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‘Think Of All The Bums!’

Collections: Moores Building Fremantle

I once visited the amazing film maker Marc Adrian, in Vienna, after I had written briefly about his work. He kindly showed me round – to where he once saw Hitler address the home crowd, to where Brueghel and Bosch glow in a dark  art school gallery!! Then came the craft museum, artists of the secession, Bauhaus and so on. Downstairs a hundred-metre  corridor was lined with examples of the modern chair hung three or deep on along one wall and on the floor. Every model Thonet made disassembled, Rietveld dangling out at an odd angle and so on and so forth. Marc glanced quizzically along this baroque perspective  of high price junk, and declared

Yes indeed, the key to the collector’s impulse is always memory. Without traces of long dead  bums an assembly of chairs means very little. An object, any object carries with it traces of its emergence. It too leaves traces, shadows of its passing, in cash receipts, dusty floors, bank books, learned treatises,  films, television, the  internet, the stain on wall or floor where something precious  once existed. When an object , any object, enters a collection it brings its traces with it. For instance a collection of shoes might trace a life from pram to sex to rheumatism. Or again, any suitcase has traveled. It smells of mothballs or a long broken bottle of whisky. You get the idea We collect memories and recollect emotions. The objects, however valuable, are mere containers.  Then there are memories which accumulate as we live with a collection, I have  a small shelf of old bottlesdug up in Leonora I remember that  and I remember them now, in my studio as I work.

Then there are endless transactions with the objects –especially works of art, which are always constructed as a boundless hall of mirrors in which memory bounces around on an infinite track like a laser beam in a vacuum. I have owned some of my Japanese prints for thirty years. I remember buying them. I remember the wall of every room they hung in. Most of all I recall how many different ways of seeing them I have achieved  in three  decades.  Collections are always containers for a life, archives of impulse and desire.  Their ‘contents’ vary with each owner.

Corner of the 8 ball collection

The ultimate collection is a collection of memories.

It is easy to fantasise a life conducted entirely for the memories it would produce, a tourist take on existence, where death and love, luxury and pain are only building blocks in a lifelong temple of remembrance. Serial killers might live such a life – a collection of faces, alive one moment, death masks the next. One might have affairs purely to remember different kinds of skin. One could keep dogs for their photos on the mantelpiece.  A collection of gnomes might mark every passing Christmas. Miss Haversham collected her own wedding day and would never clean a thing Collections may be attempts  to cancel death – doomed to disastrous failure. 

At some time Proust decided that his collection of memories was complete and wrote their catalogue   as a set of novels – another collection. For most of us collections are the nearest we get to art making. – A collection helps us reshape the world. As we rearrange our dolls, toy soldiers, novels for girls or whatever, we shift the hierarchies of our memory, archive our emotions. Then there are ‘forbidden’ collections pornography, fetishes, and corpses. Boxes of locks of hair stand in for the whole body, sinister or sentimental. In Japan they collect soiled schoolgirls panties-you can buy them in slot machines.

One artist Andy Warhol is famous for a massive collection, which was entirely about life’s impulses. Cookie jars, Faberge jewels, cheap badges and boxes almost forced him from his apartment. Warhol wandered downtown New York with a plastic bag spending thousands on antiques from fashionable jewelers and a couple of dollars on bikie ornaments from street vendors. Everything went into the great plastic bag of life in celebration of the indifference of it all. All that mattered was that Andy had chosen the object to remember, to become part of his domestic mantra, another star in the horoscope of his life’s journey. Warhol’s movies work because  a movie is collection of photographs- a magical half way house to pure memory 

Another artist Martin Heine once collected all the junk put out on one rubbish collection day and exhibited that, labeled and for sale.

He made money and left cockroaches behind.

To present all kinds of collections as art as currently at the Moores building, is to ask for trouble  especially when its artists who formed them. Is this about judgment, fine sensibility or what? Is there a competition between  a floor of suitcases , a wall of amended artworks culled from op shops, and a delicate arrangement of old 45rpm records? Why do these alien, heterogeneous elements have such rhetorical power as an ensemble? Is it the ensemble itself. the glimpse of a ordered hierarchy which makes the difference, a message in code, the democratic DNA of daily life ?

We know we are wreckers despoilers who cannot draw breath without something dying. These maps and diagrams of the soul, traced out in treasured rejects and refuse, hint at reconciliation. One might love these battered suitcases for their dignified emptiness.

Their spectacular order redeems the wretched lives they served.

Our true monuments might be found on rubbish tips.