How do we decide what is valuable to
us. What do you collect and why?
Personal I don’t collect much and at that I am
not a fanatic, I collect things that trigger a memory or a moment. The main
thing I collect is photographs of me and my family from when I was born, they
are in organised albums, from ones of just me and ones of me and my twin
together. I say I’m a collector but I can switch on and off printing photos and
organising them its simply something I do when I’m bored or I want to recapture
a certain memory. But does this mean there is something wrong with me is
collecting normal??
Take the volts in museum a collection
of our history and culture, as there is so much is it looked after properly,
with it not being carefully monitored who knows what’s missing and who decides
how things are organised. And with the story of art getting bigger it’s getting
harder to store art.
But collecting things within a gallery they loose there function they are
frozen in time, turned to stone, they change there function from useful to
educational, fro example the Ceramics Gallery in V&A 1909.
But
do jobs link with collecting make us more likely to collect take pharmacies and
libraries that have to categories part of their job, is this seen as normal
collecting is this more acceptable? Is collecting normal or do people try and
justify collecting. Is sharing their collection on say YouTube making it more
normal to them finding other like-minded people?
in
our society today are we collecting our own life and memories on social media
e.g. Facebook but does this make collecting justified because everyone is doing
it? But are we controlling our memories with us being able to change and select
what goes on these sites are we really portraying the real memory or just the
happy ones? A good example of trying to buy or show happiness is the film
Citizen Kane. Could all of these aspects link back to Freud’s View of the Human
Mind: The mental Iceberg. With us not wanting to remember a bad memory in the
unconscious level?
Is
collecting a form of art? Take Joseph Cornell with his art placed in boxes.
Great examples are Aviary Parrot Box with wine drawers 1949 and Roses Des Vents
1942- 1953. With Cornell being a big collector himself he was able to create
his own little world, he would collecting things and place them in 100’s of
shoe boxes and he knew what was in each box and exactly where it was stored, it
made sense to him but not the outsider, why did anyone have to understand his
art when it was so personal to him.
Look
at Erich Hartmann Suitcases and Shoes in Showcases, Auschwitz Photographs 1995.
Is the collecting of holocaust an extreme from of collecting, it is collecting
what was left what culture tried to forget but then you remember this wasn’t
just collecting suitcases and shoes it was collecting humans! They where
gathered to be forgotten or lost. So is collecting always here to trigger a
happy memory or to fill a gap?
So
is collecting normal can we always justify our collecting? But then whose says
what is the norm. Each to there own I suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment