Donohue, 'Cultures of Collecting', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9506
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9506-donohue-cultures

@@@@95.6.8, Elsner/Cardinal edd., Cultures of Collecting

John Elsner, Roger Cardinal (edd.), <i>The Cultures of
Collecting</i>. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Pp. viii + 312; ills. $39.95 (hb). ISBN 0-674-17992-7. $18.95
(pb). ISBN 0-674-17993-5.
     Reviewed by A.A. Donohue -- Bryn Mawr College

     This anthology, assembled by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal,
merits review in <i>BMCR</i> not because Elsner is a scholar of
classical art, but because collecting has played a central role
in the post-classical recovery of the antique world. The
materials that classical scholars use as evidence in a variety of
fields reflect, quite directly, the interests and attitudes of
collectors. We would know less than we do of Greek culture had it
not been for the Roman penchant for collecting and documenting
Greek art; we shall have fewer opportunities to develop classical
studies if we lose the legitimate popular interest in antiquity
that is encouraged by responsible museum exhibitions. There is
every reason for us to inform ourselves about "the cultures of
collecting".

     In view of the importance of the subject, the collection of
essays under review is especially disappointing. The editors have
attempted to define the topic as broadly as possible, offering "a
<i>bricolage</i> of theoretical, descriptive and historical
papers whose collective ambition is . . . to lay bare a
phenomenon at once psychological and social" (5).
<i>Bricolage</i> is still a critically fashionable notion, but
this anthology recalls not the structuralist rigor of its
Levi-Straussean semantic range, but rather the dubious expedients
of do-it-yourself odd jobs. The essays are uneven in quality; the
selection is not, in the end, collectively illuminating; the
standards of production are low.

     The contributions are a mixed bag in terms of subject,
depth, and clarity. The anthology begins with a section of Jean
Baudrillard's <i>Le systeme des objets</i> (1968) that approaches
collecting as a "way of dealing with objects" (8). This simple
premise grounds a coherent and still persuasive analysis of the
interlocking social mechanisms by which consumer society replaces
human values and relationships with material objects; he sees as
the outcome of this displacement an imprisoning social structure
that stinks of perversion at every level. Baudrillard's
theoretical treatment is followed by two studies of collecting in
a consumeristic age. The editors' own interview with Robert Opie,
who is famed for his collections of materials relating to
packaging and advertising, is surprisingly flat, but it does
offer some pleasant looniness: "[I]f I did a display of a
thousand sugar wrappers, how many people are going to stop and
look at them, except to think 'God, how stupid!' I'd much rather
have a hundred <i>Bovril</i> jars!" (34). John Windsor ("Identity
Parades") contrasts bad, Western fetishistic collecting with
Japanese and Vedic practices, which brim with enlightenment.
Moralizing aside, he is an acute observer whose choice of
examples is diverting (perhaps an illustration would have
clarified the relevance of the Thurn und Taxis phallic birthday
cake [62]), and the essay effectively develops some of the points
outlined by Baudrillard.

     Individual accumulation moves into the realm of art with
Cardinal's "Collecting and Collage-making: The Case of Kurt
Schwitters". Increasing attention is being paid to the position
of collage at the center of complex social and artistic issues
(see now C. Poggi, <i>In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism,
and the Invention of Collage</i>, New Haven and London 1992). The
most valuable part of Cardinal's essay is his argument that the
components of Schwitters' Merz compositions show him to have been
an engaged social critic; there is merit in seeing the collage as
"a literal slice of history" (84). 

     Several essays focus on specific episodes in the history of
Western collecting. The most straightforward is Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann's tracing of the path "From Treasury to Museum" in the
case of the collections of the Austrian Habsburgs; it concludes
with a useful consideration of the role of these holdings in the
emergence of art history as a discipline. Elsner's discussion of
Sir John Soane's house and museum treats a fascinating chapter in
the nineteenth-century recovery, documentation, interpretation,
and display of archaeological material; the existence of two
conventions for models of monuments, which can show either the
current state or a reconstruction, is rightly emphasized. The
historiographic analysis of Soane's project, both the visual
materials and related texts, is more coherent than the author's
somewhat forced attempt to read it as "A Collector's Model of
Desire". Anthony Alan Shelton's essay "Cabinets of Transgression:
Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World"
is similarly weakened by runaway discourse. The idea of
"transgression" is never satisfactorily explained in terms of the
context in question. The highly interesting discussion of
categories of aesthetic worth is hijacked by the author's
condemnation of the rapaciousness of the Spanish conquistadors;
on p. 190 we find, "The New World's material products that most
attracted the Spaniards were items that closely corresponded with
the canons of taste they had inherited from medieval thought;
indigenous concepts of worth, often based on materials or
artefacts not valued in Europe, were of limited interest." Yet on
p. 194, in the midst of a contemporary balance-sheet of plunder,
appears the observation that the green stones called
chalchihuites are "held in greatest esteem among the Indians,
more than emeralds are by us". This passage suggests that the
Spanish did, in a rudimentary and self-serving way, attempt to
comprehend different systems of value. Blame should not attach to
the fact that the invaders saw the beauties of Aztec feather-work
through the only aesthetic means available to them (191); blame
belongs to the imperialist enterprise itself. Shelton's account
of the European collection of the New World is nevertheless
informative and thought-provoking, and should be read by anyone
interested in the Roman appropriation of Greece. Susan Stewart's
essay on Charles Willson Peale raises intriguing questions in the
course of arguing that his art and his collections were attempts
to transcend death and time. John Forrester's discussion of Freud
and collecting touches on many aspects of the correspondences
between analysis and archaeology, a relationship made famous by
Freud's fantasy of Rome as "a psychical entity". Most surprising
is the poignance of Freud's love for his objects: "Every piece or
item in each of his collections thus represented a paternal
figure standing guard over the mysterious feminine. And every
successful act of analysis of them represented an Oedipal
victory" (251). The essay ends, touchingly, with Freud's
recollection of a childhood nightmare involving bird-headed
people, juxtaposed with an illustration of his falcon-headed
Horus figurine, which is a fake. The final essay, Naomi Schor's
"Collecting Paris", is an unsatisfactory revision of her article
in <i>Critical Inquiry</i> on Parisian postcards of the turn of
the century; she herself calls it a "(light) version" of the
earlier text (299).

     None of the essays is helped by the indifferent editing, the
awkwardness of placing the notes at the end of the volume with
scarcely any indication of the pages to which they refer, and the
abysmal quality of the illustrations. Line drawings are sometimes
legible, but everything else is too muddy for the reader to be
able to follow any point made by the authors. Some illustrations
even seem not to be referred to at all, a demonstration of the
wallpaper principle of book decoration that has no place in a
volume purporting to treat images seriously.

     The sloppiness that characterizes the production of the book
is also clear in its conception. Although several of the
individual essays have worth, the volume as a whole fails to
inspire productive questions. The editors have embraced so wide,
so all-inclusive a notion of "collecting" that there remains no
human activity that lies outside its bounds. It would have been
possible to go beyond the traditional histories of the "great
canonical collections" (4) without sacrificing focus, because, as
some of the essays demonstrate, there does exist a solid basis
for historical, sociological, psychological, and any number of
other kinds of analyses. Mieke Bal, in her otherwise opaque
"Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting", makes
an important point: in noting the difficulties raised by trying
to define "collecting", she wonders whether "these attempts at a
priori definition are themselves contingent on a view of
knowledge that is ultimately at stake in the problem of
collecting" (99). This is precisely the point on which the
anthology as a whole should have turned, precisely the point that
the editors should have addressed. Their refusal to engage with
the problems inherent in the category of "collecting", however,
implies that they see it as a unitary, if diverse, phenomenon;
that is to say, many "cultures", but one "collecting". It is a
conception that invites two kinds of errors: the failure to
consider historical context; and the confusion of individual with
group experience. It would be possible explicitly to reject the
methodological principles which define these errors as errors,
but the editors fail to do so, leaving the <i>bricolage</i> to
fall where it may.

     To begin the volume with Baudrillard implicitly establishes
his 1968 critique of consumeristic collecting in the position of
the theoretical key to all forms of collecting, which it is not.
It is a document of its age, a time when a group like the "Vienna
Action Analysis Commune" would stand on stage and shout at the
audience, "All consumers must leave!" One sees the point, but the
question is whether Baudrillard's analysis, dependent on the
particular state of the consumer society that gave rise to it, in
any sense furnishes a basis for considering "collecting" in other
historical and economic contexts. The very concept of "object",
of that which is the focus of collecting, is far from stable or
universal.

     There are also significant problems with the notion that
collecting on the individual level and collecting on the
institutional level occupy places on a single conceptual
continuum.  This fallacy leads to nonsense that is no less
inexcusable for its foolishness: "The Holocaust is collecting's
limit case; for it combines the pathology of the compulsive
individual, who will not compromise to attain his end and who
innovates by finding a perversely new series to be collected,
with all the norms and powers of totalitarianism. Yet one wonders
whether the latterday Nazi hunters, fifty years on, are not
possessed of the same collector's zeal" (4).

     Probably the editors were correct in declining to suggest
any coherence in an incoherent body of material. The specific
question of Western institutional collecting, however, demands
more than an ultimately trivial approach to the historical and
phenomenological questions it poses, and the materials for such
an analysis lie close to hand. 

     Nicholas Thomas begins his essay on the publications of
Cook's Pacific voyages by asking, "Given the degree of manifest
preoccupation with the newly-discovered peoples," "why . . . were
ethnographic artefacts . . . illustrated through engravings in
which particular pieces were highly decontextualized?" (118). The
obvious answer is that such illustrations follow the conventions
of illustration for artifacts such as classical antiquities, but
Thomas (130) chooses not to trace this course, preferring to
explore connections with natural history illustration. I would
suggest that no either-or choice is necessary, and that the
explanation of the phenomenon leads to regions more disquieting
than the "Licenced Curiosity" proposed by Thomas. For the natural
world, no less than the world of human culture, is subject to the
process dissected by Renato Rosaldo: "imperialist nostalgia", in
which "people mourn the passing of what they themselves have
transformed" (<i>Culture and Truth</i>, Boston 1989, 1993, 69).
To clarify the role of institutional collection and documentation
in this process, we may return to the "limit case" of the
Holocaust. This time, however, let us consider it not as
collecting of an individual, pathological type raised to a
monstrous scale, but rather in institutional terms. In the course
of her "report on the banality of evil", Hannah Arendt
parenthetically remarked that "an eagerness to establish museums
commemorating their enemies was very characteristic of the Nazis.
During the war, several services competed bitterly for the honor
of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries" (<i>Eichmann
in Jerusalem</i>, New York 1963, 33). She is referring to
projects such as the Nazi "Central Jewish Museum" in Prague and
its macabre "collections" and exhibitions, assembled through
murder and curated by slave labor (for a brief history, see D.
Altshuler, ed., <i>The Precious Legacy. Judaic Treasures from the
Czechoslovak State Collections</i>, New York 1983, 24-38). Arendt
sees the Nazi activity as a "strange craze", but she might well
have analyzed this phenomenon of the Holocaust, too, in terms of
banality--in other words, craze, perhaps, but strange, no. The
message of The Museum to those whose artifacts it collects may,
in the end, be quite simple: Your culture is dead. If this is the
case, the collections which we like to think preserve the life of
the past are nothing else than mechanisms of death, and the rush
to valorize contemporary life by committing it to museums should
make us all uneasy.