Week 72: 27th January – 2nd February
In developing my understanding of collections studies and the ways in which it might contribute towards my research, I decided to focus on the work of Susan M Pearce, Professor Emeritus of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and her anthology, Interpreting Objects and Collections.
Separated into two sections of essays, the first section focuses on the ways in which objects are interpreted within museum collections, while the second considers the collection as a whole. For the purposes of continuity, I will first summarise the latter section in order to continue the discussion about the nature of collecting. The first section, relating more to the methodology of material culture and anthropology will be summarised in the following post.
Interpreting collections
Continuing on from Baurillard’s definition of collecting as distinct from accumulating or hoarding, Susan Pearce’s essay ‘The Urge to Collect’, catalogues a number of examples which quantify the act of collecting. Quoting Durost, the first definition listed differentiates between the value of an object being intrinsic or representational, the latter constituting an element of a collection. The second example by Alsop focuses on “the mentality of the collector” and the objects they choose to collect according to preferential categories. (Pearce, 1994, p.157)
Aristides’ example defines the collection as “an obsession organized”. This definition adds a possessive element to the formulaic and orderly structure of the collection, while Belk et al. suggest a much more considered, detached activity: “the selective, active, and longitudinal acquisition, possession and disposition of an interrelated set of differentiated objects that contribute to and derive extraordinary meaning from the entity that this set is perceived to constitute”. The determining factor in all of these examples, Pearce notes, is that the collection only becomes a collection after it is defined in those terms. This also sheds interesting light on her assertion that “many accumulations created by women fall outside the traditional view of what constitutes a collection”, suggesting that collections are more socially than materially constructed. (Pearce, 1994, pp.157-158)
Souvenirs, Fetishes and Systematics
Pearce further attempts to quantify these definitions by attributing each act to one of three modes of collecting: souvenir, fetish or systematic, in her essay ‘Collecting reconsidered’. The first of these, the souvenir, is associated with a person or their life history, and may also be categorised as ‘memorabilia’ or ‘personalia’. These objects, despite depicting the intimate details of a person’s experiences, are largely of little interest to the general public, unless the personality behind the collection is of particular note. (Pearce, 1994, p.195) Such a description may be applied in part to the Freud’s Sculpture exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in 2006, but this was as much in how the work was framed as any inherent sentiment on the part of Freud himself.
The second mode, referred to as fetishistic, is a “kind of obsessive collecting, in which the intention is to acquire more and more of the same kind of pieces, and in which the accumulation stops only with death, bankruptcy or a sudden shift of interest…” (Pearce, 1994, p.197) The term fetish, in this instance, suggests an object removed from its social context, but has its origins in anthropology as adapted from the Portuguese ‘feiticos’ meaning ‘made by man’, and ‘magically active’. According to Pearce, in fetishistic collecting, “powerful emotions are aroused by the objects which the objects seem to return, stimulating a need to gather more and more of the same kind.” The idea of the fetish was also appropriated in psychological and political investigation, through ideas of sexualisation and the commodity, respectively, adding a further dimension to this obsessive activity. (Pearce, 1994, pp.199-200)
The final mode of collecting might be described as the quintessential mode of museum display, that of systematic collection. This mode “depends upon principles of organization which are perceived to have external reality beyond the specific material under consideration, and which are held to derive from general principles… [which] form our ideas about the nature of the physical world and the nature of ourselves”. However, due to the fact that this method was developed as a process to create an organised and didactic public display, such a collection is therefore historically and culturally constructed, and so can only produce the subjective reality of the curator. (Pearce, 1994, p.201)
