Much ado about cuttings

.cent, Issue 9

I have a habit of cutting clippings from newspapers and have done for almost ten years. I choose my newspaper not on the content or the tone but by the amount of goodness I can get out of it. The weekend papers are always the best I think, especially the Sunday Observer for information on characters from the past – if I find an article on Ernest Hemmingway or the French writer Colette I know that is a great newspaper day. I am always drawn to the back of newspapers, to the obituary page and not in a morbid way at all. The way they manage to tell us about 80 years of a creative’s life, all summed up in one column is amazing. The obituaries which attract me the most are ones that chart war times, France in the 1950s or the beat poetry movement – historical situations or events where, as a reader, I can create an image of the world at that time and try to understand what it was like to live within it.

The oldest newspaper clipping I have is from sixty years ago. It describes the wedding day of Virtue Coombes and Jim Grant, who were to become my grandparents. It is not known who cut the clipping from the paper, or indeed which local Devon paper it was saved from, all I know is that it has survived all these years and has now worked its way down the generations to me. The clipping of my grandparents’ wedding may have been standard for that time, however compared to our modern day writing the descriptions of the outfits and use of language, even the title of ‘Wedding Nearly Postponed’ seems quaint and instantly holds it out as a second world war era. The in-depth description of the bride and bridesmaids’ outfits and even the grooms’ (then called bridesgroom), gifts meant that the residents of the whole town, and surrounding villages, would know about every detail of their wedding day. The fact that it was cut out and saved means that, as their grandchild now I can also have an insight into that one day from more than sixty years ago.

I remember my grandma telling me that when she was a child the butcher’s shop walls were covered in newspaper clippings telling of local farmers’ news, the rise and fall of the meat business, recipe suggestions and the occasional framed clipping about the butchers in question.

The artist On Kawara, like many other artists, has used the newspaper as a tool for his work. On Kawara is a philosophical artist, Japanese born and New York based, whose work addresses the passage of time through participating in the activity of collecting and cutting up newspapers. For his work ‘Date Painting’ one tiny canvas was made, meticulously painted black and inscribed with that day’s date in white. Starting in the morning and finishing before midnight, Kawara created this canvas, which was then filed away with a chosen newspaper clipping from the same day. These clippings become like a diary for him, even though the subject matter is about someone completely unrelated and previously unknown. These works act for Kawara like the process of cutting and keeping newspaper clippings act for me – as a confirmation of that one moment.