I usually keep schtum about it, and rarely use it to justify ex-marital dalliances.

What I do for a living, really, is read. I read institutions, their members, their narratives and their sites. Particularly their sites: I'm especially fond of reading office kitchens. I get paid hourly, using that cheeky analytical definition of the hour as fifty minutes. (An hourly rate is important, when – at least according to certain clients – the problems “fix themselves”, no thanks to me!) I learnt long ago, during my lengthy traditional training in the dance of transference and countertransference, that not all insights can be shared with the analysand. Often, attempting to do so can seriously harm the therapeutic alliance. Indeed, there is such a thing as a therapeutic lie. What I've developed, over the years, is a Dalí-esque “Paranoid-Critical” method. A kind of house-trained mania. I begin by seeing everything as potentially significant. I trained in the 80s, during the post-structuralist shitstorm, so my method sidesteps the question of meaning. I'm interested in structure. In function. Poetics. That there's always sugar all over the kitchenette worktop doesn't mean. But it can signify. It comes about through the institutional unconscious (again, a term I would never use with clients).

Back to the John Affey Museum, and the final piece of the four-person puzzle: Peter Le Couteur. Le Couteur is a young artist and musician (it probably says something that a 32 year old man seems young to me) who was artist in residence at the Eisegetics Institute's Prague branch a couple of years ago. He's taken on the J.A.M. Project, agreeing to work – I think for free – as the museum's fabricator, researcher and general factotum. Most of the impetus for actually trying to open the museum in some form is coming from him. Le Couteur's taken on the project, I think, as readymade subject-matter for his PhD. His angle is that the museum is “fictive”, by which he seems to mean halfway between fact and fiction, irreducible to one or the other. He apparently views the whole enterprise as a kind of author-less artwork. Actually, this seems like as a good a description as any of the “as–if” state of mind I enter while working. Patently, institutions don't have unconsciouses, but if they did...

So, back to the story. I'm sitting on the loo, with an eyebrow raised, looking at the baize green toga St. Jude is wearing. All of a sudden, Jude looks like he's just swept the cover off a 50s card table, like a nightclub magician, and draped himself with baize the same green as Dr. Origen's fanciful museum door. Origen talks as though this is a photograph of the museum's door; he's rather proud of it, actually, quite proprietorial. “Here's the door of our museum,” he says, with a wink, when opening his elderly refrigerator. I have the feeling he makes this exact joke – aloud or sub-vocally – every time he gets the tonic water out of the fridge (something he does rather a lot). The Sellotape across its corners has darkened to amber; its been there long enough that its initial connotations as a picture he took once of a house in Bath have all but worn away. The mundane significance has been passed by. Robertsonianism would term this the first (and least important) level of exegesis, the Literal. The second level, the moral of the story, Origen himself provides, offhand: “Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, was it?” But he and I continue to stare at this photo of one door, representing another, taped to yet another. There are two levels to go, in this exegetical exercise in a Vauxhall bedsit, but though I feel them hanging in the air, nothing more is said.

Typology, for Christians, involves reading the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New. Jonah in the belly of the Great Fish – Dr. Origen, having opened the fridge door a few times, coincidentally, let's the italics act slip and begins to call Affey “Jonah” – is read as an allegory of Christ in the Tomb. This is level three. These levels of exegesis, though, were not originally Christian. Walter Benjamin, an avowed Kabbalist, writes about a similar concept as a way of reading history as a metaphysical state, as Messianic Time. From ephemera, the act of criticism – poetics, if you like – allows us to make the jump up to Truth, to Idea. One thing is read in the terms of another, through the form of the other. From this superimposed reading, both elements are changed. Though naturally the Christian reworking of typology always instantiates the type with Christ, so there's that clear hierarchy, typological reading actually swings both ways (don't we all). The story of Jonah adds meaning to the Resurrection, it becomes a commentary upon it, and elements of its structure are added to the type-structure. Time is folded, pinning the two sequences together, and providing – as is inevitable when folding – form in a higher dimension.

But just what is being folded, in that long moment sitting on my toilet as I look at St. Jude's outfit in a framed icon hung on the back of a door? A certain flavour of green. Doors. A typological figure with various accrued attributes and significances: the staff, oar, axe or club; a green robe; a flame on the forehead; the medallion of Christ; sometimes the carpenter's rule, the boat; lost causes. Green eyes, maybe. A door is an eye. The fanlight looked like an eye, or like half a rose window in a cathedral.

I arrange to see Dr. Origen again; I forget to ask, again, what his doctorate is in, and every time I forget, it seems harder to ask. I have an obscure intuition it is in Divinity. This time, we meet at Carluccio's in Covent Garden, a place I believe to be haunted by the ghost of Eliza Doolittle. I'm buying, apparently. Fixing my gaze on the door into the foyer (not green: a kind of chic Georgian grey) I casually ask if Affey ever mentioned St. Jude. He did, it turns out. He wore a silver St. Jude's medal, which belonged to his mother Mary until she gave it to him in 1929. (The fact that “Jonah's” mother was called Mary is utterly irresistible to me, I must confess.) Affey gave the medal to Origen, who kept it in a “lovely little scrimshaw box” Affey had made from the tooth of a sperm whale, before posting it to Margaret O'Sullivan when she was ordained hereditary Directrix in 2004. “It never arrived, if you can believe that. Lost in the post! I was quite distraught about it for a while, I can tell you.”

I think I've finally met my match in Dr. Origen. I absolutely cannot tell when he's concealing something. Or, rather, I always get the sense that he is, and that it's a personal joke of some kind. Reading this museum, analysing it, is a nightmare of countertransference. In a very real sense, of course, that's because there's no museum to read. I realise I've lost my touch. I've become reliant on physical signs, multiple people. I no longer have the one-on-one abilities of the true therapist. I lack a secure attachment. I've become fearful-avoidant. I've developed secure base distortion. I've got disinhibited attachment disorder. Institutional syndrome. I can't rely on my primary object. When one object doesn't satisfy, I seek another, and another. I'll go off with anyone. Dr. Origen is still sitting across from me, half-smiling in that way he has, drinking his camomile tea (he brings the bags with him, asks for hot water, camps up the doddery old dear act like a champ). I'm suddenly worried for him, worried that it's not camomile, that it's birdsfoot trefoil, the plant Affey's mother studied obsessively, and which probably gave her chronic cyanide poisoning; the cause of the premature dementia that landed her on a mental ward in Edinburgh for half her life. My heart is racing. I smile, and lift my coffee.

The above (and you'll have to trust me on this) is success, as I measure it. What the post-Kleinians might call “transference/countertransference”. An up-welling of emotion and association within me, which manifests and mirrors a similar up-welling in... well, usually I call it the institution. Suddenly, a little boy, a toddler, maybe three or four, runs over to our table and bashes a plastic boat onto it a couple of times, setting the crockery and silverware clashing together. “Jude!” It's the mother, across the room, wrestling with one of those huge buggies which look like they might have four wheel drive. “Jude! Stop it, please darling. Leave those nice people alone, they're trying to have their tea. We're not sitting there today, Jude. Come with Mummy and we'll sit by the window. Look at the cars!” Something in this barrage of maternal lacemaking seems to connect, and – handing the boat to me gravely – Jude waddles across the room at speed.

The boat is slightly sticky. (Sugar on the kitchenette worktop.) It's a green plastic rowing boat, two yellow benches. Vintage Fisher Price, with two holes for a figure in each bench, and one in the prow. Glued to the bottom of the boat between the benches is a worn illustration of a collection of items on five wooden planks: a fishing rod, which at first I mistake for a fencing foil; a red lobster in a white bowl of blue water, looking like a hole in the bottom of the boat; a green box for lunch or fishing tackle; a yellow disc, possibly a compass. Certainly not a medallion. I get up, displaying the artefact to Origen in both hands like a shopping television host. I walk over to Jude and Mummy. “Oh thanks, sorry. We always sit over there, usually. He's not usually like that. I'm amazed he gave that to you! It was his Dad's when he was little, wasn't it? Takes it everywhere. It's sort of his teddy, isn't it Jude? Isn't it, you funny little man?” I smile indulgently down at Jude, both sticky palms glued firmly to the widow, fingers splayed, sturdy little legs planted wide in the manner of toddlers and old sailors everywhere, like my father, watching the traffic. Five, I think, walking back to the table. Five seats, five planks. Four characters plus me. Where would we sit? Affey would be slotted into the prow, like a harpooneer. Like Ahab, with his ivory peg leg plugged into the hole. Dr. Origen and O'Sullivan would be on the for'ard bench, with me and Le Couteur on the aft one. I'd be on the starboard side, to the left as you look back from the prow.

This promotional poster design for John Affey’s unrealised museum project was made using Google’s Deep Dream algorithm, models of Deception Island, and an archival image and the Capacity Plan of the Southern Venturer.

MEANWHILE IN THE ANTARCTIC (2014) was a concept design for displaying networks of information, based on traditional museum timelines and wall diagrams, and inspired by the artworks of Mark Lombardi. It was made for the JAM by research artist Clair Le Couteur using chalk pens, and charts John Affey’s belief in the Whale Rider culture and its connection to Deception Island.

The protective PVC cover is similar to spray hoods used on boats and open top cars. During transit, the cover could be removed, folded and kept within the case along with the object on display. Inside the case, by the handle, Affey has included a fluorescent tube to light the exhibit. This method of lighting would require batteries and inductive ballast, adding significantly to the weight of the design.

We have included the label text from the original sketch, which suggests Affey intended the case to show small objects from his ‘Whale Rider’ collection. Throughout his life, Affey collected ethnographic artefacts that he believed provided proof of an undiscovered civilisation living around the coast of Antarctica, which he called the Whale Rider People or Ascensorescetis. The label reads:

This artefact, priceless beyond measure, shows both the astonishing feats of creativity of which the Whale Rider people were capable, and the incontrovertible facticity of their existence.

Given this hard evidence, who can doubt the sightings by many brave seamen, or question the testimony of the Newman M.S., unique in all the annals of History?