No one likes to be put in a box, to have their identity narrowly defined by someone else.
But it can be liberating to put yourself in a box, if that means packing up an old identity and moving on, to a new place or a new life. What you leave behind can be telling.
A couple of weeks after Moving Day, we visited some relatives in their new home. They were still getting settled in.
But fortunately for me, they hadn’t yet scrubbed all the traces of the previous occupants. Some residual bric-a-brac remained, left in corners and alcoves – unwanted gadgets, faded juvenilia and a shabby box piled with rolls of abandoned wall art.
Sleuthing through what had been left behind, it was possible to piece together a narrative from a very specific place and period.
I was convinced that this was more than just apophenia on my part. These posters constituted an accidental time capsule: someone’s university bedroom, condensed into a box.
Nymphs and nukes
Backed up by supplementary documentation (shopping bags and pamphlets), those posters told the story of a student attending the University of Birmingham in the early 1980s.
If you arranged the papers in the right order, you could even discern the waypoints on their journey to the halls of residence.
Evidently this student stopped at a tobacconist and a shoe shop, then called at Athena to pick out posters celebrating their musical icons, as well as some elegant pre-Raphaelite art (‘Hylas and the Nymphs’). At the fresher’s fair they joined the conservative association and stocked up on hawkish anti-Soviet handbills and flyers.
At least back then (and maybe to this day) decisions about interior decor were critical at university. It was a rare opportunity to advertise your allegiances and reshape your identity in a new setting.
In that sense, the curatorial choices seemed to make sense. At least, initially.
The Athena posters included a much-reproduced Hydrogen Bomb photograph – an item that complemented the Russia-bashing material picked up on campus (‘WE MUST NOT DISARM ALONE’). Put that on your wall and you remind every visitor of the danger of underestimating Soviet aggression.
But as I unfurled the other posters, hints of incongruity emerged in this Cold War cache.
A theory of evolution
For instance: this budding conservatism didn’t quite scan with the avant-garde stylings of Kate Bush, David Bowie, and Altered Images, all of whom featured in the Athena posters.
Nor did it seem to jibe with a candid nude figure, titled ‘Black is Beautiful’ – a near-contemporary of the Tennis Girl (who was herself photographed at the University of Birmingham courts a few years earlier).
Perhaps weirdest of all, given all the socialism-skewering propaganda, was a poster of The Clash – at that point, among the louchest of left-wingers in the musical landscape.
People’s passions don’t necessarily have to demonstrate internal logic, especially at university
Was this evidence of cross-contamination? Had a roommate’s possessions been dumped into the same box at the end of term?
Or were these choices nothing more than evidence of diverse and compartmentalised interests?
After all, people’s passions don’t necessarily have to demonstrate internal logic or staying power. Especially at university, where the graduate can emerge a very different beast to the fresher.
Then again, maybe the box of posters wasn’t a time capsule. Maybe it was something like a core sample, allowing us to track the strata of evolving beliefs.
In that scenario, you could start your studies by pillorying every socialist from Karl Marx to Shirley Williams. Then, after three years of uni-bar philosophising and joint smoking, you might find yourself listening to Sandinista! and wearing a CND pin.
Running up that hill, again
Of course, this is a knife that cuts both ways. I could have the ideological journey back to front.
Maybe there was a hardening of attitudes, and our subject transitioned from liberal rebellion to hard-nosed realpolitik, in the manner of Dennis Miller.
But whether the subject emerged from university as an idealist or a pragmatist, one thing felt clear enough. Inspecting this forgotten gallery from the high vantage point of 2022, one could see exactly why it had been abandoned: it had calcified into irrelevance.
Four decades on, it’s just very hard to conceive of a world where geopolitics is dominated by Russian aggression and all the kids are listening to Kate Bush.
