Collecting, taxonomy, world making, kitsch

Lest we forget

Fire!

Quick, bury your valuables!

I'm an In Our Time addict. I even hoard the podcasts on my lapdog. Last week's show focused on the Great Fire of London - I found it really interesting, especially in light of our CofC course. A few weeks previous to this they did a show on the Baroque - a truly excellent introduction to the topic if, like me, your art history lacks a little ecstasy.

The definition of collection...

has obviously already been given to us.

a trove which contains:
- gadgets and gizmos aplenty
- whosits, whatsits galore
- twenty thingamabobs
- etc.

collection

I wish I had written my paper about this song instead.

The Opposite of Collection is...

Noise?

The opposite of collection is...

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Collecting As A Work Of Art More Recently Than The 20th Century

"[...] drawings, formal studies by the artist, personal photographs, newspaper clippings, found images from the internet, computer prints, photo-copies and other vernacular paper mapped onto clear, free-standing acrylic walls. Many of the images are easily recognizable fragments of personal, cultural and political life: snapshots, ghost rider cars, the sketch released by the McCann family of an unknown man carrying a child, Francis Bacon’s ‘Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’, a portrait of Jerry Adams as a young man." Store Gallery Press Release

Talking about Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne project reminded me of - along with Gerhard Richter's Atlas Project - an exhibition at Store gallery last year of the work of German artist Tobias Buche. I first came across his work in a group show at the Lisson gallery called Construction Time Again, it seemed so flimsy and whimsical (Richard Flood, who's the boss Curator at the New Museum in NYC called Buche's work 'Anti-Serra') but really involving and seductive in the way that he mixes layers of images onto small, rickety labyrinths of painted wooden or transparent perspex kiosks - here too is the collection at the scale of the body, and as Flood described it, in a conversational mode (also thinking of Thomas Hirschorn's info kiosks & installations).
They're quite diary-like with their ephemeral personal imagery but as they're presented quite loosely and without any textual indexing, they float about the gallery space feeling both personal and non-specific at the same time. In a way he invites the viewer into an interaction with the presented images, an interaction in the sense that one starts decoding and interpreting them into narratives (no matter how fragmented they may be) or kickstarts a type of instinctive categorisation of the images.
Or else, one becomes tired of trying to make sense of the work..."surely that's the artist's job"


Also, if you're interested, here's a slightly annoying video tour of an exhibition in NYC