‘Anything off the bottom shelf’: Ephemeral fairgrounds and material swag

Abstract

Travelling fairgrounds embody the ephemeral. They arrive from elsewhere to occupy an everyday space, momentarily wrenching it from regular purpose and bringing in a bombardment of shimmering surfaces, magical spaces, affects, illusions, fleeting peaks of sensory excess. Utilizing historical resources, interviews with showpeople and gathered testimony, this article examines the material encounter of the British fairground through the prize, what might be considered as a making material of the ephemeral. The prize provides material reminders of the fairground when it has departed, to counterintuitively persist through time as meaningful keepsakes and souvenirs. The fairground prize is tracked as both object and concept, utilizing detailed ‘back-stage’ and ‘front-stage’ flows, Dant’s work around ‘objects in time’, spatial practices and complex crossovers to other cultural trends. Taking his research to the contemporary period, the author proposes a significant shift in the fairground prize that has a wider impact on the aesthetic engagement with the fair.