Sojourns in another world, a world that is inhabited only by the imagination of the collector and at the same time also forms part of another realm, be it memory or imagination, beauty or genius, are the promise of every collector’s cabinet, of the enclosed space in which he takes refuge and where he himself is demiurge and ultimate arbiter, deciding over admission and expulsion, over order and arrangement, over value and beauty. It is not incidental that this paragraph uses male pronouns only, for there is a marked difference between female and male collectors. Although overall slightly more women describe themselves as collectors,1 the majority of those whose lives are taken over by their collections, who live for it and are dominated by its demands, are men. It seems fruitless to launch into generalizations here, but a few observations may serve to sketch out this phenomenon.
If for the last 3,000 years women had dominated Western societies and had relegated men to the position of useful if brutish servants and occasional lovers, our world might be very much more happy, more harmonious and more medieval. The single-minded pursuit of one idée fixe to the exclusion of everything else, and the accompanying phenomena of isolation, fierce competition, the overpowering will to win, an atrophying of empathy, seem to be associated with the male psyche. It takes a certain mind-set to devote one’s entire life to the development of a modified watch movement that is slightly more accurate or can withstand a little more shaking. This tunnel-vision mentality has spurned the technical inventions as well as wars (indeed, many inventions useful to us are a byproduct of warfare). Both great innovations and encyclopaedic collections take a mind prepared to live in seclusion and just keep chipping away at the impossibility of the task. The male of the species seems not yet to have emerged entirely out of the proverbial garden shed, the only place in which some men seem to be comfortable and truly to be themselves, left to whatever hobby they have taken up as an excuse for being alone. One of the founding fathers of the American space programme, Werner von Braun, had gained his rocket-building expertise in Nazi Germany designing the V1 and V2 missiles used to bomb London. In pursuing his obsession with rocket flight he was oblivious to (or simply uninterested in) whether he was in the American desert researching to put a man on the moon in the name of freedom and democracy, or whether he was working for Hitler and exploiting slave labourers killed by the thousand. It takes this mind-set, its voluntary seclusion and single-minded pursuit of one goal and one goal only, to keep on going oblivious of the consequences. Men seem to be more comfortable with, or more in need of, the hunt, and with the business of conquest and possession, with the loneliness of this task and with submission to its demands, with social and intellectual hierarchies. Military metaphors come to mind when describing such arrangements: an army of things, objects regimented on the shelves, all lined up like soldiers. The mirror image of this obsession is the painstaking identification and strict classification of objects into hierarchies and systems. The characteristics of emotional paucity and the language of collecting overlap in many ways: holding on to one’s feelings, bottling up, being retentive, not letting go.
The whole phenomenon of retreat into a world of predictable patterns and away from an environment of social complexity and competing claims for attention and for love brings to mind autism, and, indeed, the majority of those suffering from this condition are boys and men. While the autistic spectrum reaches from mild eccentricity to severe disability, one clinical condition in particular, Asperger’s Syndrome, the least severe of the autistic disorders, serves to illustrate this point. This syndrome is characterized by a whole range of symptoms: a resistance to change, relying on repeating patterns, stilted speech, immersion into arcane topics, such as transport timetables, which assume great importance, and collecting series of objects worthless to others.2 While the most severe form of autism shows only a slight male bias in the distribution of cases, at the highest ability levels, at the most ‘normal’ and functional end of the spectrum, the ratio can be as high as fifteen to one.3 This, of course, is not to say that collecting is inherently autistic any more than that it is inherently male, or that collectors cannot be rounded human beings with thriving personal relationships, but the similarity is arresting and can be transferred to other predominantly male activities. How many woman anglers can one count sitting by the river alone on any given day?
‘I used to be a fisherman from years back,’ says Alex Shear, the Noah of American life. ‘I lived on the rivers.’ He is not, to his mind, a collector. ‘I don’t like the term “collector”,’ he explains. ‘I’m a cultural anthropologist, some kind of picker. The guy who is doing a dig in Pompeii, is he known as a collector? Obviously not.’ To Shear, the entire United States are a Pompeii under whose lava of lost identities and corporate lifestyle one can unearth the true, the innocent America of the 1950s, the time of his own childhood. His monumental task of rescuing this civilization has led him to accumulate not one but a multitude of collections, all numbered and categorized, roughly, in chapters of his own devising.
‘My job is to be the steward of innocence,’ Shear states simply. ‘My pieces are pure, they have nothing to say. There has to be a place that is as close to pure as possible and away from the cerebral manipulations and the politicizing. I have America’s only known lifestyle archive.’
This archive of the American Soul contains everything that post-war wealth in the United States produced, imagined and feared: oversized jars of mustard and fallout shelters, hundreds of Barbie dolls and Flamingo-brand bobby pins, wooden templates for cast-iron manhole covers, Pop Brand radios and elaborate hair-drying contraptions, ‘Glo-Glo’ boots and food blenders, rows of suitcases with salesmen’s samples from colourful telephones to miniature swimming pools, fairground bumper cars and homely toasters, advertisements for washing machines (‘Just Like Electric Mummy’) and bathing caps (one labelled ‘Aqua Original Exclusive Mermaid Millinery Creation’).
More than most other collectors his passion has its roots very immediately in his own biography. A highly successful product designer who would scour flea markets for ideas and trends, Shear found his ideas plagiarized and had to go to court over copyright infringements, an experience that was both cathartic and traumatic and formed his idea of the country he was living in more strongly than any other experience. The deceit and unfairness, he calls it rape, which he witnessed caused him to re-evaluate his life. Before long, he says,
I was buying substitutions for people in terms of character and integrity. During my case I threw out all my address books because my friends abandoned me and believed these huge companies. I traded all this stuff in for people. You have a major crisis in life, you find yourself in court like a Kafka novel. I started thinking about this and this was very very disturbing and when the fog lifted I had all these objects and I wanted to somehow build my world with character. This stuff was so pure and beautiful with the honesty and the integrity, everything I didn’t see in humans. I built my perfect world. I started with a beautiful dream, I went through meditation. I was seeking truth. I was not satisfied, so I kept going east. I’m like a patriot but I don’t wave flags, I just buy stuff.
The ‘stuff’ Shear has bought already, more than 100,000 objects to date, fills several warehouses. It is a search for innocence through the innocence of pure consumerism and a rescue mission with eschatological urgency. ‘We have so much here, and because we’re so teenage in our culture we don’t take ourselves seriously. This is what I’m trying to preserve: the ages of innocence. Human character gets lost and values become less important. I go and seek those inanimate objects that have the characters we all used to have, like honesty, integrity.’
He is quick to acknowledge the direct connection his obsession has with his own life. Son of a toy wholesaler and fad-spotter who would fill his warehouse with whatever he thought might become the next hot thing, from Betty Boop dolls to Hula Hoops, from yo-yos to Flexible Flyer sleds, Alex and his twin brother were allowed to play with these toys only if they replaced them afterwards, undamaged and in their original packaging.
The warehouse was a lending library – I never had a sense of ownership. When I saw those toys again, in the flea markets, I wanted to own them. I had an intense nostalgia experience, and I basically began buying back my father’s warehouse. I had my dad’s entire listing of accounts in my head, and I bought them all back. It was very exciting, and I knew that something was going on, not consciously, but I knew something was going on. There was something about that process of going out looking for the missing pieces. I revisited my father thousands of times through this stuff.
Even as a child, he says, he could communicate with his father only through the things in the warehouse.
Being a twin, too, was an experience he found difficult to deal with.
When society sees you as a unit, you have a job that’s bigger than you. I dislike being ‘alike’ so much that that’s why I always climb up the back side of the mountain – there’s too much traffic on the front. I used to answer to my brother’s name, because I didn’t know who I was. Will Alex Shear please stand up? I always used to fantasize that a guy in a fifties Argyle sweater would stand up, and the sweater would be empty. It was in the fields that I started to find myself, and I believe that in those fields are many of the answers to this life. Is my collection autobiographical? You’d better believe it. A lot of my life is in the stuff.
Shear’s stocktaking of an American life, though, was only one aspect of his attempt to possess the American Dream, through the familiar household items of the nation’s supposed Golden Age. Part of this project, he explains, is to define the cracks in the veneer, the obscure chapters that were never supposed to happen and are therefore all the more revealing:
I buy failures. I have a terrific collection of them. During the Gulf War I collected cases of Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell dolls that were made in China. Cases! They have Asian eyes. I have African-American Barbies with tattoos on. Well, the families went wild and they had lots of recalls, very expensive for Mattel. I’m still looking for Asian Barbies. That would make my day. I have cases of Coca-Cola plastic cans that have all shrunk. Why is this important? Well, Coke doesn’t make mistakes. This is important for kids. This is why this has to be catalogued.
The paradoxes that shape a great nation are close to his heart: failures in the land that worships success, purity in the great melting-pot, innocence amid the reality of corporate America. To Shear, they are not contradictions: somewhere amid the 1,200 categories and subcollections (one is tempted to think of Rudolf II’s Mannerist project) is the essence of America, the spirit that has been lost is preserved in their integrity. It took Shear a decision to end an unloved job as an accountant and then as an executive at Macey’s to find his true vocation:
Then I realized that the thing I love is stuff, and that it speaks to me, and it’s the soul of America – these things that came out of the home of the average Joe and Jane – and there is something quintessentially American about them, and they somehow have to be saved, because I have never seen anything like them in the Smithsonian or anywhere else, and when I look at these things they begin to make sense to me as the embodiment of American can-do, American innovativeness, Yankee ingenuity, build-a-better-mousetrap – a latter-day extension of the pioneer spirit, the cowboy spirit, the reckless exciting desire to go over the next mountain.
Having made a fortune out of his product designs he was able to indulge his passion and to allow his art, as he considers it, to mirror his life: when his marriage deteriorated he began collecting plastic brides and grooms, during the court trauma he discovered militaria and dressed in khakis.
He had always been particular about controlling his environment: ‘When I was a teenager,’ Shear says, ‘I was obsessed with my hair. I had a flat-top crew cut, and it had to be perfectly flat, like the deck of an aircraft carrier. If it was off by two degrees, I would start to sweat in horror, and I would tilt my head two degrees to compensate. I used to go around town looking for barbers with steady hands.’ Now, finally, after his divorce, the court case, and his decision to devote himself entirely to his project of rescuing the American spirit from flea markets and jumble sales, his life was in his own hands.
‘Two of every sort shall come to thee, to keep them alive.’ This was Noah’s task. His spiritual descendants still follow in his footsteps, adhering to the gospel that things cannot be allowed to go to waste, to perish, to be forgotten, to vanish altogether. Incantations are not sung in churches alone: anyone can build a little temple, or an altar in a corner of the room. Even, and especially, the humble and the insignificant are often extended the hand of rescue. Saving the world, or a world, preserving history or genius, saintliness or innocence, touching something beyond our random existences is a labour of love, a constant ritual, is one face of the desire to be authentic, to be human.