What exactly is ephemera?

‘The collecting of ephemera is the use of apparent garbage to be educational. It is the other side of history from what sits on the library shelves’Footnote ¹

Any discussion on ephemera has to tackle the on-going question of what exactly is meant by ephemera. And there is a wide variety of material gathered under the term ephemera in art libraries. It can include, and this is not an exhaustive list, short exhibition catalogues, private view cards, press releases, artists' multiples, personal correspondence and press cuttings, and increasingly digital material. Some collections, such as the Tate Library, may include artists' multiples in their ephemera collection. Others, like Chelsea College of Arts Library, have separated these from theirs. This makes it hard to gauge what you might expect to find in one of these collections.

Fig. 2.

Ephemera, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Library.

Pollard writes of

‘Mass art items are very often, even by the most enthusiastic of qualitative standards, trite, shallow, unimaginative and even dangerous either drugging, manipulating, satisfying or stimulating the aesthetic needs of a large proportion of the population of both the industrial and agrarian cultures – the angle of vision is your choice.’

This definition of ephemera appears to be somewhat disparaging. While he uses terms such as mass art items, mass-produced, semi-functional, cheap to produce, derivative, he gives few examples to really give you sense of what he is referring too. However, he does emphasise the idea that this ephemera should ‘function in the future as archival data’.

Fig. 3.

Ephemera, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Library.

When I put the question of ‘what does ephemera encompass in your institution?’ to Kerry Watson, she responded

‘Ephemera for us, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, encompasses any item relating to an artist or organisation of curatorial interest, which is too slight to justify being catalogued as a book/pamphlet. This includes: private view cards and exhibition notices; news cuttings; articles and excerpts from larger publications; gallery guides and handouts; curriculum vitaes and other promotional material (including images of works) received direct from artists/galleries. I think Pollard's definition doesn't really cover this kind of material – it seems as though he's referring more to specifically mass-produced material which he sees in a rather negative light, ‘low art’ maybe? I think not only have attitudes changed, but the culture of collecting ephemera recognises that the influences brought to bear on the production of an item of ephemera (a private view card, for example) can be many and varied, from tight control by the artist, to this being handed over to a designer. The definition is far too narrow, particularly in the context of the 21^st century commercial gallery's output, where the status of the artist is (or can be) conferred by relative quality of both publications and ephemera.’

It is evident that today, librarians working with their institution's ephemera collections are clear on the content of their collections. Pollard sticks to a wider concept, around ideas of mass-produced and or as Watson says ‘low-art’. In considering how Arty Choke: acquisition and ephemera can illuminate areas of current developments, I think it helps to show how librarians are developing a clearer terminology to describe the material they are working with. Pollard's lack of a clear definition of ephemera in the art library could also be interpreted as being the result of picking up on the issue relatively early in the development of art ephemera collections and their relevance.

Developing a terminology, or vocabulary to describe different categories of ephemera found in art libraries is helpful as it defines what to expect from a collection. It also develops a common language that can be used to describe and promote a library's holdings. It is therefore useful to identify and define different categories of ephemera found in art libraries and describe them through this common language.

Acquisition, storage and access

‘The proliferation of loose-leaf and ready-bound binders with clear plastic pages has virtually eliminated the problems of packaging and issuing small or loose items, and problems of acquisition are very few compared to the disadvantage of the inevitable time lag before a first study is produced with all its likely failings.’ This aspect of Pollard's article underlines the massive changes that have taken place in a relatively short space of time into how libraries and archives have to handle ephemera. These changes encompass changing material formats, the sheer volume of material, and how institutions choose to share their collections e.g. digitization projects, reference only files, etc. I asked Kerry Watson what was her response to Pollard's 1970s view on ‘acquisition and accommodation’?

‘This strikes me as a bit quaint. The attitude to storing ephemera at SNGMA has shifted over the years. When I started here 8 years ago, material was stored according to format (all private view cards kept together, all news cuttings kept together, etc). My approach has been to integrate material in artist files, which better suits the way the curators browse and brings everything on a single artist together in one (or more) box file. It allows us to give visitors access to this too, without having to gather everything together from disparate parts of the library. My concern is that material is physically located together, not what kind of binder/file I'm using! Plastic pockets are the bane of my life. We use archival envelopes for anything that needs contained.’

SNGMA's approach to artist files, gathering together all the material available in a single artist in one accessible place is a standard one replicated at many art institutions and recognisable to many users.

While ephemera can be ascribed many potential values, these are all mediated by the access provided to the collection. This is what makes it ‘one of the most underutilized resources in an art library.’Footnote ² Access is tied in with the issue of tackling the visibility of ephemera. This is a visibility within a library's collection, and within the wider consciousness of the research and curatorial community. Ephemera collections do have an intrinsic value, but in today's library the predominant view is that they must justify their place within the broader scope of the collections. Their value as objects, precious for their own sake, is not enough. This material must be accessible and contributing to the overall scope of a library's collection and its objective.

Pollard's focus on how you hold material – initially dismissing acquisitions with the statement ‘problems of acquisition are very few compared to the disadvantage of the inevitable time lag before a first study is produced with all its likely failings' – underlines a sea change in the issues affecting institutions who collect ephemera. He does acknowledges it to some extent later on in the article but the idea now that a few loose leaf binders would be enough to collate your ephemera collections is – as Kerry Watson says, ‘quaint’. I would also be interested to know whether the ‘inevitable time lag before a first study is produced’ is still a relevant issue. The publishing world works at a much faster pace now, so that the time lag that ephemera could cover seems, in my opinion, to be less relevant today.

Historical and cultural purpose and importance

The publication of the original article in 1977 is, I think, important. The late twentieth century is emerging as a key date in art ephemera history. ‘The last decades of the twentieth century provide some of the most interesting [private view cards], both visually and art historically, as documentary relics of the period.’Footnote ³ As history provides distance from this period, the value of the material that has been collected is being appreciated as a rich and valuable resource, as an exhibition such as the 2001 MoMA, New York, show Extra Art: A survey of artists' ephemera 1960–1999 illustrates.

The 1960s and seventies were decades that marked a shift in art practices and thought. This new emphasis coincided with a move away from the traditional established gallery world and the growth of underground or alternative art culture. It also coincided with a definite swing away from the old staples of painting and sculpture. Artists' work began to include performance, film, video and sound, and they no longer confined themselves to one medium of expression. Time became an important element and whilst some works would last for days or more, other events passed in minutes, even seconds. Into this mêlée of artistic flux and creation what is now defined as art ephemera had an important role in sharing information, advertising and promoting events and happenings, in some cases as the only record of such events, or as artworks in themselves.

This is something Pollard begins to explore in Arty choke: acquisition and ephemera, he writes:

‘They [ephemera] are a current manifestation of man's long production of visually potent artifacts, often they have considerable aesthetic appeal. They can represent the corpus of a particular artist, designer or group or they are representative of a particular social, economic, or artistic efflorescence giving clear indications of the cultural life of a society. They provide aside from evidence as to the use of new technologies and techniques, wider overall clues to the way in which “we piece together the dots and lines- the codes- of our culture's graphic media. We learn to interpret the stylistic conventions of each new visual mode of communication” and to the iconological parameters of a society- its aspirations and neuroses. They exist – they are a part of our art and our consciousness and we must keep and examine them for exactly the same reason for which we have preserved material in the past.’

An awareness of the potential historical importance (and historical loss) runs through Pollard's article. Within this dramatic language I think he begins to refine his concept of ephemera in the art library to something closer to what it could term as art ephemera. ‘The material which has been created and conceived by artists or the gallery representing them to publicise an exhibition or event.’Footnote ⁴ And for Kerry Watson at SNGMA, when I asked ‘Who are the users you are collecting for? Pollard argues for a collecting policy with an eye to the future. Is this true of your institution?’ she responded:

‘Yes. This is much more on the mark. We're collecting these days specifically on artists and organisations of interest to us as an institution – they are represented in the permanent collection, or they are Scottish artists (this relates to wider collecting policy for the SNGMA). In the context of Scottish art, we're trying to capture information particularly on artists at an early stage in their careers, who may not have been the subject of a major publication yet. For well-known artists, the ephemera produced over periods of years traces their careers and can sometimes fill in gaps not covered in books and exhibition catalogues. It gives a fuller picture.’ What Watson's response underlines too is the specific and specialist nature of institutions' ephemera collections. Naturally the SNGMA's collection focuses on Scottish artists, trying to collect work from young artists early in their careers, and continue to build files on more established figures.

This all remains true for the contemporary art world. The diversity of practice continues; an artwork is as likely to be a sound piece or one off performance as a painting or sculpture. The art scene of galleries and spaces changes constantly. Art ephemera is an important record of these places and events. And an increasing body of literature affirms the value of contemporary art ephemera in recording these events that play an important part in contemporary art practices. Rickards' ‘minor transient documents of everyday life’ are now potentially valuable art historical documents. This seems to be the great potential of art ephemera collection. It can record and document artists early in their careers. It can also provide a record of artists, groups, work or events that contemporary onlookers did not recognise the importance of. Again, as with so much connected with this resource, it is an area that needs more research and development, but the potential for ephemera to give a voice to the artistic margins is worth exploring further.

However, the great potential of ephemera is all dictated by the collection development policy and an institutions ability to collect. This is the next topic which Pollard expounds on, he states:

‘Plainly it is impossible to keep everything. The economic situation would not allow it and the possible conservation problems are immense… Selection, especially if it is rooted in a rigid or outmoded model of culture, will tend to impose misleading patterns on a collection rather that leaving these to be derived but scholars whose opinions and archival needs are likely to change as new angles/methods of examination come into being. One of the interesting suggestions arising from the Annan Report was that all the broadcast output from one day each week or month should be preserved, thus retaining not only those items of currently approved cultural value but also a broad spectrum of other material which would allow more accurate appraisal.’

Pollard writes about ‘selection’ and suggests sampling mass-produced ephemera is a better way to preserve for posterity a more truthful insight into contemporary culture. I wondered what Watson thought, working as she is with a research collection based in SNGMA. She responded:

‘It depends what your ambitions are as an institution. It might be appropriate for the British Library to sample in this way, but it's certainly not useful in a gallery context. It could be that this is the kind of thing that should be considered in an archival context, rather than applying sampling to an ephemera collection attached to a reference library that has to meet the needs of certain user groups. Our main ambition is to support research into our collections.’

I was also interested to understand how important the issue of selection versus sample that Pollard raises is for contemporary ephemera collections. Watson replied:

‘For us, the only way to go is selection, but that's because we're working to support research around our permanent collections and temporary exhibitions (usually an artist we exhibit will be someone whose work we are interested in acquiring, but not always). A sample simply wouldn't provide the kind of ephemera collection that performs this function. It might be something we would consider alongside, but at the moment we struggle to maintain priorities – lack of resource and lack of space mean that I have refined what we collect to the minimum.’

Ephemera's role in building unique collections

‘I am both irritated and alarmed by the bland similarity of most libraries and their stock…’Footnote ⁵ This leads into another theme that comes out of Pollard's article, uniqueness. He argues strongly that ephemera can help differentiate library collections and contribute to their uniqueness:

‘Art libraries, guided in part by unquestioned assumptions and market forces, tend to buy the same books while neglecting ‘ephemeral’ primary material which can often be acquired cheaply, which will be vital data for future historians, and which is likely to inspire artists then as it does now. Collections of ephemera invariably attract donations, research, and recognition. Reliance on books to document this material means accepting a selective and perhaps misleading view, at second hand, after a lapse of time. Reassessment of the significance of the image and artefacts thrown up by our culture by means of printing and other mass-production techniques, might lead to the cooperative, rationalised acquisition, by art libraries, of both books and ephemera, and to the exploitation of the latter by inter-library lending of the original material or of slides.’

I wondered if this is still the case in the 21^st century with so much material being mass-produced. I asked Kerry Watson, can ephemera still help differentiate library collections and contribute to their uniqueness?

‘Yes, I think so. We have the luxury of being able to focus on what is really quite a small area of human knowledge (albeit one that touches all sorts of other subject areas). As the librarian, I try to ensure that our holdings reflect the strengths of the collections, and that they are as comprehensive as possible. Our artist files constitute a unique resource in this context.’

So it seems that, even with the proliferation of mass produced ephemera, a focused collection, utilising selection can pull together unique pools of information for its users. And in doing so ensure contribute to halting the ‘bland similarity of most libraries and their stock…’

Ignore ephemera at your peril?

Pollard's article is an early example of an art librarian arguing for the importance of this type of art ephemera in a library's collection. And he argues hard, attempting to show whilst it might largely consist of what traditional art history would consider the ‘low arts’ it was still potentially a key resource for artists and historians researching ‘high art’ or to use Pollard's terminology the ‘beaux arts’. I get the sense that he feels that ephemera is not only being neglected but its value in and to an art library's collection was not recognised.

‘It should be a basic fact of art information existence that we collect key and representative items from any thriving area of artefact production within our base culture that had any art/design context so as to enable future art historians to reach for an accurate appreciation and to allow practising artists and designers to comprehend and use the complexity of recent traditions.’

I was interested to know if Watson thought that art libraries are still guilty of neglecting ephemeral primary material?

‘Possibly, but I'm sure this is largely due to budget cuts and lack of resource. You need staff time to be able to maintain ephemera collections and make them usable and accessible. I can only speak from my own experience – I would say that the will is there, there is an awareness of the importance of ephemera, but that we're restricted in what we can do because of staffing levels.’

So it would seem that whilst the potential value of ephemera is recognised, benign neglect is still an issue. Watson identifies staff time as the major stumbling block. And this chimes with my own research in the area. It is hard to justify spending staff time on these collections as they are a free resource and will always take second place to paid for resources that need to be processed quickly. Pressure on space for library collections has also necessitated an examination of these collections that for years have been growing but with inadequate access. However, with limited resources and competing staffing pressures, the amount of work needed to make these collections accessible- even to a very basic level- is seen as being beyond most libraries' day-to-day priorities. As a result the collection is given a low priority in staff time. This results in a catch-twenty-two situation where nothing happens to the collection, so it remains as inaccessible and unfocused as before. Yet to justify keeping it, libraries must start to process and promote the material in some way, which requires dedicated staff time.

A digital future

In our discussion Watson comments that ‘One topic that hasn't been raised is born digital ephemera [ephemera that only exist in a digital form e.g. websites, emails and other digital formats] and what we do with that, I suspect we're still floundering on this.’ The simple reason for this is that when Arty Choke: acquisition and ephemera was published in 1977, the digital age we live in now was, if even imaginable, the stuff of science fiction. The first popular home computer (the Sinclair ZX80) was brought out in the UK in 1980s. The widespread use of the internet and World Wide Web can be seen to gather speed from the early 1990s. So in looking for Pollard's original article to provide some practical and theoretical scope for discussion it is uncharted territory. I did put the question to Kerry Watson about what she thought ephemera collecting would look like in another forty years. To which she responded:

‘Digital? I imagine the days of us keeping the physical artifacts are numbered – plus more and more mailings come as digital files/emails, and we need to find ways of dealing with both.’

And I would agree that a digital future opens up a whole new array of challenges for libraries hoping to collect, maintain and make accessible ephemera collections. Equally however, with the possibility of digitization projects it is one that also opens up solutions to some of the issues that Pollard's article highlights. It is certainly an area that is ripe for further research and discussion, which leads me to wonder: can contemporary art libraries even hope to capture a snapshot of contemporary ephemera with mass media overload that the 1970s art librarian could not even imagine? Watson's thinks:

‘If we all try to collect everything, then absolutely not. But if we play to our strengths (and maybe there is scope for co-ordination across institutions) then it's a more manageable task. I certainly don't feel like we can keep up with the constant stream of material that lands on my desk, and it's all unsolicited!’

‘Libraries have always been the repositories of what society considers to be of cultural significance, they cannot escape this role.’Footnote ⁶ Equally, I would argue, libraries are as often the repositories of ‘stuff’, for want of a better word, that no one else knows what to do with. Corresponding with Kerry Watson at the SNGMA, and in my previous research on art ephemera collections, it seems the current approach to acquisitions is often serendipitous, reflective of a particular institution, and even particular personalities. None of the institutions I have looked at spent money on the acquisitions of art ephemera, and rarely did they really attempt to proactively acquire specific material. Watson refers to a ‘constant stream of material that lands on my desk’ that is ‘all unsolicited!’. Inevitably this will lead to overlaps and gaps in collections of art ephemera. Watson suggest that maybe there is scope for co-ordination between institutions. I would agree that greater collaboration between collecting institutions could explore the concept of sample versus selection raised in Arty choke in further detail, and work out how best to tackle issues of gaps and overlaps. Maybe this special edition of Art Libraries Journal focused on art ephemera could kick start the process…

With thanks to Kerry Watson for her time and help.