Something I don’t think about that often is the fact that, somewhere, people may have parts of my past stored away that I know nothing about. I don’t mean that obliquely or poetically; I’m thinking about the fact that for my BA degree show, and then a year and a half later, my MA degree show, I sold work that I’d created, and that work probably still exists out there, somewhere, a quarter century later.
Perhaps it doesn’t; there’s every single possibility that what I sold — almost all of which was short runs of things I’d written, printed and collected into some kind of publication as basic and botched as they may have been — ended up in trash piles or recycling across the years, given that we are talking almost three decades later by this point. (Realizing that my bachelors’ degree show will have been 30 years ago this summer is a trip, I’ll be honest.) But… what if it didn’t?
It’s not as if I really remember who I sold things to, anymore. I know that friends bought a lot at my BA show in part because I had purposefully priced everything ridiculously low for that purpose. I dread to think how much money I lost with that show, but I also know that I miss that kind of thing and often wish I could do it over again and make the same so-called mistakes. But what about anyone and everyone else who bought something? What did they do with it? Where did it end up, afterwards?
Or, in the case of the more expensive MA show, I printed and bound 5 hardcover books and sold… three? I think three. One I ended up accidentally giving to a friend at the time who I lost touch with a couple years later. Whatever happened to those books? Are they still out there even now? Do people look at them and wonder what the hell ever happened to that guy? (I do, every now and again.)
It’s something that I didn’t really think about at the time — for obvious reasons, not least of which being, I was in my early 20s and who thinks about posterity then? — but each of these things was something that I made and put out into the world, and for all I know they’re still out there, somewhere. Little pieces of my history that will exist independently of me for as long as they’re able to.