Reuben Spencer

It’s Like Trying To Make Sense of Some Kind of Spectacle

2025
Mixed mediaI’m a historian. Rather, I would like to see myself as a historian. I spend hours a week in the library, staring at microfilms or whatever resource I can find on my historical “niche”, and I'll dig, and dig, and dig. Therefore, the moment I knew we were doing this project, I knew my subject – One of “my white guys”, as I call him around friends. Aaron Burr.Burr is an interesting “character” to me. He's been called a lot of things throughout history; He's an enigma, he's a traitor, he's a hero, he's a specimen, and of course he's also portrayed by Leslie Odom Jr. in the hit Broadway show Hamilton. The way people have interacted with him, and respectively his archives, is something that fascinates me. At first, I wanted to touch on that and the often horrible mischaracterization his name endures. He was certainly no angel, but also certainly no “traitorous”, “heartless” monster either. The project was becoming morbid as I delved into this theme of character assassination, and it felt deeply uncomfortable but I couldn't understand why. Then I realized: that's not the relationship I have with his archive. Others may approach his history with extreme disdain or reverence, but I'm just looking to make sense of it.It doesn't feel real, when I try to research him. This guy feels like he came out of a play or movie, – hence the holding device, a painted wooden pulley stand, resembling a vintage theatre curtain pulley stand. Is this guy even real? I mean, I hope so, I'm researching him.The ceramic microfilm symbolizes a storage piece for an archive both literally and metaphorically. Microfilms are fragile and have to be handled with care, as do ceramics, as do original documents. The lightly annotated papers, which are various resources I have saved in my Google drive, are damaged and a mess, but still present. His history may be old and disorganized, but there are still pieces to find. Microfilms are meant to store archives in some organized fashion, but I'll find him in archives I don't expect him to be in. So, there are a couple papers attached to the microfilm, but the rest are in a messy state. The light annotations relate to my personal relation with not just the archive, but each individual piece of it. There are also a couple papers on the pulley stand. Each paper has such a story, but the front one on the pulley is from an 1807 newspaper clipping that I found comically theatrical, where an angry mob in Maryland burnt effigies of Burr and three of his allies.Is this guy even real? At this point, I don't know. He's the only founder I've researched where a historian can write for three hundred pages just to end their book with “Perhaps” and a Washington Irving quote calling the man a mystery.