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HAr T ER SEVE N

COL LECTING IN A POST­MODERNIST WORLD

Look! O ut th ey co me, fro m the bu shes - the riff-raff. Children? Imps- elves - dem on s. Holding what? Tin cans ? Bedroom candlesticks ?Old jars ? My dear, th at 's the cheval glass from the Rectory! And themirror - th at I lent her. M y mother's. Cracked . What's th e notion?An ything tha t's br ight eno ug h to re flect, presumabl y, ou rselves?Ourselves! Ourselves!

Between the Acts (Woolf 1978: 133)

INTRODUCTION: MAKING EXHIBITIONS OFOURSELVES

The cultural logic of late capi talism, to use Jameson's (1984) phrase, haspenetrated th e world of objects, of th ose who co llect objects, and of thoseinst itutions - particul arl y mu seums - w hos e bu sine ss is ob jects, for just asmatu re capitalism , that cha racteristically E uropean use of Europe's owninheritance, generated a world of o bjects whose use and value was carefullyregul ated by accepted so cial pa rameters, so po st -modernist late capitalismhas, fro m its own ent rails, produced a wo rld in w hich the multiplicity ofobjects float free in a culture landscape in whi ch boundaries seem to havedissolved .

The main stra nds in th e bundle can be ske tched out re latively easily .In classic Marxist term s, th e workers are no w further than ever from theproduct and from participati on in th e w ho le cycle of production and con­sumpti on . T he job market becomes yea rly more co mp lex and fragmented asempl oyment stability disintegrates and more work is linked to computersand satellites which breach the on ce restrictive time-space barriers . With thishas gone a sim ilar instabili ty of aes the tic. As Harvey puts it:

The relativel y st able aesthetic of Fordi st modernism has given wa y toall th e ferm ent, instability, and fleet ing qu alitie s of a po st -modernistaesthetic that celebra tes difference, ephemerality , spectacle, fashi on,and the co mmo dification of cultural forms .

(Harvey 1989: 156)

- C o llec tin g In a Post-m odernist W orld -

As a result , we are

so far removed from the realities of production and work in the worldthat we inhabit a dream world of a rtificial stimuli and televisedexpe nence: never in any previous civi liza tion have th e grea t meta ­physical preoccupations, the fundamen tal que st ions of being and ofthe meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.

aameson 1989: xviii)

This po intl essn ess has been provided with its own philosophy in thepost-structuralist writings of men like Baud rillard , Barthes, Derrida andFoucault (for a goo d discussion see H arland 1987). For Foucault theoperatio n of powe r in the mod ern state is all-pervasive, running up anddown so ciety at alllevcls and linking the w hole to gether. Power and knowl­edge are mu ch th e sam e th ing, and the y in their turn are linked to ideaslike 'tru th ' and ' reason' . Power is exen ised as an intent ional str ategy,but because it is everywhere, it is not .linked, as Marx thought, with on eparticularly oppressin g group. It cannot be clearly located in a distin ct andmanageable set of pe rsonal relati on ships, and co nsequently indiv idual s,enmeshed in power relati onships like fJ ies in webs, have no hope ofextricating themselves by normal processe~., because thes e would simply setup more of th e same.

T he semiotic argument arrives at much the same conclusion. In languageas in all others forms of communication . including material culture andins titutions like museums, the link between signifier and signifi ed has beensevered . To put it another way, there is no reason why the meanings whichhave traditionally been attached to anythin g should continue to be attached;meaning is what anybody cares to make it. Signifiers, obj ects and exhibi­tions amon g others, can trig ger off a large range of meanings within theminds and feelings of those who exp erience th em, and since the inheritedsignification of the past - roughly the consensus of meaning resultingfrom history - has been demoted , there is no way of judging between thevalidity of these experienced meanings. As Baudrillard has pu t it, 't od ayespeci ally the real is no more than a Stuck pile of dead matter, deadbodies and dead language' (1981: 103). Fo r Baudrillard there can be noreal ity, no meaning and no history, for what is history but a way ofpretending that meaning exists ?

In our relationship with the material world, the philosophical and socialuncertainties of the post-m od ernist period have produced a reflexive stateof mind in wh ich the old hier archies of value seem less secure and areperceived as social constructions rather than as explanations of natural truth,while the vario us kinds of popular cul ture and the material collectionswhich come from it, traditionally given a low ranking in the jud gementalhierarch y, are corresp ondingly taken to be orders of interest in their ownright. The result of this across the collecting scene in terms of wh at we

- Co llecting in P ra ct i ce - Co llecti ng in a Post - rna l e rn is t W o rld

Fig ure 7.1 Plan of Museum Europa exh ibiti on , Nation al Mu seum s ofDenmark, 1993: 1-4 histori cal phases, 5 -6 Th e Collector, 7 paint ings

(after exhib ition Ii,era ture)

and inference took much of its shap e. A nu mber of similarly self- reflexiveexhibitions have followed the Ashmolean on e, like that entitled Birds' Eggs(1992) at the Oxfo rd Mus eum of th e Hi story o f Science (in .the oldAshmolean bu ilding) which gave us th e opportu rn ry to sec what IS p.rob ­ably th e world's oldes t co llectio n of bi rd s' eggs mad e by Jo hn Pointer(1667- 1754) in th e first half of the eighteenth centur y, w hich he used toteach a course at Oxford on natu ral history and materia medica.

The point mad e at Oxford has been taken by several of the majormuseums of northern Europe, whose co llections are broadly similar. In1992 the H istori cal Mu seum , Am sterdam, mounted the exhibition DistantWorlds Mad e Tangible w hich dis played the art and cur iosi ties in th eco llections made betw een 1585 and 1735 by wea lthy Dutch burghers. In1993 th e N atio nal Museums of D enmark put on an important exhibit ionentitled Museum Europa: An Exhibition about th e European Museum andEurope. Museum Europa was described as

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The desire to sec co llectio ns and co llecting as of signi ficance in their ownright, as cons truct ions which ask to be unravelled and und ers to od withintheir ow n term s of refe rence, has given us an extremely interes ting sequenceof exhibi tions in which an inward -turning muse um gaze att empts to demon­strate up on wh at premises mat erial has been selected for accumu lationover the last four centuries or so and how the mu seum as collection-b asedinstitutio n has co me abo ut. The genesis of this activity was the exhibitio nand accom panying conference mou nted in 1983 by the Ash molean Mu seum,Oxford, in orde r to celebra te the tercentenary of the opening of the museumin 1683. T he Tradcscanr Collection was researched, redis played (Fig ur e 7.1)and publ ished (Macgre gor 1983) and the co nference volume (Impey andMacgregor 1985) discussed a European -wide ran ge of similar co llection swhich, as we have seen, belo ng wi thin the cabi ne ts of cur iosities and relatedtraditions and stand at the origins of many of the great Eu rop.eanmuseums.

Th e effo rts of th e Ashmolean have concentrated attent ion upon theextent to which the study of early co llectio ns, and so of course of all col­lect ions, can thr ow light on our relationship to the mat erial world, and theway in which we create our und erstanding of ourselves and our sur­roundings by selec tive manipul at ion of thi s relat ionship. The early mod ­ern co llections, in parti cu lar, arc now perceived as what they arc: importa ntmoment s in the history of th ou gh t th rou gh whi ch the characteristic mod­ern ist gaze of mat eria l anal ysis which yields truth by ph ysical comparison

MATTER FOR REFLECTION

might call the institutional pr actice of co llecting has been an interestingthreefo ld mixture.

Co llect ion s which have come to us from the earl ier peri od s are attract­ing considerable att ent ion as histori cal documents in their o wn right,parti cularl y as displ ays mounted in museums by who m th e material is held .Equ ally, and again the princip le agent s arc the museums th emselves, th ereis much anxiet y abo ut how collection s of tw ent ieth -century mat er ial shouldbe assembled as th e mate rial do cuments of ou r century to those whocome after. Finally, there is the immense scope of popular collecting byindividu als who keep thei r co llections largely in their own hom es. Th epsychological and social basis of thi s is of great interest and imp ortance,and will be co nside red in Part Th ree of this study; what co ncerns us hereis the way in w hich such co llecting is emerg ing, gradually, into institutionalrecognition and so int o acknowledged pr actice. Eac h of the se three topicsneeds examining in turn; wh at binds them to geth er is a co llecting eye nowturned not to th e vertical structure s of the hiera rchy, but to the spreadinglandscape of hu man society and the huma n heart.

- Collectin g in Pr actice - - Collecting in a Post-modernist World -

Figure 7.2 Plan of Collections Gallery, Tolson Memorial Museum,Huddersfield, 1992

History of Collectors and Collecting in Jersey. This demonstrated the Jerseycollections and collections in relation to themes like 'The Classics', 'Art','The Empire' and 'Evolution' . In May 1992 the Tolson Memorial MuseumHuddersfield (Kirklees Museum Service) opened its Waxwings, Waistcoatsand Wooden Legs: Collectors and Collections in Your Museum exhibition(Figure 7.2). This has sections on the or igins of the museums' collection,what the museum has collected, and why it has done so. There are displaysof specific collections of bottles, stamps and cigarette cards, and sections

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an exhibition about the European Museum and about Europe herself,both as concept and reality. With this exhibition, the National Museumsof Denmark wishes to illuminate th e relationship between Europeanthought as expressed through science, art and philosophy, and themuseums of Europe, expressed in their methods of classification.

The way a museum exhib its its artifacts always mirrors the marchof time. We see the objects of the past through the eyes of thepresent and only understand the past by the amount of light it shedson our own present time. Therefore the ways of display found inthe European Museum are as vibrant and alive as, for instance, thenarrative sty les of European literature or the painting techniques ofEuropean pictorial art .

(National Museums of Denmark 1991: 3)

Museum Europa was therefore intended to 'exhibit' the exhibition itselfby displaying examples of the epoch-making changes in the methods ofe~hibitio~,. beg.inning with the first encyclopedic collections and endingWIth the Imaglfiary museums' of today, where objects are transferred tocomputer screens fro m databases, regardless of where they may be foundin time or space (National Museums of Denmark 1991: 4). In this exhibi­tion the objects themselves determine the arrangements in order to showhow collections can reflect a cosmology and how the grouping of objectscreates meaning. The whole enterprise was intended to be an examinationof the museums as an idea (p. 7).

In order to achieve this the Museum drew on its rich collections, whichinclude ~e surviving 2,000 or so objects in the Royal Kunstkammer,the first inventory of which dates from 1674, and which itself includedmate~ial deriving from the collections of Olaus Worm (d. 1624). Thephysical ~ppearanc~ of the exhibition was that of a montage, a fragmentedpresent~uon of history open to more than a single interpretation.Accordingly, the exhibition morphology is not linear, but a labyrinth inwhich the visitor was allowed to make his own discoveries. To achieve this,the. gallery was divided into s.even areas, in which four areas showing his­toncal phases were accompanied by the Introduction Room which showedmedieval treasures in boxes and chests, The Collector which showeda bower-bird with its ' blue collection' in a wood, children collecting at abeach, and. a ?ook collector at his desk, and the Gallery of Paintings whichshowed pamungs of collectors and collections (Figure 7.1). Museum Europarepresents the grand gesture of self-reflection, coupled with an importantstatement -of the significance of the collected world in the history ofEuropean consciousness.

A similar desire for self-examination and the assertion of significance isshown in the projects mounted by a number of regional museums in Britain.In 1992 Jersey Museums Service put on From Whales to Winklepickers: A

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- Collecting in Practice -

on the core of collections and the uses to which they are put. Twosections consider 'What objects tells us' and 'What objects .don't tell us',where attention is drawn to the selective, generally middle-class, view thatsurviving objects give us of our historical past. The tone here is that of amuseum service explaining itself to its public, and the emphasis .is there­fore rather upon the way the collections are managed and used ratherthan upon the presentation of an intellectual framework within which thecollections can be understood. The importance of exhibitions like those atHuddersfield and Jersey lies in the way in which they focus attention uponcollections and the collecting process.

All this museum activity bears a close relationship to similar reflexive- some would say narcissistic - efforts much on the minds of some contem­porary literary critics, pointing up the similarity between the analysis ofwritten narrative and that of narrative constructed from material culture.Here, as in the museum, we see a textually self-conscious and criticalapproach to fiction in which the reader (or viewer) becomes a collaboratorinstead of merely a consumer, and reader and writer understand the respon­sibilities which the better-understood complexities of interpretation require.As Hutcheon has put it:

The artist reappears, not as a God-like Romantic creator but asthe inscribed maker of a social product that has the potential to par­ticipate in social change through its reader. Such an acknowledgementof the power of language is also an acknowledgement of the poten­tial for ideological manipulation by the wielder of that language. Thebest way to demystify power, metafiction suggests, is to reveal it inall its arbitrariness.

(Hutcheon 1980; xvi)

Her 'power of language' is for museums and collectors the 'power ofobjects ' and her 'metafiction', essentially fiction which reveals the natureof fiction, is our' meta-exhibition, exhibitions of collections which revealthe nature of themselves.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: OUR COLLECTIVESELVES

One of the sections in the Huddersfield exhibition was called 'GrowingCollections' and was concerned with recent acquisitions. One very par­ticular, but very important, aspect of the whole late-twentieth-centurycollecting debate is the question of how museums should go about select­ing and accumulating material from the twentieth century, and especiallyfrom the second half of the century, so that these collections can representour time to those people of the twenty-first and later centuries who will

- Collecting in a Post-modernist World -

(we must suppose) come after us. The kernel of the argument revolvesaround the difficulties implicit in selection and representation which, how­ever self-conscious and open the process may be, will inevitably involvelop-sidedness and bias.

One approach attempted to find a path through the difficulties byconcentrating upon issues which are visibly and clearly important in theneighbourhood in which the collecting museum works. As King puts itvery clearly in relation to the People's Palace Museum, Glasgow:

You have to decide what the issues are for your own locality. TheFalklands War was not an issue for Glasgow, in the same way as itwas for Southampton or London. Glasgow's war in Argentina tookplace in 1978, when Ally's Tartan Army was routed in the WorldCup Finals. In the aftermath, we were able to acquire quite a varietyof souvenirs at bargain prices for the museum collection. This mayseem to some to be a facetious outlook, but in a country which ispolitically effete, ·football often assumes a disproportionate culturalimportance. In comparison with the heated fervour generated bythe '78 World Cup, the '82 Falklands War had the aura of a distantB-movie media event.

(King 1985-6: 4-5)

King goes on to detail some of the popular culture which can and shouldbe collected in contemporary Glasgow: new shops and their immediatepredecessors ('the Patisserie Francoise, nee City Bakery'), city Christmasdecorations, the material culture of the Peace Movement and the 1984/5Miners' Strike, comedian Billy Connolly's stage costumes and materialrelating to pop and folk music. As Mayo puts it, drawing on her experi­ence in the Division of Political History at the Smithsonian, collectingcontemporary historical artefacts requires a great 'leap of faith' (1984: 8)because political problems can never be solved to everybody's satisfactionand yet material must be selected if museum collectors are to do thei~ j?b.

Another way is to steer through the theoretical problems by admittingcheerfully to bias on the grounds that how a late-twentieth-century museum

. curator sees contemporary collecting is itself part of the history of our time,and consequently endowed with its own interest and significance. When in1990 the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted the exhibition Collectingfor the Future: A Decade of Contemporary Acquisitions, it became clearthat the museum sees itself as collecting on the basis of aesthetic, technicaland historical criteria arrived at, essentially, on the strength of curatorialinterests and taste. By 1992 the Museum had opened both the TwentiethCentury Gallery and the European Ornament Gallery. The TwentiethCentury Gallery features Doc Marten boots, Lycra leggings, the Bic ball­point pen: ephemera treated as art because of its design qualities and itsability to define the essentially political tastes of an era.

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- Collecting in Practice _

In 1992 t~e E~ropean ?rna~ent Gallery featured a display of 'out­r~geous, ~hansmatlc and kitsch ties' by inviting all and sundry to send inties for display. The London Evening Standard for 19 March 1992 told us:

London's temple of style, t~e.Victoria and Albert Museum, is playinghost to the worst that the British male and his dubious sense of fashioncan throw at it. Men - and women - from all over the countryhave. resp?nded enthusiastically to the V & A's appeal for outrageous,chansmatIc and kitsch ties. Every day, parcels containing moreexamples of bad taste arrive at the museum's new European OrnamentGallery.

(Evening Standard, 19 March 1992)

, Claudia ~igg, a member of the museum staff, was quoted as sayingOne ~an said he had 2,000 but was forced to stop buying because he was

spendmg too m~ch money' (Evening Standard, 19 March 1992). ' Herewe ha~e the national 'Temple of Style' as the Evening Standard put it,exploring .contemporary. popular taste through the medium of a standardlate-twentIeth-century piece ?f male clothing, and doing so by inviting pop­ul~r.collectors to send In their own accumulations for display. The demotic~plr~t o! the age comes into its own here, as collected objects, politics andinstitunons come together.

ONLY COLLECT

Like the . ties e~h~~ition, .the Victoria and Albert Museum's Collecting forth~ Futu:e exhibition, With its Objects for the Collector section showingobJ~cts like David Shilling hats; craft pottery and Aldo Rossi coffee setswhich, although sold for use or decoration, are manufactured above allto ~e colle~ted, . made an explicit link with contemporary collecting beingearned on, outside the. museum walls. The same link was at the heart ofthe People s Sh~w Project launched by Peter Jenkinson at Walsall Museum.

In 19~0 Jenk.mson conceived the idea of a People's Show, which wouldput. on display in the museum collections formed by private individuals inth~lr own h~mes. The first People's Show gathered together some 16,000objects by sixty-three collectors from diverse backgrounds. The displaypacked o~t the museum's walls, floors and ceilings and included collectionsof neckties, eg,gcups, international hotel soaps and gambling machines.~urther ~eople s Shows have taken place since 1990 throughout museumsin t.he Midlan~s. The Wa!sal~ show attracted much attention in regional andnational me?la,. where It. linked up with the enormous superstructureof coll~ctors .faJr~, magazmes and clubs, all ?f which support the popularcollecting which IS one of the most mterestmg and significant aspects ofcontemporary culture.

- Collecting in -a Post-modernist World -

The notion of what is collectable ranges from recognised antiques (thatis, those pieces which are more than a century old), to discarded contem­porary brio-a-brae, or even contemporary material bought in a normal mar­ket outlet. The collectors hunt in antique shops, car-boot sales andmail-order magazines, but also in ordinary shops carrying contemporarycommercial stock. Their interests are served by enterprises like the BBC'sAntiques Roadshow and its various spin-offs, Miller's magazines, tradepapers like Antiques Trade Gazette, which are often read by collectors, anda large range of magazines.

A characteristic magazine is that issued by Marshall Cavendish entitledWhat's it Worth: The Complete Guide to Everyday Collectables. The firstissue appeared in the winter of 1993. It features articles on blue and whitechina, men's pocket watches, teddy bears, first aid for wood, comics androcking chairs. Each article is lavishly illustrated and is backed up by insertson 'Dealers' tips', 'Close-up on trade marks' and 'Tomorrow's treasures'.Each individual piece shown has a price-guide tag attached to it: pricesrange from under £5.00 to over £5,000. The emphasis is on becomingknowledgeable enough to find one's way about the collecting world andto avoid being made a fool of in a world presumed to be full of pitfalls.

CONCLUSION

At first sight, post-modern collecting, like the post-modern world, mightappear to have abandoned the old cultural parameters of the long term infavour of eclectic freedom, both personal and material. Notions of classi­fication and relationship, including those where value judgements areimplicit, seem to have been subverted in favour of idiosyncratic assemblagewhich has no point of reference beyond individual quirks of partiality. Thebreakdown of traditional material structuring can be linked with thedissolution of other traditional social parameters - the family, authority,law and order, and so on. This is accompanied by the now-inevitable agonyon the part of the professionals involved, here museum curators, whoembark on honest endeavours to come to terms with the new world.

But what abides is the clear propensity of European individuals to definethemselves and their cultural relationships in material terms. Viewed fromthis angle, popular collecting reinforces long-term habits and attitudes; nowmore people collect than ever as post-modernist capitalism and its culturalfreedoms opens up more and more material to the collecting gaze. Perhaps(perhaps!) many European individuals are in some important ways more'free' than they were, but they are using this freedom in traditional waysin the aggressive accumulation of goods, in the cherishing of materialrelationships and in individual assertions of sense and meaning.