Boxed Up: Time Capsules, Archives, and Magazines

A recent story from Tulsa, Oklahoma, reported on a "ruined" time capsule built in 1957. The capsule was opened this year during Oklahoma's Centennial celebrations, but it had leaked and the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere inside had been pickled for fifty years in four feet of standing water. While the Tulsa capsule was undone by the ravages of time--precisely what it was constructed to keep out--there is one interesting footnote to this spectacular failure. Interred in the capsule were the results of a competition to see who could get the closest to guessing the town's new population when the capsule was to be opened in 2007. No winner has yet been announced but they ("or their descendents") win the car and a savings account worth $1,000, which all goes to show that the past is always present and it can come back anytime to bite you. From time capsules to archives is an easy transition--both contain a body of records/documents "pertaining to an organization or institution." (1) One important difference between the time capsule and the archive is that the time capsule attempts to, "store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time." (2) Archives are less picky, and it is well understood that their real significance might not be fully appreciated until some time in the future. Archive appears to be a flexible term, one that can be used to describe the physical place or locale of the collected material, as well as a conceptual frame that sifts artifacts and intellectual information. Indeed, the archive, time capsule, and magazine are not that different. All sift and sort information, arrange it into a predetermined format, and all have a complicated relationship to the present. The magazine records the now for immediate consumption, the time capsule preserves the now of then for the then of now, and the archive preserves everything for later. All are united in their capacity to store things, to bring stuff together from different pasts and for different futures, and all converge at the collection point of the archive. Patricia Kelly, a contemporary art historian at DePaul University in Chicago, in an abstract for a chapter in a book about artists' periodicals, writes about Phyllis Johnson's Aspen magazine (which published ten issues between 1965 and 1971) and how each issue of the periodical with its mixed media contributions gathered inside a box served as "as a veritable time capsule, providing insight into a fraught historical period...." (3) Indeed, there are two issues of Aspen that do have unique combinations of objects that have come to be viewed as representative of specific cultural and historical moments: the "Pop Art Issue," designed by Andy Warhol and David Dalton (#3, 1966), and "The Minimal Issue," edited by Brian O'Doherty (#5/6, 1967). Here we have a magazine that illustrates one aspect of its etymological definition as a "storehouse" (4) while simultaneously functioning as a unique time capsule. Additionally, from the historian's point of view, the opening of the time capsule offers a tantalizingly ephemeral whiff of the past. Warhol, as it would later turn out, had a much deeper and long-lasting association with archives. In the middle 1970s, ten years after Aspen's "Pop Art Issue," he began to keep a cardboard box next to his desk into which he would regularly sweep a Wunderkammer of printed matter. At the time of his death in 1987, six hundred and twelve of these dated and sealed boxes were discovered in storage. Warhol was evidently ambivalent about these "time capsules," as he called them, saying, "I want to throw things right out the window as they're handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so that they can be used again." (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a 1978 diary entry, Warhol considered another strategy: "I really ought to auction off my time capsule boxes . …