2023-12-30 11:52:50
In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, we actually have to expect that analog collecting of things – and perhaps also art – will soon die out. Characterized by omnipresent algorithmization and automation, we actually experience a loss of authenticity every day, which will gradually lead to alienation not only from the real counterpart, but also from objects and their stories.
“Things are poles of calm in life,” writes the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book “Undinge”. “Things stabilize human life by giving it continuity.” Unlike the smooth surface of the smartphone, lived material gives objects a presence that activates the entire surrounding space. Things – especially beautifully designed, historically charged objects, and this certainly doesn’t only apply to works of art – can develop an almost magical power.
Han is pessimistic: Today this magic is being lost, just as stories are becoming more and more “narratives in consumer form”. Instead of creating community through true narratives, products for community-oriented customers are artificially emotionally charged: “Storytelling is storyselling,” writes Han in his new book “The Crisis of Narration.”
also read
But no matter how skilfully the philosopher cultivates the field of late capitalist man and sprinkles his own cultural pessimism with fertilizer from poetic-lucid main sentences: are his theses really true? How is it that the digitally deformed person has not renounced objects and their narrative patina – but that they continue to like touching things, identifying with them and even collecting them?
That he still gives in to the age-old urge to pick out a particular theme from all the things in the world and hunt and hoard its physical manifestations, often for life? Whether stamps or wines, works of art, design objects or antiques, white vases, old computers, illuminated signs or sand: Apparently there is nothing that is not worth accumulating and staging, that does not carry an amazing story and becomes more fascinating in its accumulated aesthetics.
Time capsules, life companions, memory carriers
The Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt has dedicated itself to this phenomenon and, for the exhibition “What we collect,” asked thirty designers from the Frankfurt region what they collect privately – as “time capsules, life companions, keepsakes or simply spontaneous discoveries.” The result is a lively, concentrated combination of everyday objects that are freed from their inconspicuousness in their collective appearance.
also read
They are accompanied by personal stories, which often go back to childhood: Franziska Holzmann’s “Hello Kitty” collection began with her school friend from Tokyo, who introduced her to Japanese culture. Katharina Pennoyer’s passion for Thonet chairs began with her great-great-great-grandmother’s examples, which stood out of reach high up on the shelf at home.
Martin Schwember got his first banana sticker at eleven, when he was still living in Chile and thought there was only one brand called Doyle – his hunting instinct was sparked when he came to Germany a year later and saw how many other brands from all over the world countries had immortalized themselves on stickers. And Isabel Naegele raves about sponges: “They are cute, mostly very colorful things, available for little money, that promise us perfect cleanliness and whisper big promises on the transparent wrappings like ‘extra thorough’, ‘mega clean’, ‘ultra absorbent’, ‘très efficace’, ‘ergonomic’, ‘non-scratch’, ‘antibac’ or ‘extreme scrub’”.
The fact that 30 designers not only design the environment themselves, but also focus their attention on things that would otherwise get lost in the noise of everyday life, shows that not everything that has to do with real, often quite insignificant objects and their stories will disappear – that collecting gives things a presence and meaning that would otherwise hardly be visible. A sponge alone doesn’t catch the eye, but a colorful pile of sponges looks like a cheerful city landscape in which you can imagine small UFOs and foam clouds.
The important role of museums
Of course, it’s not just banal things that gain meaning through collecting. Also and above all, art is enhanced through accumulation: an isolated sewn figure by Louise Bourgeois appears lost when it stands there without context. What is then missing is the narrative embedding that spins the threads of her story much further in dialogue with other works and thus gives it more weight. That is exactly the official task of a museum: to collect, research, preserve and communicate – in short: to use contextualized art objects to create narratives that open doors to knowledge and further stories. It’s a principle that can basically be applied to anyone who doesn’t just hoard crazy stuff, but has committed themselves to an obsession that they pursue with meticulousness and curiosity. Every single thing suddenly takes on an aura and a very personal, unique story.
In fact, the leap from collected everyday objects to art is not that far. The Hello Kitty cat on pink bags and hair clips, for example, does not seem at first glance like an object to which one has to attribute deep meanings. Nevertheless, Japanese “cuteness” is a phenomenon that has made cultural history – Yoshitomo Nara’s grim-looking children’s characters and Takashi Murakami’s piercingly smiling sunny faces would otherwise be unthinkable. The cheerful and the evil are close together here – an old myth that works in popular culture as well as in art. By the way, artists are often the most obsessive collectors of all. In their apartments there are entire armadas of plastic superheroes, historical circus photographs, computer games, outsider art, folk monster masks from the Alps, records, crystals – such patinated things often form the foundation for their parallel worlds in which virtual and real fantasies, old and your own stories are not a contradiction.
Everything we collect is brought together in the museum
Source: Museum of Applied Arts/Photo: Günzel/Rademacher
In general, fine art is perhaps the best example of why collecting is by no means threatened with extinction – which one might well think with all the remote-controlled investors who accumulate works of art like stocks and then sell them off again. But the impulse to collect is not lost, nor is the meaning of art. Works of art are symbols of how artists perceive, interpret and transform their surroundings and their inner lives.
They develop their strength especially when they are not alone. Collecting art is about making connections and uncovering narratives. This requires curiosity, intuition, knowledge and passion – and above all, perseverance. “Since I started collecting, I think more,” is how the Hamburg art collector Harald Falckenberg, who died at the beginning of November, once put it.
also read
He did it with radical, socially critical and imaginative works by Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Hirschhorn and many others, through which he gave “civil disobedience” a space full of dialogic cross-references that is still unparalleled worldwide today. Falckenberg showed: Collecting is an attitude, even a counter-attitude, to the world – and yes, especially to one that is becoming increasingly digital and commercial.
What we collect. Until April 7, 2024 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt
#age #algorithms #phenomenon #collecting #mania #Museum #Applied #Arts #Frankfurt