Towards a New Understanding of Collecting
Text by Anthony Kiendl
Artwork by Edward Poitras, Shelf Life/Drawing Conclusions [detail], installation, 2004, collection of Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre.
As a curator in a public art gallery, my experiences of working with collections have often hinged upon under-spoken assumptions and values — some of which have been set out before by the profession in the structures, practices, and histories of the museum as a form, container, and system. In the same way that I became fascinated in school by the narratives and expeditions that typically illustrate algebra problems—often to the detriment of solving the problem at hand—I have been driven to distraction in matters of collections by the assumptions, and political economies of museum and gallery practice. Why do we collect?
If the art object has dematerialized in the twentieth century, through conceptual, performance, and new media art practices, can we continue to pretend that collections are permanent? And if we don’t, what are the costs, culturally speaking? Just as my student imagination would wander when pondering the mathematical life of Mr. Smith moving from point A to point B, the “problem” of collecting often lingers as I consider acquisition budgets, loan agreements, and grant applications. Why do we really collect? What is the end result given the context of changing technologies of collections?
Do collections and their associated concerns—ownership, value, power, seduction, and memory—to name but a few—not cry out to tell us something about the nature of the activity itself, and in turn tell us something about being human? To look at how and why we collect is to look at how and why we select, accumulate and order things more broadly speaking. This essay for me is a step towards a new understanding of collecting, especially in relation to the larger project of modernity. In examining how a culture collects, stores, and disseminates things, we are also examining — as French philosopher Michel Foucault did in The Order of Things — how a culture, “experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered.”[1]
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The Order of Things starts with a fit of laughter in response to a Jorge Luis Borges tale that breaks up, “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written ‘that animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.’”[2]
For Foucault, this passage shattered the way that we, as a culture, perceive the order of things. Given such an example of how things might reveal assumptions not only of value, but also of the matrices of language and thought that govern our understanding of the world around us, I want to think about the objects in our museums, our museums themselves, and the means by which they come together.
From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries European wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosity, displayed side-by-side artifacts, scientific instruments, wonders of nature, oddities, and generally, objects acquired on travels. Access to these collections was mostly restricted to acquaintances of the owner. Each object carried a tale with it of it’s acquisition and provenance. The ensuing Enlightenment project from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries eschewed the quirky, idiosyncratic, and irrational in favour of the rationalized, linear, and gridded structures that were also applied to the museum, and that led to modernism’s museums of specialization-- alternately museums of art, science, history, and so on.
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Gustave Flaubert humorously portrayed the lives of two fops, Bouvard and Pecuchet, in the novel of the same name. The protaganists were haplessly engaged in their own pursuit of Enlightenment thinking. Set around the year 1839, the book satirizes the Enlightenment’s reification of rationalism, as constructed largely by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
We discover that Bouvard and Pecuchet have been liberated by inheritance from economic need. They move to a house in the country, where they begin a series of explorations of human knowledge that proceed comically and tragically as they stumble from agriculture, to medicine, to chemistry, to anthropology, as consistent with the Enlightenment compartmentalization of disciplinary boundaries.
Bewildering their neighbours along the way, they eschew the practical experience of the local community in favour of “book learning.” This is a satire of the human obsession with wanting to conclude matters where truth is always shifting, contingent, or provisional.
Bouvard and Pecuchet experience museum culture as a series of lessons, a procedure by which they assemble an understanding of things:
They strolled along past curiosity shops. They visited the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, Saint-Denis, the Gobelins, the Invalides and all the public collections.
When asked for their passports they pretended to have lost them, making out they were foreigners, English.
In the galleries of the Natural History Museum they passed by the stuffed quadrupeds with astonishment, the butterflies with pleasure, the metals with indifference; fossils made them dreamy, seashells bored them. They examined the hothouses through the glass, and trembled at the thought that all the foliage was distilling poisons. What they found remarkable about the cedar was the fact that it had been brought back in someone’s hat.
At the Louvre they tried to be enthusiastic about Raphael. At the National Library they would have liked to know the exact number of volumes.
Once they went into a lecture on Arabic at the College de France, and the professor was astonished to see these two strangers trying to take notes. Thanks to Barberou they went behind the scenes in a small theatre. Dumouchel got them tickets for a session of the Academy. They found out about discoveries, read prospectuses and through such curiosity developed their intelligence.”[3]
Bouvard and Pecuchet is of relevance here because of its implicit critique of structures of knowledge and human consciousness. It also included is the posthumous second volume, Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas. He died before it was completed, but it exists as an addition to critical editions of the novel. The Dictionary shares some qualities of the Borges compendium that so titillated Foucault. It provides the following definitions:
Art: Leads to the workhouse. What use is it since machines can make things better and quicker?
Fossil: A proof of the Flood. A joke in good taste when alluding to members of the Academy.
Gordian Knot: Has something to do with antiquity. (The way the ancients tied their neckties).
Museums:
Versailles Recalls the great days of the nation’s history. A splendid idea of Louis Phillipe’s.
The Louvre To be avoided by young ladies.
Dupuytren Very instructive for young men.
Order: How many crimes are committed in thy name! (See Liberty.)[4]
Foucault describes how the Borges tale “shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and of our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.”[5]
Similarly, the Dictionary draws attention to a system of classifying and explicating the terms of knowledge. The Dictionary of Received Ideas serves as an index of categorizing and understanding. By separating, explicating and ordering, the Dictionary is a collection that functions on the page, as museums do in multiple dimensions.
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Walter Benjamin describes the act of collecting through the lens of his own collection of books. In Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting, Benjamin describes a process of collecting. To acquire outweighs, for the book collector, even the content of the books themselves. The order of the library for Benjamin becomes the preoccupation, along with the history of acquisition, of previous ownership, and ultimately the fate of the object, regardless of their author or meaning.
Benjamin wrote, “… what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories, which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”[6]
He continues, “Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership … also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value — that is, their usefulness, but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock, of his property.”[7]
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Honore Jaxon collected. The former secretary to Louis Riel sought to create a library for the Indigenous people of Saskatchewan. Benjamin’s “mild boredom of order” is replaced with the disorder of an eviction that sent the ninety-year-old Jaxon onto the streets of the Bowery. It was an unceremonious eviction that ultimately preceded Jaxon’s death two weeks later. And rather than crates of books, as in Benjamin’s more serene account, Jaxon’s dwelling itself was made of orange and ammunition crates. The accounts of Jaxon’s passionate hoarding of printed material point, just as Walter Benjamin did, to the intellectual, emotional, social, and at times ineffable dimensions of the act of collecting. Jaxon moved to New York in the 1920s, and loved the city’s museums and libraries. It was in New York that he began to collect the printed material that was to form a library for the Aboriginal people of Saskatchewan and western Canada.
Jaxon’s identity was multiple and mutable: a white political activist who renounced his race, took on a Métis identity, was also an anarchist, feminist, labour activist, and was denounced as insane. He travelled from Central Saskatchewan to New York City, over the course of nearly a century—an arc of modernity that saw the creation of Canada as a nation and the development of the atomic bomb.
Honore Jaxon was born William Henry Jackson in 1861, a white protestant from Ontario who had served Riel. Riel was a prophet, poet, leader of the mixed race Métis of western Canada, and was ultimately hanged for his pivotal role in the Northwest Rebellion, or, interfering with the colonization of Canada’s West. Jaxon moved with his family to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan in his early twenties after studying classics at the University of Toronto.
Despite his loss, Jaxon began purchasing more old books, storing them in his new apartment in New York. Newspaper accounts relate how he moved into a basement cranny on the lower East Side and earned his keep as a sometime janitor. His landlord/employer subsequently evicted him from that room because he was too old and frail to perform his tasks. Nevertheless, Jaxon appeared unconcerned about his loss of home and job. According to a newspaper account, His lament was that he now had no place for his ‘library,’ a massive, battered collection of cardboard cartons containing material on the obsession that made him notable on the Lower East Side. It contained information on the American Indian, Jaxon said, which could be found nowhere else in the world.
In the early 1940s, he lived for several years in a house that he built himself in the Bronx out of orange crates and other materials near the Bronx River. The New York Times described his library as, “a strange little house he built entirely of old ammunition boxes (which) attracted much attention until it was burned down.”[8] The city authorities argued that his home violated city health and building bylaws and levelled it, just before his eighty-first birthday. “Jaxon lost many of his papers in the process. He wrote, ‘All of my records having been scattered and destroyed. Still I can make a fine book of memories on fragments packed up.’”[9]
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Benjamin wrote, “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership — for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. In this circumscribed area, then, it may be surmised how the great physiognomists—and collectors are the physiognomists of the world of objects—turn into interpreters of fate.”[10]
While the array of things we gather certainly is telling, the performance of collecting is equally illuminating. The study of museums, galleries, corporations, and other containers forms an interpretive matrix of knowledge, history, and beliefs. The technologies of collecting, from cabinets of curiosity, to banks, museums, thrift stores, and today’s virtual collections, whether they are catalogues, databases, or those more readily discernible manifestations such as eBay (the online auction house), similarly constitute political, social, and psychological implications of collections.
Extreme collecting by the individual is often associated with insanity, yet in the context of the museum, library or archive, it is a sensible cultural act, even a duty. For the individual, a modest collection is a hobby. To exceed “normal” boundaries of amassing material borders on the pathological, except in the case of our cultural containers: the library, museum or archive.
As Hegel put it, “only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”[11] Just as the French Revolution opened up the system of restriction to archives and collections, Jaxon arguably saw the archives as the basis for the reconstruction of a culture, a revised order of things. Today, history has been deconstructed and reconstructed multiple times and is seen as available to cultures for the reassembling of order in the present. Jaxon, while an admirer of the collections available in New York, must have accepted their missing information (for example an aboriginal archive) as a challenge. His actions speak of comprehending that collections are never neutral. His assembling of a collection speaks of an agency that prefigures the possibilities available to contemporary museums and archives.
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Hegel likened history to, “an indolent movement and sequence of minds,” a procession he compared to a gallery of paintings.[12] For Hegel the traditional art museum illustrated a linear conception of history and time, a conception of history featuring transactions of characters that play their parts successively in an historical scene. Since 1800 paintings in Europe were hung on museum walls in chronological order, transforming the museum wall into a calendar that determined not only the placement of past works, but of all future acquisitions.
As theorist Friedrich Kittler points out, “So history as paintings came together with the chronologically arranged museum. Indeed, Denon’s Louvre and Schinkel’s Altes Museum aligned their paintings in chronological order, thereby converting Hegel’s peremptory utterance into exhibition practice and—wittingly or not—confirming his philosophical inference that our galleries in particular and artworks in general ‘are things of the past for us in terms of their supreme destiny.’”[13]
More recent museum practice, whether it is the Musee d’Orsay’s presentations arranged by medium, the Tate Modern’s juxtaposition of works in socially-engaged, non-chronological order, the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s dissemblance of historical and chronological certainty, the explosion of artist’s practices of “museumism,” (works that emulate, refer to or critique museums) or “collectioneering,” such as Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher’s Museopathy exhibition presented,[14] demonstrate an ongoing critique and awareness of the modern museum’s tendencies towards storage, chronology, and specialization.
These relatively recent exhibition practices related to collections demonstrate dynamic possibilities, and curator Bart De Baere writes how these practices of “networking” and synthesizing information are a potential for the relevance of collections that mean we need not simply return to such pre-museum forms as collections of curiosities or royal treasure houses, “The museum can – without harming its present image of itself – also see itself as an institution with a tendency towards archives and which sets itself the permanent task of increasing the potential of its material.”[15]
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Borges’s encyclopedia was an epiphany for Foucault clearly, and perhaps viscerally, disassembling the rational means by which western culture has become accustomed to defining terms and, by implication, structuring knowledge. Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet and Dictionary of Received Ideas are means by which we can experience the rationalism of museums in post-Enlightenment western culture. Walter Benjamin took reflecting on the ephemera and products of modern culture as the means by which to understand the significance of things. In his essay on book collecting, Benjamin elucidates the meaning of the act of collecting, looking to the process as much as the objects to make meaning. By looking at the passionate accumulation of material undertaken by Honore Jaxon, obsession and collecting may be understood as culturally significant gestures of memory, agency and assertion of value—of rewriting the present and history. In the context of the museum environment created by these and innumerable other scenes in our cultural memory, I propose these scenes as markers or indexes of collecting’s meaning.
Collections are a form of knowledge that are inseparable from philosophy.
The activity of collecting is as culturally significant as the objects and the containers of those objects.
Collections are texts to be re-written, or pictures to be re-drawn. Perhaps in most cases they are texts to be re-contextualized, or pictures to be re-framed.
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The writing or authorship of collections is generally the domain of the curator and museum staff that contribute to its care and realization including archivists, librarians and other administrators. Bart de Baere writes about the future of collections through a curatorial practice of not only acquiring, cataloguing and documenting of objects, but of suggesting links and connections between things. We might learn of the availability of different readings of objects by different individuals, or even study when something may have been looked at or how often. These alternative narratives provide contextual knowledge. Benjamin wrote, “You have all heard of the people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness … And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.”[16]
In contrast to the order of the traditional library catalogue, Google, the online search engine, is structuring of knowledge in different ways. It is a visible means by which knowledge is ordered in contemporary society. The order of things according to Google is determined by algorithms. It gets its name from the largest number imaginable. If we type a word into Google to find something among billions of websites, it will deliver not only what we ask for, but things we didn’t even know were there. The relationships between information and objects are as revealing as the information we thought we were looking for.
Exhibitions and collections which draw attention to the relationships between artists and artworks are now common and reflective of contemporary art. Through the potential of these and other curatorial and archival practices, the museum is poised to be even more relevant, even more constructive of meaning.
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