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.
Quotes and Books
There are a few quotes and pieces that I want to keep hanging around and be in my head so I'm going to write them up here and I might pay more attention to them. Illuminations: Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin, Pimlico, London, (1999):
"not yet touched by the mild boredom of order"
"What I am really concerned with is giving 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 various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary."
"For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
"to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is it's rebirth."
Interpreting Collections and Object, ed. Susan M. Pearce, 1994, Routledge (New York and Oxon) Ch22 The Urge to Collect, Susan M. Pearce:
"A collection is basically determined by the nature of the value assigned to the objects, or ideas possessed. If the predominant value of an object or idea for the person possessing it is intrinsic, i.e., if it is valued primarily for use, or purpose, or aesthetically pleasing quality, or other value inherent in the object or accruing to it predominant value is representative or representational, i.e., if said object or idea is valued chiefly for the relation it bears to some other object or idea, or object, or ideas, such as being one of a series, part of a whole, a specimen of a class, then it is the subject of a collection." (Durost, 1932: 10)
"the collection is greater than the sum of it's parts"
Ch 26, Collecting reconsidered, Susan M. Pearce:
"Above all, it [material entering a museum] comes in groups, in sets of material."
"What links these collections [those in museums created by famous collectors] with their humbler cousins of the matchbox tops and beer mats is the lack of an intellectual rationale by which the material and it's acquisition was informed, and this nothwithstanding the fact that cigarette cards and the like are classified into sets which collectors try to complete: the sets have no rhyme or reason outside the covers of their albums.
Ch28, No Two alike: Play and Aesthetics in Collecting, Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel:
"The pinnacle of achievement [validation?] is to have one's collection displayed by a museum."
"Some people collect 'real' objects while others collect imaginary representations of objects. Thus while Nabokov hunted real butterflies in the fields, the Viscountess Lambton created a total environment for herself in which not only her clothes but nearly every item in her home had a butterfly emblem on it (Johnstow and Beddow 1986."
"For an object to become part of a collection it has to be reframed as a collectible."
"To treat an object as a collectible is to take it out of it s natural or original context and to create a new context for it, that of the collector's own life and the juxtaposition with other items in the collection."
"The principle of no-two-alike" "same-but-different" "Humphrey has suggested that the paradigm for the experience of beauty in sameness-within-difference is rhyme. Just as a poem rhymes, so objects may rhyme: 'consider the nature of a typical collection, say a stamp collection. Postage stamps are, in structuralist terms, like man-made flowers: they are divide into 'species,' of which the distinctive feature is the country of origin, while within each species there exists tantalizing variation. The stamp-collector sets to work to classify them. He arranges his stamp in an album, a page for the species of each country. The stamps on each page 'rhyme' with each other, and contrast with those on other pages."
on completing a series or set: "To play with series is to play with the fire of infinity. In the collection the threat of infinity is always met with the articulation of the boundary' (Stewart, 1984: 159)" "When asked why he thought he had been attracted to stamps, one stamp-collector we interviewed replied, 'because you know exactly what you are missing'."
Miniatures: "'There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to the physical world' (Stewart, 1984: 55) [...] It is also pertinent that a miniature world is a more perfect world; the blemishes visible to the naked eye in life-size objects are no longer visible."
Ch30, Susan Stewart:
"The collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor rather than metonymy."
"Thus the miniature is suitable as an item of collection because it is sized for individual consumption."
"The collection relies upon the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves. It is determined by these boundaries, just as the self is invited to expand within the confines of bourgeois domestic space. For the environment to be an extension of the self, it is necessary not to act upon or transform it, but to declare its essential emptiness by filling it. Ornament, decor and ultimately decorum define the boundaries of private space by emptying that space of any relevance other than that of the subject."
"The collector can gain control over repetition or series by defining a finite set."
Ch37, Collectors and Collecting, Russell W. Belk:
"In a sense, many collections are 'discovered'."
"A common strategy to avoid completion is to redefine or add new collecting interests as completion nears. [...] The other strategy is to develop a 'serial collection' in which the items in the collection are owned sequentially rather than simultaneously."
"The vertical/ horizontal dimension reflects the degree to which a collection is housed in one centrally located array (often literally ‘vertical’ in it’s position on the wall or on shelves) as opposed to being spread or scattered throughout space (so that visiting the entire collection requires ‘horizontal’ movement). An illustrative example from the data is a collection of figurines, statuettes and small porcelain objects that occupied two glass-enclosed cases on both sides of the fireplace of one informant’s living room; in a sense, if an object were removed from these vertical arrays, it would no longer belong to the collection. In vivid contrast, another informant’s vast collection of heart, ducks, geese, apples and strawberries has expanded horizontally throughout her house; these objects pervade her space and appear in the most unsuspected places, which turned our photographic exploration of her home into a hunting expedition for hearts and geese."