Week 71: 20th – 26th January
When discussing my artist book practice, I’ve been asked to consider why I prefer the context of a museum to display my work, rather than a library. Apart from thinking about the book as an object, I realised that the distinction, for me, was not so clear cut, and I needed to think more about the connections between libraries, museums and galleries.
Cultures of collecting
The similarities between these institutions are fundamentally related to to the nature of collecting and collections. The ways in which each fulfils drives to categorise, assimilate and organise the world, is how I understand my own practice, so I decided to read more about the psychology of collecting.
The book, The Cultures of Collecting, assembles a series of articles which trace “the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the “Other” and the marginal.” Introducing the series, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal outline the procedures and desires inherent in creating a collection; the necessity of classification as a precedent for collecting, the history of collecting as a history of taste, and “the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time.” (eds. Cardinal, R and Elsner, J, 1994, pp. 1-4)
The system of collecting
In the first chapter, The System of Collecting, Baurillard sets out to determine the ontology of possession in relation to collecting:“Possession cannot apply to an implement, since the object I utilize always directs me back to the world. Rather it applies to that object once it is divested of its function and made relative to a subject… [these objects] constitute themselves as a system, on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm.” (Baurillard, 1994, p7)
He also stresses the ways in which collecting differs from accumulating, beginning with inferior stages such as stockpiling, through to the accumulation of identical objects, and finally “collecting proper”, the assembly of, and distinction between, objects of cultural value. In this case, the collection is also defined by what it lacks, the missing object signifying “our own death, symbolically transcended.” (Baurillard, 1994, pp.17-23)
The psychology of collecting
He continues to explore some of the more sinister aspects of psychoanalytic theory by suggesting how the possessed object may constitute the fear of symbolic castration (an argument which clearly disregards the possibility of collections by women): “…One is hardly inclined to lend another person one’s car, one’s pen, one’s wife, this is because these objects are, within the jealousy system, the narcissistic equivalents of oneself…” (Baurillard, 1994, p18)
However, if jealousy is one motivation for collecting, then there are many more, as detailed in Mieke Bal’s study of Susan M Pearce’s book ‘Museums, Objects and Collections’, in Chapter 5: Telling Objects: “…Pearce goes on to discuss as many as sixteen possible motivations… leisure, aesthetics, competition, risk, fantasy, a sense of community, prestige, domination, sensual gratification, sexual foreplay, desire to reframe objects, the pleasing rhythm of sameness and difference, ambition to achieve perfection, extending the self, reaffirming the body, producing gender-identity, achieving immortality.” (Bal, 1994, p103)
Fetishism and collecting
Although Pearce herself separates collecting into three categories: systematics, fetishism and souvenir collecting (Windsor, 1994, p50), Bal suggests that all her listed motivations can be subsumed under the narrative of fetishism, through cutting the object off from its original context in order to reconstitute its meaning with the use of three common tropes: “synecdoche, the figure where a part comes to stand for the whole from which it was taken; metonymy, where one thing stands for another adjacent to it in place, time or logic; and metaphor, where one thing stands for another on the basis of similarity…” (Bal, 1994, p106).
These examples focus particularly on the strong psychological reasons for the creation of collections, however, the historical nature of collecting always seems to point towards a need to possess and remove objects from the world. Therefore, has a new digital context introduced a more social element of sharing where image-objects proliferate?
