Karen the McCartney Collector

So I went out of London for this one: a Beatles and McCartney collector. She collected everything from the records (all- including bootlegs, and weird covers of Beatles and McCartney stuff) to books to memorabilia (talcum powder, dolls, and postcards) to gigs (nearly all front row centre) to face to face meetings. Karen seemed to use the high fiscal value of her collection as a validating tool- she didn't acquire items because they were expensive but used their value to explain to others why she had collected them. It seems also a bit of a thing with collectors for their collections to take them to other places- it was trainspotting holidays for Tim, Indian tin hunting for Tony and McCartney Road trips for Karen. She spoke about her and her friends (another common thing is this culture of like minded collectors- i guess that's just like friends though right.) would go and follow Paul's tour around the states- only sitting in front row centre seats (AAA) which seemed pretty hardcore. She spoke about how the memorabilia she collected now had to be authentic i.e. from the 60's / 70's as crap knock offs weren't good as people were making too much money off them - although she did say "if it was Paul then I'd get it- I'd just have to." When asked why Paul McCartney? she responded-"Why do some people support Manchester United? I just do" She also spoke about enjoying others incrdulity at the amount of stuff she had- "I can honestly say anyone who's ever some to my house had been wide eyed and open mouthed- it's like... awh!" I guess Beatles items lend themselves to sets as there were 4 of them but even in the McCartney stuff she would have a set of 5 or 6 of the same vinyl which was different countries releases- the promos and the original re-releases. Interestingly whilst she described herself as untidy, her collection contrasted by being centrally located in one room at the heart of the house- it was alphabetically ordered, and organised by subject and medium, whilst not being archived, or listed in any formal way she said she knew what items she had and where every item was, in her head. She also had a McCartney tattoo which i forgot to take a photo of! One if the best quotes was: "I'm a loyal collector, when I collect something, I really collect it. It's why I've never watched shows like x-files etc." In terms of pulling out conclusions, this one seems quite hard, but i'd have to focus on- the breadth of the collection: from experience to record (directly influenced by the artist) to memorabilia (indirectly influenced by the artist). The duplication and tiny variations which create the need to possess multiple and (to the untrained eye) identical copies.  The symbolism attached to the subject matter- Paul McCartney. The purhasing owning, possessing of the items being the 'thing' as the records (whilst played) seemed to be thouroughly abstracted from the function. The competitive streak to be the No. 1 fan- in terms of quantity of records and number of gigs attended (I just had to buy it).

Tutorials

I'm going to blog my two tutorials this week from the dynamic duo of Matt and Luara. Matts tutorial on Monday put me in a good mood as he said he liked my drawing about the projectors and sequential which mixed my trianspotting interview with my conveyor belts. It sprung me into looking for more collectors to talk to to help ground my project. But he also saw the potential in doing perhaps a series of outcomes (something i'm well into) which could be an illustration (loosely, I'm not going to get too prescriptive about it) of the collection process, i.e. acquisition, display and storage, or something like that. My tutorial with Laura went really well. She talked about my process, and the transitions between drawing/idea and model/physical and from that to outcome/presentation. She said that I might not need to create the things I'm drawing if the outcome wasnt actually a set of conveyor shelves (for example). I could present the outcome and design the process, which is kind of a lot of what my work is about anyway. Laura said I've really got to figure out what the point of whatever it was i was going to design was, even if it just so that I can display/ present it in the right way.

I'm now going to print out all the interviews, good drawings and good models and start to merge them slightly into groups to design around. I've also got some more focused making and stuff towards a finished 'thing'. I guess it's also encouraging that Luara was asking me what kind of outcome it was that I wanted to produce (a video, an object, graphics), and it made me happy to think that i didn't care; whatever is relevant to the project. I like that I might actually be this Goldsmiths designer and that I use only graphics as a convinient tool.

More Books

The Order of Things, Michael Foucault, Vintage Books, Preface: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that 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 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. 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 camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

The Cultures of Collecting, Ed. John Elser & Roger Cardinal, Reaktion Books, Ch. 9, Cabinets of Transgression, Anthony Shelton:

"Collections of Curiosity, succinctly described by Pomian as hoardings of 'rare, exceptional, extraordinary, exotic and monstrous things'."

Susan Stewart - "the collection presents a hermetic world: to have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world - a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority."

Collecting In Contemporary Practice, Susan M. Pearce, Sage Publications, 1998,

"At any given moment, in the contemporary world western world, around a quarter to at third of all adults are willing to identify themselves as collectors (Belk 1988, see chapter 2.)"

Stewart on Collecting - "it is 'a strategy of desire' whose task is the ever-impossible effort to bridge the gap between expression and experience.  (Stewart 1984: 139-169)"

"Belk and his colleagues have arrived at the following: 'We take collecting to be the selective, active, and longitudinal acquisition, possession and disposition of an interrelated set of differentiated objets (material things, ideas, beings or experiences) that contribute to and derive extraordinary meaning from the entity (the collection) that this set is perceived to constitute' (Belk et al. 1990: 8)"

To Have and to Hold, Phillip Blom, Alan Lane- The Penguin Press, 2002:

"the ideal of a cabinet of art and miracles, combining beauty with strangeness, classical form with riotous excess, scholarship with sheer curiosity."

"Only with mass production came the idea of the complete set, the full series, the vocabulary of a mentality that until then could not express itself through accumulating things according to arbitrary principles. Before this moment, collectors of art, of natural objects, of shells or coins or scientific instruments or portraits, of antiquities and of books had no way of hoping to achieve completeness. There was no complete set of Greek sculpture, no full series of exotic flowers, no last single bird of paradise to get to finish a collection, no final Raphael drawing to round things off. Collecting by way of its very nature open-ended and there were always other pieces, other examples, that could be found and added. [...] in principle the collection can be completed, can achieve its logical destiny - and consequently cause its creator the greatest trouble as his goal is achieved but his urge to continue far from satisfied."

"One way of making the world one's oyster is to reduce it the world to oyster size."

"While Opie collects inedible food (given the fact that the boxes promising nourishment are usually empty), others collect unwearable shoes, medals that were not awarded to them, [etc...]. Their uselessness vis-a-vis their previous existence, in which they had a purpose in the context of things, stands out and unifies them into collected objects, taken out of circulation and pinned up like butterflies, regarded now as specimens, as 'examples of' as links to another realm of history, of authenticity, of beauty. "

'the collectors edition, items produced explicitly for collectors and not for use [...] This is the apotheosis of consumption; the utilitarian object that is intended not to have a use, but to be placed on a shelf, skipping the phase of circulation and utilization altogether."

"A sheer accumulation of books does not constitute a library. It is also their organization, the ordering mind inhabiting and ruling them."

More Books

Inventory : Collected, Vol. 2, No. 2 1997 The world according to Dewey, Simon Neville, pg 34:

There are 2 types of institutional collection; the indexical collection and the museum collection. This distinction hinges upon an understanding of 'whole' and 'fragment'. Within the indexical collection, items that together compromise the collection as 'whole', are 'fragments' of that collection. Within the museum the same items become 'whole' though an act of presentation that serves to isolate the item as a distinct object, removing it from an archival space where it would have existed within an array of similar objects descriptively understood as a class within a general taxonomy, to become a proper name.

Abject/Collect, Nick Norton, pg 37:

Yet how pointless, to embark upon a collection that will be killed if complete, will kill us if never completed.

The Ticket Collectors, John Churcher, pg 41:

For many patients the closed world of the railways fulfils he same function as the pub for alcoholics; providing an ideal milieu and cover for their activities.

A botanical enthusiast informs me that there are at least 300 genera of rushes and that while the difference between many of them is extremely slight an interest in rushes is not incompatible with leading a relatively normal life. On the other hand grasses have been divided up into 600 genera and 10,000 species. In  typical English meadow or field an expert working on his hands and knees , with a microscope, from dawn to dusk might identify upwards of 100 species or sub-species, the following day perhaps another 50. The perils are obvious. As some will attest that with recreational drugs one things leads to another, all too often today's 'rushman' is tomorrow hooked on grass.

From Soane to Soane, Calum Storrie, pg 44:

Every doll (especially the doll that cannot be played with) presents itself as 'us' made small. Each railway station, car, gun and doll's house shows us our world made small. Of course by juxtaposing different scales of object this world is made absurd. So what, at  first, appears as a way of simply relating to the world (especially the world of made things) is actually a mad tableau which defies coherence.

Waste, Residues and Traces: Collecting As A Form Of Consumption, Adam Scrivener, pg 94:

Collecting also seeks the most rare, the unique. In an age of undifferentiated mass-production the aura of the unique object still has power.

For the museum, completion is the ultimate desire - to collect or accurately represent everything of a certain type or with the widest and most detailed scope possible; where for the private collector, it is to be feared and deferred - the final item spells death where perhaps only a dispersal or selling off can begin the process anew.

Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, translation: James Benedict, Verso, London, 2005. Part B, Ch. 2: A Marginal System: Collecting. "Littre's dictionary defines 'objet' in one of it's meanings as 'anything which is the cause or subject of a passion; figuratively - and par excellence - the loved object'."

"If i use a refrigerator to refrigerate, it is a practical mediation: it is not an object but a refrigerator. And in that sense i do not possess it. A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject."

"At on extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine.  At the opposite extreme, the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection. It ceases to be a carpet, a table, a compass or a knick knack and becomes an object in the sense in which a collector will say 'a beautiful object' rather than specifying it, for example, as 'a beautiful statuette'. An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject, but in the passionate abstractness of possession all objects are equivalent. And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfillment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects."

"Only a more or less complex organization of objects, each of which refers to all the others, can endow each with an abstractness such that the subject will be able to grasp it in that lived abstractness which is the experience of possession."

"Collecting, however offers a model here: through collecting, the passionate pursuit of possession finds fulfillment and the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse."

"Collectors are forever saying that they are 'crazy about' this or that object, and they all without exception - even where the perversion of fetishism plays no part - cloak their collection in an atmosphere of clandestineness and concealment, of secrecy and sequestration, which in every way suggests a feeling of guilt. It is this passionate involvement which lends a touch of the sublime to the regressive activity of collecting; it is also the basis of the view that anyone who does not collect something is 'nothing but a moron, a pathetic human wreck'(M. Fauron, president of the cigar-band collectors' association, in Liens, May 1964)"

"Collecting is thus qualitative in its essence and quantitative in its practice."

"In the words of Muarice Rheims: 'For man, the object is a sort of insentient dog which accepts his blandishments and returns them after his own fashion, or rather which returns them like a mirror faithful not to real images but to images that are desired. (Rheims, La vie etrange des objets, pg 50)"

"The unique object is in fact simply the final term, the one which sums up all the others, that it is the supreme component in an entire paradigm (albeit a virtual, invisible or implicit one) - that it is, in short, the emblem of the series."

"The object obtains exceptional value only by virtue of its absence."

phew.