Sunday, she listened to the church choir hold their long whole notes. Everything had a knack for hanging on. Even the old refrigerator by the kitchen table, though it shook with noise like a train, wasn’t going anywhere.
-Elaine Terranova, "The Choice"
In the 1990s, it became popular to construct poetic snippets on refrigerators using magnetic words. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Haas described the phenomenon as, "one-man Scrabble and the prize is insight." In response to the popular movement, the Magnetic Poetry Company (magneticpoetry.com) released "an anthology of magnetic poems from the refrigerator doors of America," which came with a kit of magnetic words. A reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly remarked, "Not everyone can be a poet, but let's give out the magnetic words and cover the hard steely surfaces of the world with messages, charms, and barbaric yawps."
The Other White Cube Project is an extension of the magnetic poetry movement. In fact, I developed the project in dialogue with a concept called "poetic substance." Theorized by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, "poetic substance" concerns the way the imagination augments reality, creating multiple layers of meaning - poets are pros at this. In his seminal book the Poetics of Space (1958), Bachelard wrote, "To give an unreality [or poetic substance] to an image attached to a strong reality is in the spirit of poetry." Turning the refrigerator into a museum or a journal is in the spirit of poetry, and, as Bachelard explained, poetic ideas "will help us to discover within us such joy in looking that sometimes, even in the presence of perfectly familiar objects, we experience an extension of our intimate space." We begin to see ourselves in the attributes of artifacts. We begin to see ourselves in the reflective surface of the refrigerator.
Not everyone can be a museum curator, but let's give out the knowledge and cover the hard white surfaces of the world with photos, artworks, and visual ephemera.