To Have and To Hold - Philipp Blom

This book, subtitled An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, is the most thorough and gently intellectually interesting book I have found on the subject. It goes deep into the history of collecting, but rather than simply offering an overview it is also, as the subtitle suggests, a deeply intimate and personal book. 

Starting with Blom's own memories of his great-grandfather's collection, the book takes us on an oscillating journey from the early days of cabinets of curiosities, through to the foundation of early museums, to libararies, kitsch, the democratisation of collecting, psychoanalysis... But what I really loved was how rather than just the stories of objects, this book felt like an exploration more of the unknown stories behind such things. The memories objects trigger, the passion that drives the collecting instinct and how this can take over a life but also lead to great discoveries. How collecting has become intricately linked to the formation of knowledge and society as we know it today.

Part One starts with the 16th explosion of science in Italy and how this fueled people to collect specimens of the natural world. How collections became a way of exploring and representing the world - of seeking out new meaning and also of continuing the great works of Pliny and Aristotle. He talks of how the exploration of the wider world fueled this further, with wonderful stories of how sailors would bring back exotic objects from their travels knowing that someone might want to buy them. Both a personal and a world wide exploration seemed to occur. This happened particularly in the Netherlands, where by the 17th century even dolls houses had their own miniature cabinets of curiosities!

He goes on to talk about Philip II and Rudolf II and how these vast royal collections led to the existence of the Wunderkammer or "Chamber of Miracles". The sheer glorious decadence of these collections is almost unbelievable. There was no sterility like some associate with modern museums - these were places of magic. It was like these collections became their own world - an almost metaphysical manifesto to show the world in microcosm. It was almost a practical alchemy where collecting goes beyond object appreciation to an extraordinary quest for meaning. He also talks about how this links in with early botanical collections. These early collections seemed to then expand to contain any number of "foreign rarities" from plants, to beasts, to shoes from Russia, to relics and oddities like pictures made from feathers. There is a sense that these collectors are pioneers trying to own a little of the whole world - that they are travelling whilst staying still. He ends part one talking about the creepy world of anatomical collections such as that of Dr Ruysch who preserved human specimens - he had a skeletal garden of Eden and a child's hand which he surrounded by exquisite lace. I was fascinated by how what is now seen as a personal hobby was once at the forefront of scientific discovery.

There are so many names and collections discussed and explored that they are far too numerous to go into here, and far too interesting to simply list. But Blom does then go on to talk about how the Enlightenment changed collecting and how more scientific labelling and catagorising emerged. How this led to the foundation of museums as we know them today. But he also explores crazy personal ways of displaying collections such as vast painted landscape backdrops and life size dioramas. He explores how the French Revolution changed collecting and showed it as national ambition and acquisition. How in the 19th century the role of museum as educator really began to evolve. He gives both a very interesting history of relic collecting and of how book collecting can differ from other sorts in that books already contain stories - they have a voice that travels through time and lives. He also talks very interestingly about Camillo and Bacon and Theatres of Memory - the trend for allegorical imaginary museums. An idea I would love to explore more.

In the 20th century he explores mass production and the democratisation of collecting, and the emergence of the idea of having a complete set as opposed to collections being omniverous and open-ended. He talks to a man who collects everyday objects as a social history of modern society - collecting as a salvage operation - collecting as building an ideal world - of showing the character of the world. How collecting faulty objects can reflect the flaws in society.

I could go on but, as this review is probably showing, it seems futile to really explain the depths of this book in such a short space. I feel a little like I am too a collector trying to catalogue a cabinet of wonders but that it is losing its magic as I write down sterile worlds. I made pages of notes when reading as there were so many wonders that I didn't want to forget - my brain becoming its own depository for object facts - but now like a swamped curator I hardly know how to put them all together. Suffice to say that if you want to read a meaningful and fascinating in depth history of collecting, then this is the book for you. Having read it once I know that it is a book that I will revisit throughout my life, and that has given me a wealth of things to think about in terms of museeme and the meaning behind my own collecting instincts. It can be brought here

Still Life With Oysters and Lemon - Review

This book by Mark Doty is subtitled on objects and intimacy. It is a wonderful rumination on the subject. There are many things I could say here about the beautiful poetic yet simple language or the art historical insights into still life painting, the lovely and sometimes moving personal anecdotes... But I'd rather you read the book to discover those things for yourself - a treat in store... I'm going to focus here mainly on Doty's ideas about objects and collections as is relevant to museeme. In many ways rather than a review, this is a mini essay inspired by the book.

However whilst I do not want to dwell too much on the art historical side of this book, it is just wrong to start any writing on it without mentioning still life painting, or in particular "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" painted in the 17th century by Jan Devidsz de Heem in Antwerp. At the start of the book Doty tells of how he fell in love with this painting, and how this is a possible emotion as a painting can affect all the moments around it. A painting can be an atmosphere. Everything within a painting can be transformed into feeling. This is particularly interesting when thinking of still lifes as they are of simple objects. Therefore something that seems to hold no deeper level - a simple depiction of objects can actually hold a vast depth of feeling and emotion - a still life thinks through objects, suggesting knowledge can be found in these everyday things. A still life infuses ordinary things with an infinite well of meaning. Yes we might not know what the painter intended or who owned the objects in the painting, but that doesn't stop us finding an emotion or meaning in it - of wondering about its stories. A few pages later Doty talks of how a painting has a magnetic pull similar to the resonance of strings. How painting turns objects into words waiting to be spoken. For me this triggers a lovely image of objects breathing words out of the painting like echoes - ectoplasm wisps of uncertain yet no less powerful human history.

As I read this book I made notes and now am painfully aware of how woefully inaccurate they are in terms of creating a coherent piece. So I will write this almost as a list of Doty's ideas and my reflections on objects and meaning - like a wisp or hint of an idea story in itself. I think to write too clinical a "review" of this book is to belittle its depth of meaning in a way - I will just seek to draw it out a little...

Doty suggests that the language of ideas is in itself a phantom language. I think by this he means that in reality for real meaning language is anchored in the physical world. That is not to belittle the abstract, but more maybe I would argue there is no true abstract - we are incapable as humans of truly communicating without the things around us. Doty says we are instructed by objects - they are containers of feeling, experience, memory and time. He then goes on to explain by telling a story about visiting his grandmother and going to look for bears in the mountain. This whole stream of memories is contained for him in a particular swirled peppermint sweet. I personally have no memories triggered by said sweets (though bizarrely now maybe I have absorbed Doty's - maybe now every time I see such a sweet I will think of grandmothers and bears in Tennessee...), but it got me thinking about whether there can ever be an "empty" object - can an object only ever be devoid of extra meaning if it has never been seen, which is mostly impossible when one thinks that so many objects are man made? They would at least have been seen by their creator who would have their own memories of making said object. Therefore as we go through life we are surrounded by things full of the meanings of others - we make our way through an invisible soup of meaning - of other people's memories that increases rather than depletes with time. I spent a part of this morning in charity shops in Plymouth and having spent yesterday reading Doty I could not see anything as what it simply physically was - everything was thick with stories. This wasn't an entirely new feeling for me - I'm obsessed with hidden histories and have always loved second hand things precisely because I like the idea that they have these previous lives - but I did feel a new intensity to it today. Or almost a new poignancy... Each shelf was like an abandoned sculptural still life - I felt myself feeling sorry for the things no one wanted any more that being so commonplace and shabby in many cases might end up being simply thrown away.

But I digress a little. Doty argues that objects, such as those belonging to his grandmother whose story and memory in turn were triggered by the peppermint's memory, are made poignant by distance and time. Something you only noticed as a child has a meaning that is different as an adult. For me it grows - almost like a tree with its rings for each year - we can tell the weather and any big natural event that happened - Doty's way of seeing his grandmother's objects are similar for me - they expand in circles of meaning till it almost seems bizarre that something could be just a sweet or a floral dress. Surely they have to be more - have some way of showing physically how they have morphed? But no - meaning is both visible in the mind and invisible to the naked eye. Having just innocently used the term naked eye here that too triggered an idea - perhaps we could see these memories as the eye's clothes - that no one can see objects from their own lives with a naked eye? This is where the layers, the rings, lie. Doty says that if he laid out these objects on a table it would be like a memory museum. I love this idea. It's like a table of ordinaries rather than a cabinet of curiosities, but in my opinion it would be no less curated. It would just be that they were curated for personal memories rather than personal feelings of curiosity. I would argue that in this way we inadvertently curate a lot around us - shelves and dressing tables - any surface where we innocently put stuff. In the future those objects in that combination could be infused with a meaning we would have never presupposed.

"The heart is a repository of vanished things." I loved this line - it felt like the first line of a poem to me. But what I also loved here and Doty notes, is that yes this line is true, but also if these things have vanished to us, that doesn't mean that they are not out there somewhere continuing their accumulation of meaning with other people's lives. There is a poignancy to the personal loss of objects, indeed it is the heart not the mind that Doty says is the repository, but for me there is also an implicit hope - almost like a child leaving home there is the excitement of what might be waiting for them. This ties in with how I've always felt about second hand things.

Doty quotes the poet Cavafy who writes about visiting a room that he once spent a lot of time in with a lover that has now changed. He says "They must still be around somewhere, those old things." Doty points out how that by visiting rooms we have once been in and imagining them how they were we are almost giving them back their bodies. That the objects in them at a certain time were what made this room what it truly was and that it has changed. Yet he says there is a wistful adult acceptance in this poem that things must go on without us, again almost suggesting that these objects have been let go for a new life. But where have they gone?

Doty comes on to talk about auctions as a redistribution of objects, and therefore I would argue, memories. He says he particularly likes yard sales as this is where the histories of objects are their most palpable. I would also say that this urge to buy second hand has something to do about how this gives objects personalities. He talks of liking a particular plate with a chip out of it as he can wonder how it got it. For me it is like being through so many owners builds character. I have always found it strange when speaking to people who don't like second hand things. Maybe they are aware of this history even if they dismiss it as nonsense and it makes them feel uncomfortable? But I have always loved owning something unique even if it is only made so by its flaws, people I love have flaws - it's what makes them unique - you wouldn't want to hang out with someone who was the human equivalent of the IKEA catalogue so why would you fill your house with it? I feel there is a strength in old second hand things - a reassurance that they have been through things. They help me out in some way going through hard times - this reassurance is a pleasure. A nourisher. Old things are nurturing to me. Life isn't clinical so why try to make it so?

Doty sees people who attend auctions as a tribe who understand that they are curators of objects - objects that could outlast us. I find that interesting. Museum curators think all the time about age and preserving things for future generations, but we rarely think about our mortality in relation to things we own. You might be outlived by that horrid Primark frock so you might as well preserve something old and beautiful. I don't mind being outlived by a '30s ballgown or a beautiful painting. Good jewellery and antiques have always been seen as heirlooms. I like how it gives the activity of going to a yardsale the feel of an important mission knowing that you might be rescuing something that might have been precious to someone in the past, and could be even more so to someone after you're dead. It's comforting rather than morbid. And it is a curation. Does that make a yardsale a transient museum - a museum takeaway - a travelling exhibition of personal history? He also talks of how objects can have a personal collective memory that I almost see as heriditary - he is drawn to things because his mother liked them for example. We are searching for specific memories, in the same way as we might be on the look out for a specific type of art deco desk.

Doty talks about our houses being like our biographies. For me this links with Proust, and Doty frequently mentions Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space", but they are both works I love and I think everyone should read, but I'm not going to dwell on now. I am going to think more of the objects in our homes. Doty talks at the end of his attic being so crammed that he knows the stuff is there, but how whilst each individual piece has meaning, en mass it can become overwhelming or even shameful. I guess this is where we touch on hoarding - unhealthy attachment to objects. But what I love here is how he describes his attic as almost paleontological. It has strata - one could excavate it. Go on a dig for memories, which is something that certainly comes up in my poetry book The City I have written with Ana Seferovic. 

But rather than ending on how objects can overwhelm us I would take us back to the still life. Like an attic of memories, the painter can only render what can be seen yet there is so much more there. Yes all of our senses are arriving via the gates of our eyes, but there is still more. For Doty this leads to the conclusion of the soulfulness of objects. That there is something about them that is akin to a spirit or a soul. People talk of the body as an empty vessel and if objects are vessels filled with memories, than surely they are soulful? But what is interesting to me is how these souls are given to them by humans not an all powerful deity. These ordinary objects are given souls by ordinary people. By us. And for me this gives them something that is more powerful than a religious relic we are told has a certain meaning. We create the meanings of ordinary things through a collective giving of memories - it is personal and unknowable and altruisitic. It is a gift that everyone will during their lives give. It is our invisible epitaph.

I could say more and I have gone off topic and left out so much. I urge you to buy this book here .

Urville - curating an imaginary city.

Urville is the creation of the extraordinarily talented Gilles Trehin. Gilles is autistic and has been working on Urville since he was 15 (he is now in his early 40s), designing his imaginary city in beautifully detailed drawings and creating the history that goes alongside it. I have always been fascinated by imaginary cities (it's a subject I expect to revisit often on this blog) and Urville is the most detailed I have discovered, so for museeme I wanted to pay homage to this great achievement and talk a little about how I feel it is both a creation and a curation.

One of the first things I find interesting about Urville in this context is that it is an imaginary city situated in real history. Whilst the physical site of Urville is an island in the meditterranean off the coast of France, the written history is situated very much within the history of France. In this way the city works as an imaginary forum in which to curate the events of French and world history in a new way. The events of history take on a new light in an imaginary realm - we can see how Urville was affected by the French Revolution and WW2; we can see how its buildings reinvented themselves after stock market crashes; we can see how the high rises were affected by September 11th. In this way the fictional city is both acting as an archive (the drawings and designs almost like complex shelves) for real happenings, whilst addressing the issues that affected real cities and their planners post global events.

The city is divided into many areas, and the drawings have been divided into groups for each area in the book version of the project published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. The text that accompanies each drawing is interesting in that whilst describing events (more on that later) a lot of the text comprises of lists of dates and people that have been involved in the particular building or area illustrated. Whatever the reasons behind this, where I find it interesting is again in how this makes the city function as an archive - the imaginary buildings have almost been catalogued by their history and who has been involved with them. One could also see the buildings themselves as items in a collection created by Gilles. In this way I think Urville functions both as an imaginary and a multi-layered archive of real and imagined history, the history of each building and that of those involved, and as a catalogue of the work produced. We are even told what archaeologists might find if they looked under the city - again another layer of potential curation.

This idea of a multi-layered curation of imaginary place is continued for me in how the text tells of any film or book that may have been inspired by something that happened in a certain building or area. In this way the history of the city goes beyond trying to catalogue a physical history to a creative history, from building, to event, to inspiration, to art work. We are aware of imaginary works of art that in themselves also curate the city in our imaginations - curating the curated. We can never see these artworks or read the books set in Urville, but just the knowledge of their imagined existence somehow adds something to our understanding of the city. We know that it is a city that has the potential, just like a real place, to affect the world in many ways.

In the introduction to the Urville book, Uta Frith says that autistic artists are often seen as having an "obsession with the physical world and a neglect of the social". This could be seen in Urville in how the hundreds of people drawn are anonymous like mini statues or that residential areas are not really dealt with - we just see lots of buildings that we guess must be flats and no low rise or townhouses, but I would say that Urville doesn't so much neglect the social as see it through cultural and civic terms. There are enough public squares to make Richard Rogers dance for joy (in many ways Urville looks like his dream city...) and, particularly interesting for this blog, a museum for virtually every aspect of life it is a city of/for curators! We might not see the textile workers, bankers or fisherman and know what they get up to at home, but they each have their museums or, in the case of bankers,  monumental or iconic buildings. Museums also spring up to commemorate historical events, including social history - e.g. a factory might close and its building be turned into a museum about what was made there, in a way socially archiving the city's structure as it changes. It's almost as if the buildings are curating themselves! There are also social aspects in terms of how cultural events are archived - from the grandness of World's Fairs (another future topic) to a yearly Armenian music festival, as well as food and flea markets. Again these can be situated in real social history - he talks of Nirvana and The Pixies. Gilles's attention to detail is extraordinary. Having read the book I feel I know as much about his imaginary city, as I do about many real cities, in some ways making it just as real in my head in terms of how i archive city experience. I have a list of what I'd like to see and do there. I have imagined versions of real cities all over the world based on reading and images, and Urville is just as clear to me.

Dream versions of real cities is one of my pet subjects, and something that continually arises in my own creative work. Urville really fascinates me in this way, partly because as mentioned it is situated in the context of real French history, but also how for me it functions as a dream version of Paris, just as say Calvino's Invisible Cities are all a form of Venice. I know Paris fairly well and it keeps appearing to me as a kind of phantom city as my mind travels around Urville. I don't know whether this similarity is conscious or not - it doesn't really matter - but if we do acknowledge this similarity then it seems to me that Urville could also be seen as a curation of an imaginary Paris - a secret exhibition within Urville for those visitors who have some knowledge of the French capital. Yet unlike Paris, Urville is an island, and I love how in some drawings Gilles has included giant sailing boats, giving the city another level of imagination in that we can imagine where we would sail to from it - we are aware of a world beyond even when immersed in such detail.

Gilles also deals with dream as in utopian views of Urville in the area Cite Utopique. Drawing on a lot of the ideals that led to post world wars estates in many cities, Gilles has included one here, creating an idealised city in intention within his own imaginary city, also curating city planning movements as he does so. Many planning and architectural styles are included in Urville and these are catalogued, including the large 19th rebuild of Urville (echoing Haussmann and Paris) and the current trend for giant towers.

I could go on, and maybe I am stretching things too far, but I not sure it matters. Surely one of the interesting things about imaginary cities and any attempt to analyse them is their ability to trigger an infinite number of ideas that cannot really be proven. The creator might have intended one thing, but then no matter how much they are catalogued they to an extent take on a life of their own. The one thing I am sure of is that Urville is a staggering achievement and one I am sure I will visit in my imagination again and again.

The book version of Urville can be bought here .
Visit Urville at www.urville.com .
I have pasted some images below, but I apologise for the lack of accompanying text and close up detail. I recommend you buy the book!

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects - Review

I stumbled across this little book by accident and was drawn initially by its title and then of how it was a memoir set in 1990s Paris - a city I was fixated with during my own late teens. And it seems the author Stephanie Lacava shared some of my own fixations with characters such as the Marchesa Casati and the clothes of Paul Poiret (the subject of my university thesis), which combined with ruminations on the music of Nirvana and cabinets of curiosities made me instantly like her.

It's a gentle little book whose atmosphere I found comforting, which is interesting in itself seeing that it chronicles a teenage breakdown. But to dwell on that seems to miss the essence of this book somehow. For me it was essentially hopeful - that yes we can sometimes lose it a bit, but rather than a grand solution it is often in the everyday that we find the things that help us - in the case of Stephanie Lacava, the objects she collected.

Starting with a collecting impulse that started as a child, she says "Collecting information and talismans is a way of exercising magical control," and whilst indeed control and order can be helpful when going through something, for me the key word here is "magical". Control is a word that sounds clinical and cold, whereas the power of objects is the opposite of this - they can transform the clinical into the magical - they can help us escape the ordinariness of our lives for dreams of a more exciting one, echoed in this book by how she always felt an outsider but could picture herself hanging out with Lee Miller or Francoise Sagan. Objects can transport you to another place -whether it is a fantasy one or into the past where one feels how you are as a person would make more sense. I could really sympathise with that growing up as a bit of an outsider - as a child I was convinced I should have been born around 1890 in fictional Prince Edward Island (Anne of Green Gables) where flowing dresses and quirky but feisty poetic rural adventures were more in fashion than Bros and pixie boots, I collected accordingly, and this like with Lacava, changed into the same date but Paris, when I wanted a bit more eccentric decadent distraction than was on offer in Somerset.

I guess this isn't turning into a book review as much as a selection of thoughts based on what Lacava says, but for me that was one of the powers of this book - that it really got me thinking about deeper things when its own dealings with this were quite subtle - as a book it encourages one to think deeply and gently rather than shoving ideas in your face, and I loved that about it. It was quirky and feminine rather than shouting look at me I'm so clever I can think all this deep stuff and have illustrations just to prove that I am a boutique book. Yes there are illustrations (and let me qualify after the previous sentence that I am definitely not anti-illustrations - I love them!), but what is interesting here is that whilst they were beautiful little drawings that added to the atmosphere of the book and I would certainly have included them, it was more the footnotes describing the history of certain objects that acted as illustrations of the wider text for me. The drawings were a lovely incidental.

Often I get very annoyed with footnotes in non-academic texts - I find them affected and contrived and a distraction from the main narrative. But in this book Lacava uses them in a way that avoids all this. If we see them as illustrations as well as factual asides, they function as to bring her narrative to life. On its own her narrative is an interesting thoughtful read about finding your place as an awkward  teenager in a foreign country, but despite the personal subject matter I felt that it was in her choice of objects that we really got to know the teenage her. Why do we pick out the details and objects to fixate on that we do? I get so frustrated with people seeing caring about physical stuff as shallow, and it is something that museeme is seeking to address, when it tells us so much and represents so much, and has its own multilayered historical personal narrative. We are what we find interesting, and objects arguably curate people who are interested in them in a collection of narratives.

Going back to the beginning of the book she talks of how children latch on to the security of objects. In her case there is a lovely anecdote about how she bought an acre of rainforest through an environmental scheme (something I also did when I was 11!) and then dreamed of escaping there, in the meantime filling her room with collections of frogs and turning her room into this imagined space through her collections. I think this ties in with what I was saying in a previous post about how as a child collections can aid our imaginations by encouraging dreamworlds, and that rather than unhealthily aiding introspectiveness, they enable an escapism that can be a positive thing - that I would argue is essential to developing into a creative adult. She touches on the danger of being too obsessed with objects to the point where there loss is a catalyst to a downward spiral - I can sympathise with this having most of my stuff in storage and how sometimes I almost physically miss its comfort - but I still don't think this negates the positive. Yes she talks of how she was lonely but at the same time surely it would have been lonelier without the worlds of objects and dream worlds to escape to? Rather than a cautionary tale (not what I think Lacava intended anyway) I see this book as a gentle celebration of stuff - of memory and personal history and hidden stories. Of how we curate our lives and places and memory through objects. This is endlessly fascinating to me.

There is so much that one thinks when reading a book that is inevitably lost by the time one comes to write about it. A book can function like an object in itself - hold forgotten stories and personal thought interactions - take on a new life of its own as each reader brings their own life to its interpretation. Therefore a review of such a book is maybe a false task. Rather I left the reading of this book simply thinking that I would recommend others read it and if nothing else I had found, in the words of Anne of Green Gables, a kindred spirit.

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects by Stephanie Lacava can be bought here
You can check out her website at www.stephanielacava.com