For years he didn’t know why he was chasing down exhausted objects. All that frantic passion for a baseball and he finally understood it was Eleanor on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. Memorabilia. What he remembered, what lived in the old smoked leather of the catcher’s mitt in the basement was the touch of his Eleanor, those were his wife’s eyes in the oval photographs of men with handlebar moustaches. The state of loss, in fact, the facticity in its lonely length.
Don DeLillo, Underworld1
They are part of the repertoire of small escapes, part of the canon of suburbia: the three ceramic ducks, their glazed wings shining in the lamp light, flying away in an ascending line on the living-room walls of countless homes, one bird smaller than the next to suggest distance and perspective, flying across thousands of wallpaper patterns, plain or textured, flowery or rhomboid, winging their way into a better world, towards a little freedom, an assumed, unspoiled nature somewhere beyond these walls.
Their journey is as reassuring as the annual hoarse cries of their live, feathered cousins flying overhead on their transatlantic quest for survival, and they are not alone in evoking that other world into which one can dream oneself for a few stolen seconds: the foxhunt prints, the jolly friar catching the reflection of a sinking sun in a wine glass in his cellar, the stag at bay standing amid primordial woods, the porcelain cats and chubby children and dogs at play, the peasant girl leaning seductively against a haystack. These evocations of an innocent life may be contrasted with objects that conjure up different worlds: stately homes and royalty and commemoration mugs and tea towels, a fictitious rococo flourish in the form of a toilet-roll doll, a vision of carefree bohemia in an oil painting of a Parisian street café brought back from that little stand in Montmartre.
These things are kitsch, tat, not to be admitted by the rules of good taste, which have been unbending and rigid ever since they were changed for the last time by the previous generation. It is easy to despise them and the fact that they are derivative, mere gestures in the direction of art, mass-produced and without originality, too cute and too cuddly and too much imitations of imitations of real art to have any value. But it is the very fact that these gestures can be acquired for a few pounds from a mail-order catalogue which makes them interesting, for this is the consequence of mass production and the beginning of the possibility of collecting in the age of technical reproduction, with all that brings with it. Only with mass production came the idea of the complete set, the full series, the vocabulary of a mentality that until then could not express itself through accumulating things according to arbitrary principles. Before this moment, collectors of art, of natural objects, of shells or coins or scientific instruments or portraits, of antiquities and of books had no way of hoping to achieve completeness. There was no complete set of Greek sculpture, no full series of exotic flowers, no last single bird of paradise to get to finish a collection, no final Raphael drawing to round things off. Collecting was by its very nature open-ended and there were always other pieces, other examples, that could be found and added. Mass production changed all this. Even if infinitely varying Barbie dolls seem to have been produced, even if the little coloured tin tops that sit on champagne corks seem to proliferate without control, we know that their number must be finite, that there were only so many patterns of Meissen produced during the nineteenth century, only so many football cards printed featuring Manchester United players, only so many stamps issued by the newly independent former British colonies. Even if one or more of them should prove elusive for an entire collecting life, in principle the collection can be completed, can achieve its logical destiny – and can consequently cause its creator the greatest trouble as his goal is achieved but his urge to continue far from satisfied.
A creature of mass-production, kitsch allows us to regain a moment of self-possession, the illusion of individuality; by indulging and inviting sentiment in the safety of a storyline, a picture frame or a song, it becomes an effective substitute for feeling at first hand and without a scripted ending. Nothing is safe from kitsch. Even the highest art, especially the highest art, can be kitschified in the twinkle of a heavy-lidded eye and many a great work of art is great because its proximity with kitsch is truly frightening. Who would not see it in Michelangelo’s Pietà, in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony or in Romeo and Juliet? This may well be retrospective, for kitsch as we know it, the word at least, was born in Munich around 1870 when certain art dealers spoke about flogging their factory artworks, of verkitschen, not only to the culture-hungry burghers of an emerging empire, but also to American tourists who wanted German art on the cheap and would often ask non-English-speaking dealers for a ‘sketch’. Kitsch is essentially domestic and domesticates whatever it paints gold with its merciless Midas touch. Even in death and mourning there is a vague sense of titillation, of voyeurism and voluptuousness, as can be witnessed on any nineteenth-century tombstone with its grieving, bare-breasted graces and charming putti. Nothing is beyond its power to domesticate. Its visions of freedom are attractive precisely because there is no risk of it actually becoming real, because they occur in an ideal world, close and wonderful enough to be dreamed of, far enough away not to be actively pursued. Its cosiness, eroticism and exoticism never quite goes away and, under the guise of art and of convention, it gets away with murder.
In our sophisticated times it has become fashionable to collect kitsch, to show superiority by smiling at the naïvety of other periods and classes, half implicated and all the more exonerated for having mastered its appeal. It has, however, one power that is stronger than any other: just as it turns love into a vision too lovely to be spoiled by messy reality, it succeeds in the singular feat of killing death. When St Paul asked in his Letter to the Ephesians (15.55) ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ he did not realize that kitsch could draw its thorn just as effectively as salvation. Kitsch is the death of death, for even the grim reaper becomes a homely figure. Alpine ranges are reduced for tourists to the size of paperweights and divine mysteries are transformed into plastercasts of the Sacred Heart, or into a blond Jesus on the cross, opening and closing his eyes in graceful death pangs as the picture is tilted left and right. Suffering is sweet; agony and ecstasy are revealed to be kinky cousins. Death itself is either drowned in the excess and wide-eyed innocence of the sentimental novel, or simply not allowed his turn at all. And they lived happily ever after.
One way of making the world one’s oyster is to reduce the world to oyster size. This is what kitsch does, as everything beyond human comprehension zooms down to postcard format. If collecting is an art (it can be), then kitsch is not confined to assemblies of garden gnomes, Cinderella dolls or memorabilia of that most tragic of female heroines, the misunderstood Habsburg Empress Elisabeth, Sissi to her friends, the proto-Diana of the nineteenth century, whose legend was blessed even with an early violent death.
Mass-produced objects are the most common face of collecting today, though hardly the most spectacular: the mantelpiece populated by ceramic pigs, the cabinet with Sheffield plate, the album with old city views, the shelf with wineglasses or hat-pins or fluffy animals, the box with old football stubs, theatre programmes or train tickets from around the world; little shrines all of them to different pasts, escapes from the present, assertions of individuality, of longing and of hope. Often they are salvage operations, rescue missions designed to save from extinction something that others would not stoop to pick up or hesitate to throw away. A man collects milk bottles ‘because I saw that people were throwing them away’. Now he has thousands of them, classified according to origin and age, a British geography in milk bottles and a garden shed transformed.
Robert Opie, one of the best-known of the devotees of the everyday, collects food packaging and household ephemera. In his house in Ealing, west London, and in a museum in Gloucester, Opie has an estimated 500,000 items of packaging and household goods-related packaging, advertising, matchboxes, etc. He describes his own childhood as an apprenticeship during which he learned from his parents, renowned collectors of children’s books and childhood lore. He went through the usual stages of stamp and coin collecting until, he describes, he found himself one day eating a packet of Munchies.
I suddenly looked at the pack and thought, ‘If I throw this away I will never, ever, see it again, and yet there is a whole wealth of history.’ The sudden realization came to me that this was something I should be saving, and I thought what an enormous part of social history I was about to throw away. That packet was going to be priced at seven pence, it would soon be priced at eight pence, or whatever it was. Yet I was about to throw it away, damage it. I knew I should be saving these things. The next packet was a McVitie’s one. From that time on I have saved every packet that I’ve consumed the contents of.2
Opie admits that not in his wildest dreams could he have conceived that his ‘Munchies moment’ would mushroom into a large house filled with household ephemera, plus a warehouse and two museum spaces, several exhibitions, a series of books and a steady business selling nostalgic images and renting out objects to period film productions. In doing all this, he sees himself as a pioneer.
It’s rather like climbing Everest: since time immemorial someone’s been trying to get to the top, but who is the pioneer? Is it the man who actually got to the summit first, or is it the man who made it to Base One? It’s the same with packaging … I see myself in relation to all those other people who have done these crazy sort of things. Unless you do these crazy things you don’t start to understand. Sending a man to the moon may have been perceived as the most stupid thing imaginable, but think of all the benefits of that technological leap.
The lady walking along the Rotterdam street was horrified when a small, middle-aged man she had never seen before approached her and started talking about her high-heeled boots. She started abusing him roundly, calling him a pervert, a dirty old man. It took him a long time to explain to her that it was not her he was interested in, but her boots alone, fine examples of craftsmanship and design, a valuable addition to his collection. He was Arnold de Wit. Eventually she relented, and promised him the pair of boots as soon as she would no longer have any use for them. The de Wit shoe collection in Rotterdam is usually added to not as a consequence of desperately misconstruable approaches on the open street, but at antique fairs. The main corpus of the former cobbler’s treasures is formed by miniature footwear made of porcelain, leather, metal, and so forth, everything, in fact, that is small: model shoes, baby shoes, Chinese shoes for bound feet, shoe matchboxes, shoe inkwells and pincushions, and Victorian ladies’ boots. Despite this clear priority, he finds it difficult to ignore a pair of masterworks being ground thin on the pavement when he sees them. Shoes are no ordinary items of apparel, he explains. Many people have an almost ritualistic relationship with their footwear. Buying it and caring for it is more than just a necessity, it is a form of devotion. The objects in his collection allow their owner to walk into other people’s lives. There is the pair of first Communion shoes worn by one M. G. Jonckbloedt on 26 April 1896, that pretty pair of wedding shoes that belonged to a Mrs de Bont and worn on 12 July 1894; there are all the aspirations and hopes and moments of beauty bound up in children’s shoes and porcelain shoes, going-out shoes and evening shoes. Given that none of his children shows any promise in keeping the collection going his greatest wish is to see his shoes go to a museum, to be preserved for the nation. ‘I could make myself rich,’ he admits, ‘by turning my collection over to an American, but I cannot do it, I am too much of a collector for this. ’3
While Opie collects inedible food (given the fact that the boxes promising nourishment are usually empty), others collect unwearable shoes, medals that were not awarded to them, doorknobs and keys without doors to be opened by them, orange wrappers without oranges inside, numberplates which no longer identify any cars, dolls without girls to play with them, holy water fonts that no longer dispense holy water, thimbles that have stopped shielding against pinpricks and hat-pins without hats to pin to elaborate coiffures. Their uselessness vis-à-vis their previous existence, in which they had a purpose in the context of things, stands out and unifies them into collected objects, taken out of circulation and pinned up like butterflies, regarded now as specimens, as ‘examples of’, as links to another realm of history, of authenticity, of beauty. Collected objects lose their utilitarian value (there are exceptions, of course) and gain another one, are imbued with meaning and qualities of representation beyond their original station.
Whether and to what extent they also retain their symbolic value (the nourishment of food, the fetish value of shoes, the poignancy of baby clothes, the glory of combat and distinction represented by medals, the liberating key, etc.) is a question that is tempting but impossible to answer. How significant is it that someone who was locked up in a Stalinist labour camp for five years starts collecting keys, that a woman surrounds herself with dolls, recordings of matinée idols or Princess Diana memorabilia or teapots, or that a man collects Princess Diana memorabilia or, indeed, model railway sets, erotic art or weapons? (And what, inversely, does it indicate that one hardly ever finds a man collecting dolls or embroidery samplers, a woman devoting her life to machine tools and steam engines?) In the case of Wolf Stein, the Amsterdam book collector who had been first in hiding and then in a concentration camp until he was seventeen and who invited me into his house, the connection was immediate and clear: ‘I didn’t have much of a formal education in my youth and I always hope I may make up for it if I read all these.’ Other collectors can only themselves answer this question, especially if their area of interest is less symbolically obvious and concerns itself with high art, or postcards, typewriters or ethnographic objects. What is certain is only that the collected objects have a value for the individual collector that only other collectors can understand.
The question of value is intriguing in itself. As often as not the objects collected are the cast-offs of society, overtaken by technological advance, used and disposable, outmoded, disregarded, unfashionable. There may be an avid (and, indeed, carefully fuelled) market in Swatch watches and Beanie Babies, but that marketing is based itself on the consumer understanding that the current series will one day no longer be produced, will become unavailable. When the Pokémon craze filled children’s rooms of this world with costly and ugly dolls and swapping cards, the producers of these toys, cursed by parents everywhere, showed great insight in choosing their slogan: Gotta catch ’em all! For grown-ups there is a similar market: the collector’s edition, items produced explicitly for collectors and not for use, watches, in other words, that are never intended to show the time to someone needing to know, teddy bears that will be kept away from the messy paws of children, and heritage teacups not at any time intended for any tea. This is the apotheosis of consumption; the utilitarian object that is intended not to have a use, but to be placed on a shelf, skipping the phase of circulation and utilization altogether. While these can be bought at predetermined prices, other items have value only in certain circles, among a group of initiates whose rules and knowledge are deeply arcane and shared by only a few.
What, then, makes a collected object valuable – why is someone prepared to pay a small fortune for a stamp that is no longer valid, for an empty matchbox that missed the rubbish bin only because its last user had a poor aim, for a bottle that has not contained any wine for decades? All these are useless, have lost their value as objects that do anything in and of themselves. Their value can lie only, if not in their usefulness, then in their significance; they mean something, stand for something, carry associations that make them valuable in the eye of the collector. As carriers of significance their uselessness is an asset.4 Like the bound feet of Chinese women and the long fingernails of the Mandarins, the very fact that they are not suited for any practical purpose enhances their value as being purely representational. It is not what they are but what they stand for, the promise they contain. In this sense, every collected object is not just a relic from the world in which it had a practical application, but a holy relic, just as the arm of Theresa of Avila is not valued for its muscle tissue and bone content or its ability, now lost, to carry things and to be formed into one half of a pair of folded hands; it is not as an arm that it is venerated but as an object imbued with saintliness, with otherworldliness, as a key to heaven, to a world infinitely richer than our everyday existence. The objects in a collection connect us with something far away.
Relics form a bridge with heaven and immortality; other objects bridge space (the exotica in the Wunderkammer, such as ostrich eggs or coconuts), bridge time (historical artefacts and ensembles of them), our distance from nature (birds’ eggs, for example) or from genius (the work of great artists), etc. At the same time a collection establishes authority over the chosen area, for it is the collector to whom it falls to classify, to include or exclude, to chose. Every object in a collection has to have a significance to be admitted into the fold. A stone may be desirable in a mineralogical collection because of its rare composition, in a regional collection because it is typical of its origin, a handful of gravel as an example of what gravel looks like. A church may be interested in a stone because it belonged to its original foundations, or because it was thrown at St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. It may also be thought valuable, as by one anonymous collector, because the Empress Elisabeth, Sissi, of Austria had stumbled over it. The collector in question was not interested in the stone as stone and would have bought a rake if that had been the imperial obstacle. In much the same way, the other collectors seek a special significance in the object, and it is only this meaning it carries that transfers value to it. It is this moment of transcendence, of the possession of transcendence, that makes every collected object, be it a matchbox or a martyr’s fingernail, valuable. Every collected item is, to some extent, a totem.
It was mass production that allowed a broad range of people to indulge their fancy by filling the world with a multitude of cheap things. This was the moment of the democratization of collecting. Whereas the fashion for naturalia and artificialia required connections and money in order to obtain exotic specimens of birds, stones or plants, or to buy works of art, to commission artists with original work and grave-robbers with excavations, mass-produced objects could be collected by the very kind of people for whom they had been made: ordinary people.
The charm of the endlessly produced consumer article has its flip side, of course. The gained availability goes hand in hand with a loss of authenticity, and the hunger for the real, the unique and the rare becomes ever stronger. Collectors search for limited editions, for rare misprints, first editions, and objects with interesting faults precisely because they re-establish this uniqueness, while others turn their back on the mass market altogether and collect things that are not and cannot be mass produced: antiquities and old masters, seashells, butterflies. Nothing, in fact, is more important than regaining this authenticity and through this hunger for the original there will always be a market supplying fakes, things made to appear like something they are not (though these, incidentally, are collected too). Collector and forger live in uneasy proximity.
The three ducks are still suspended in their eternal flight towards freedom and the beauty of nature. They do not really form a collection (though there are those who collect them), nor are they part of a larger collection in the strict sense of the word; and yet they belong here as much as they belong on the walls of so many living rooms. Not only are they potential collections, they embody many of the traits that can be found in larger collections; they belong to the strange class of objects that bind their possessors intellectually and emotionally to another world. They are not alone. Next to them, a little lower, on the mantelpiece, is a pair of dancing dolls, a Spaniard in a torero outfit and a woman with flamenco dress and castanets. Their skin is pink moulded plastic and their costumes made from polyester glued on to the bodies. Lips and eyes are painted in red, white and black. The woman holds her castanets aloft and seems to be twirling round while looking at her partner seductively, her emerald green dress in spectacular ruffles; the man stands in the proud pose of the bullfighter, red cape and sword in hand as if to deliver the coup de grâce to her, comically elegant with his high trousers and tiny jacket. They were purchased in Barcelona, in Seville or in Madrid, or in one of thousands of other locations throughout Spain, during a holiday some years ago. Now they are that holiday, solitary representatives of ten days of a different life, a brief sojourn in another world.
