The Online Museum Pocket Project
Collecting Features: Time Capsule 21 | Pittsburgh Collects | Pocket Project

Andy Warhol turned his artfulness to the ordinary and made it beautiful, playful, and insistent on our attention. In conjunction with an exhibition of Warhol's Time Capsules visitors to the Museum were invited to mirror this process and  to engage in their own artistic transformation of everyday objects by creating a photocopied image of the contents of their pockets or purses for our ongoing display.

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Points of View:

Talisman Airlines

When I think about poetry, I often think of pockets. Places where we keep things we need—pockets hide things, yet they also keep them close to us. Poems tend to expose the hidden things we carry with us—emotional things. And poets often find the emotional in the mundane. like the contents of pockets, or purses. Pockets also hide the talismans we keep with us out of superstition, or to provide us comfort. Often, we have difficulty explaining to others why certain things carry such emotional weight, why when we empty the pockets of one pair of pants, those same contents end up in the next pair we wear. Separated from their owners, these things carry their own mystery. They illustrate choices made. The small choices that add up, that create a secret snapshot of a life. Who knows what power or meaning these things hold for these individuals? All we know is that one day, they were in a pocket or purse, and here they are, spilled out from their dark homes especially for us. Can they be arranged into something meaningful like words of magnetic poetry? What interests me beyond the formal i.d. cards are the more subtle forms of identification—the choice of stamps, pens, drugs, cigarettes, mints, the receipts, ticket stubs, sunglasses, the snatches of personal notes. What’s more revealing, a condom or a Subway coupon? It’s a medley of the unrehearsed, the spontaneous revealed. One pocket includes a boarding pass from Tajikistan Airlines. I want to read that as Talisman Airlines. These photocopies take me on a magical flight.

Jim Daniels

Ritual Practice: Great China Buffet

In all likelihood, it doesn't matter much which picture you choose. You get pulled into the same two questions: Who is this? What is the story?

If the first question looks for clues—male or female? young or old? work? geography? income?—the second question tries to link up the objects, as if we were a private detective hired in the opening chapter. It is too much effort to resist the urge.

Two university students, Dustin and Matthew, maybe lovers, maybe not, visit the Warhol during Christmas break. One is from Boston, the other—the one with the car, the one who drove to the Warhol today—is from Allison Park, where his mother lives. She wants to make sure he comes back for a visit, at least for a meal where they ate when he was in high school and living at home. He'll come eventually—the Great China certificate is a good enough reason to go back in a few weeks, but that's his business.

For us, I must insist, the condom will remain a mystery: who knows why individual men carry individual condoms? Instead, the only object of real curiosity on the photocopy surface is the handwritten note—as painful as it is formulaic—that Dustin, or Matthew, or some random stranger who has blundered into this paragraph wrote or sent—about a program, a "personal goal," an effort to make sense of one's emotions, to redo the links between people. The two cell phones, two sets of keys, two IDs, two kinds of tobacco scattered across the photocopy surface are like the scene of a car crash that happened just now and so just in case, for their sake and ours, we will practice here making sense of what we are seeing.

Condee