Cataloging Works
Artworks in Relation to Industrial Capitalism
This project contemplates a selection of American artworks fabricated with (now mostly obsolete) American industrial materials and everyday products manufactured in the United States. Artworks span genres to represent a range of subversive creative practices from self-taught art, California Space and Light movement, Post pop art and Minimalism. Setting the Resource template with the "Manufacturer" element reveals two hundred years of industrial manufacturing and chemical engineering. Frameworks from art history, industrial history and material culture are applied to cataloging to help surface information about:
* the creative spiritual journey of a selection of 20th century American artists
* subversive or alternative interpretations of industrial capitalism these artworks represent
* the history of American manufacturing at the end of the 20th century and the end of capitalism
* implications for the value, meaning and conservation of these works in the absence of an American manufacturing base
Historical Precision & Contemporary Terminology
To highlight the subversive and transcendental aspect of the artists' creative process, it was important to structure data in a way that would highlight industrial or commercial materials used in the creation of these works. The VRA schema was used for the resource template used to catalog artworks within this Omeka S site. This allowed for the addition of a "Manufacturer" element to add pertinent information about corporate entities responsible for the manufacture of materials used and transformed by artists featured in the collection. Linking the manufacturer or coprorate entity name to authorities such as The Getty Union LIst of Artist Names (ULAN) and Library of Congress Name Authority FIle (LCNAF) surfaces unexpected historical information, and provides interoperability that helps to disseminate knowledge about the history of industrial capitalism and American art.
The Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) was used to enter Materials, Techniques and Subject elements. When possible, data entered for each artwork was cited from conservation reports and scholarly research about the artists and their creative process. When exact language could not be found in the Getty AAT, or else, did not conform to Cataloging Cultural Object (CCO) rules, fields were edited to display historically correct terminology while linking to naming authoritaties and thesauri.* Authorities used for the "Subject" element include The Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) , The Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and both Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) and Library of Congres Subject Headings (LCSH) to assign more precise values to surface historical names of people, movements, and corporate entities.
For "Place of Creation" and "Cultural Context" elements, hemispheric concepts of the Americas are now reflected in use of the terms "North America" and "The United States" in The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and the Library of Congress. After linking to the authorized term, "United States", I have entered "American" and "America" in free text displays to indicate self-identifying terms used by artists in mid twentieht century, some of whom were consciously engaged in actively defining American art.