Three artists – an artist who has worked with institutional collecting

Posted on 22 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Basia Irland

Basia Irland, as sculptor and installation artist, as poet and book artist, and as activist, for the past twenty years, has been focused on water. The water that carries, that falls, and transforms life, that writes on sand, that carries disease, that moves the imagination, water in its many forms has inspired much of her work. She is a collector, a collector of water it seems.

As an artist and activist, Irland crosses between the arts, policy-making and the natural sciences, manifesting in all those realms a political and spiritual engagement with environmental and social issues.

She asks: can diverse communities, living along any river or stream, work and celebrate together on a grassroots level to raise awareness about the plight of the world’s waterways?

A Gathering of Waters focused on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, which flows out of Colorado, through New Mexico, and into the huge Chihuahuan Desert which lies between Texas and Mexico. The Gathering Project, begun in 1995, was conceived as a symbolic carrying of Rio Grande/Rio Bravo’s waters from source to sea, to re-establish people’s ties with the river and with each other along its length. A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed downstream, between communities and from hand to hand. Small water samples were added from each community as many people extended a hand upstream, received the Vessel, added their own contribution of water from the Rio, wrote in the Log Book, and passed these along to another person downstream.

People travelled with the River Vessel and its accompanying Log Book by a huge variety of means of transport including horse and hot air balloon all the way to the sea. People who lived half an hour apart but had never met, encountered each other through this project. And each community confirmed again their connection to the Rio.

The point of the gathering and passing of the water was to restore symbolically a natural function of the river and generate understanding, enthusiasm, and a sense of continuity and a mutual understanding of riverside communities. The aim was to be a celebration of the great river and its cultures.

The Gathering Project took its own time. And when it finally arrived at Boca Chica there was a huge celebration. Such a ‘gathering’ could conceivably be carried out anywhere in the world, along any river.

The vessel used to carry the water

This piece in this picture below is a portable sculpture constructed to hold research and objects generated by the Gathering of Waters project. Made of ponderosa pine floorboards from a demolished Albuquerque church and sealed with piñon pine sap, the sculpture looks like a large, rectilinear backpack, with drawers containing water samples, hydrology reports, logbook, photographs, maps, and a carved wooden book, the ‘Rio Grande Atlas’.

This was used to log information about the project

There have been other similar ‘gathering’ projects, e.g. along the Calaveras River in Stockton, California, and along the Don River, Toronto, Ontario.

References:

Green Museum, http://greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/artists/irland/ [last accessed 22 October 2012]

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Three artists – an artist who has questioned institutional collecting.

Posted on 22 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Coco Fusco (1960- ) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer who began her career in 1988. Fusco performs and curates throughout America and internationally.

The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994) This was a collaborative performance piece that Coco Fusco carried out with Guillermo Gomez-Pena, which premiered at Columbus Plaza in Madrid. This was part of the Edge ’92 Biennial in May 1992. Over the following two years the piece was displayed in well-known art and natural history museums around the world. In the work, Fusco and Pena placed themselves on display in a ten-by-twelve foot cage, advertising that they were indigenous people from a fake island that was untouched by European culture. This fake island was called Gautinau. They dressed themselves in unusual, outrageous costume that they claimed to be representative of ‘the primitive’ and performed extravagant ‘savage’ tasks such as sewing voodoo dolls, and eating bananas which were passed to them through the cage by museum guards. They also performed for the audience; for a donation, Fusco would do a ‘native’ dance, in a fabricated language Pena would tell ‘native’ American stories and both artists took pictures with the crowd. Fusco dressed herself in a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, trainers and a baseball cap, and she also platted her hair. Gomez-Pena wore a breastplate, and a leopard skin wrestling mask. The pair carried out this exercise as part of a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, an anti-quincentenary project protesting the official quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas. They both thought that finding historical justification for Columbus’s ‘discovery of the Americas’ had become a way in which Western culture could assert its right to consume. Their performances were interwoven with archival video of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment. The Couple in the Cage provided a powerful blend of comic fiction and poignant reflection on the morality of treating people as exotic curiosities. The aim was to use the project to explore the limits of what they called ‘happy multiculturalism’ that seemed to dominate Western institutions. They also hoped to find an origin for the cultural link between the ideas of otherness and discovery. Their performance, they stated, was rooted in the American and European tradition of displaying indigenous people from other parts of the world in circuses, museums, and freak shows. Fusco describes in her book English is Broken Here the dynamic between the performers and the audience members: ‘The cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game.’

Are they real natives?

References:

Wikipedia: Coco Fusco, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_Fusco [last accessed 22 October 2012]

Thing, http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/subpages/videos/subpages/couple/couple.html [last accessed 22 October 2012]

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More musings on art and mental health – A House To Die In?

Posted on 21 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

‘Why would you want to make a house to die in?’ asks my son as we watch a BBC News item about New York based Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard‘s current exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which aims to investigate the dynamics of creative and collaborative relationships by creating, literally, a ‘House To Die In’.

Not sure I’d want to die in a black tent

It wasn’t the idea of building the house to die in that interested me so much about the news item (although that is a little odd to say the least), rather it was the other paintings and sculptures on display at the exhibition which Melgaard had created in partnership with a group of people who had had no formal art education and little or no connection to the art world (several of whom were in recovery, faced mental or emotional challenges, or suffered from schizophrenia). The project came about as a collaboration of the artist and this group of patients who are known as the ‘Belle Vue Survivors’. Essentially the ‘survivors’ painted over a number of Melgaard’s own paintings creating brand new pieces of artwork. They also made papier mache dolls of themselves. Melgaard and the ‘Bellevue Survivors‘ worked together for a year in his studio to create all this new artwork. The overall effect is quite amazing and disturbing too. There seems to be a lot of sadness in the art work, and a lot of anarchy and colour.

Lots of things to see in one room

I still don’t know whether mental illness heightens a person’s creativity though, but this would be a very interesting exhibition to go to see if only we didn’t live in Shrewbsury.

References:

BBC News website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19703139 [last accessed 21 October 2012]

Institute of Contemporary Arts website, http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=33800 [last accessed 21 October 2012]

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Are you in touch with your inner train spotter?

Posted on 19 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Since I started learning about collecting and its relation to art this week I have been wondering in my few and far between idle moments: why do people collect things? What is it about human nature that makes people natural born collectors?

There are even words to describe certain types of collectors: an archtophilist collects teddy bears, a deltiologist collects postcards, a numismatist collects coins, a vecturist collects underground tickets (in the days before Oyster cards), and a clock collector is a horologist.

Some people regard themselves as serious collectors, and they collect almost as an occupation, spending a great deal of time researching their collection, a great deal of money buying new items for their collection and displaying a great deal of pride in their collections. This could be stamps, train numbers, Dr Who memorabilia, football cards, or vintage cars. Other people probably don’t even realise that they are collecting. I fit into this second category. I didn’t regard myself as a collector before I started thinking about collecting but looking around the house now I see that I collect quite a lot of things: cats, books, boots, hats and coats to name but a few. I love boots, I have so many different pairs of boots, such as my latest purchase purple velvet Dr Martens. I also have some green patent Dr Martens, some lovely big brown high heeled boots, my everyday red calf-length boots, some black knee-length lace up boots from Jigsaw, the list goes on.

My new boots

So thinking about collections I asked my lovely friends to tell me what they collect or collected as children and here are the responses I got.

What my friends have collected:

‘Badges! I have no idea why I collected them, maybe because we had a ‘show’ day in the big hall at school once a year and you got to show off your collections on a table. I also collected Gollies, teddies and badges. All my gollies I have since sold and my badge collection was passed onto my son.’

‘Stamps. God knows why.’

‘Stamps – my grandpa had a brilliant collection, and we’d spend many happy hours sticking stamps in albums with those little sticky bits of tracing paper…’

‘Wade wimsies!’

Those lovely ceramic animals from the 1970s

‘Pencils and pens.’

‘Pogs, beanie babies, trolls. still have the beanie babies in a suitcase somewhere.’

‘Rubbers. Some of them smelly.’

Everyone in my year at school (the girls at least) loved these smelly rubbers.

‘Shells. I lived in near the coast. Now my daughter collects them!’

‘Stamps, and at one point snails.’

‘Books surprise surprise!’

‘Enid Blyton books – escapism I think! Can’t wait to share them with my children when they’re a bit older.’

‘Postcards – they had to be either ones sent to me or of places I was visiting, bought while I was there. I didn’t nick other peoples’ (my sisters’).’

‘Little furry monkeys playing band instruments!’

‘Stones and trolls!!!’

‘I collected stones (used to dig the garden for good ones), trolls, scented rubbers, monster in my pocket, sindy dolls, bouncy balls (especially really pretty glittery ones), old coins, The Sun sticker albums.’

‘Pierrot dolls because they were pretty, stamps.’

Those strange crying French dolls from the 1980s

Are collectors a bit loopy?

Sigmund Freud didn’t see collecting as coming from motivations such as to record, learn about and preserve history; for relaxation; for showing off or for boredom. He stated rather that all collecting ties back to the time of toilet training. He suggested that the loss of control and what went down the toilet was a traumatic occurrence and that, therefore, the collector is trying to gain back control. We cannot deny that there is a slightly off-centre side to collecting (the stereotype collector with his greasy anorak, NHS glasses, and a propensity to dribble). The psychopathological form is described as hoarding. The ‘abnormality’ of the hoarder shows up in those instances where the excessive collecting behaviour interferes with an otherwise reasonable life. This can sometimes even include interference with the lives of others. Some theorists suggest that the behaviour associated with hoarding can be an extreme variation on compulsive buying. Compulsive buying, in turn, is said to be closely related to major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in particular, compulsive hoarding. It has been postulated that compulsive buying is influenced by a range of cognitive domains including deficits in decision-making, emotional attachments to objects, and erroneous beliefs about possessions, and other similar skewed beliefs.

Too many books?

Freud and those clever psychologists aside, we can’t really dispute that any sort of compulsive excessive behaviour becomes a medical health issue, but surely collecting for a hobby is just part of human nature? Perhaps it is the related to the nesting instinct, the desire to surround ourselves with objects that make us feel comfortable, relaxed and proud.

We all love train spotters

References:

McKinley, Mark B: The Psychology of Collecting (2007), http://www.talkingclocks.net/collecting.pdf [last accessed 19 October 2012]

Quora, www.quora.com/Why-do-people-collect-things [last accessed 19 October 2012]

Friends on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ [last accessed 19 October 2012]

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Plastic Island – a collection of junk

Posted on 17 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

The term ‘plastic beach’ is the term being used to describe a selection of once idyllic white sandy beaches turned into rubbish tips of plastic flotsam including plastic bottles, bags, tyres, rusting petrol cans, and other waste from around the world.

Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii is one such beach.

A form of natural art from man-made waste products it may be, it has had horrendous consequences for the environment and the local wildlife.

A collection of plastic rubbish turns into art

References:

Uptake, http://beaches.uptake.com/blog/talking-trash-kamilo-beach-big-island-hawaii.html [last accessed 17 October 2012]

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I collect mantelpieces

Posted on 17 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

I decided to collect some mantelpieces of my own, inspired by Rachel Hurdley’s experiment (I also thought that bedside tables would make for an interesting collection). So here below is a selection of mantelpieces, starting with my own.

What do the objects placed on a mantelpiece say about the owner? Do they provide a snapshot of that person’s life, or personality? If the mantelpiece is cluttered does that mean the person’s mind and life is cluttered? If the mantelpiece is carefully styled, what does that say? If it is minimalist and relatively empty, is that person a calm person, craving calm surroundings? My mantelpieces are quite cluttered, am I a chaotic person needing but not able to get a sense of calm? Or am I just too busy to unclutter them? My mantelpiece is quite eccentric – not many people have cats with hats on their mantelpiece. Am I an eccentric person, an nonconformist? Some of my friends appear to be quite sentimental, having very personal and poignant items of memory on their mantelpieces. Others have matched items to the room’s general scheme, rather than choosing items that touched them. Some have very bare mantelpieces, my tidier friends perhaps. Some just have one or two items of meaning on their mantelpieces. Friend Nine has a great mantelpiece I think – she has a very busy life. Judge for yourself, what do you think?

The Mantlepieces:

My mantelpiece – ‘The ceramic cats are all presents, which came mostly from my husband. I bought the green ones in Oxford during my lunch hour one day just because I liked them. The hats come from an Innocent Smoothie promotion a couple of years ago – we loved the little hats on top of the smoothies so much we drank about ten smoothies in two weeks just to get the hats. The oil burner comes from the Body Shop.’

My Mantelpiece

Husband – ‘(The evolution of the Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica, a TV series made by NBC Universal): Toaster, Serge from Caprica, U87, Original series Cylon, New series Cylon and Number Six.’

Husband’s Mantelpiece

Friend One – ‘The figures are from the willow tree range and have all been bought because of their meaning. The clock was what I bought my mum and dad for their silver wedding. The lego is the complete set of the team GB set that came out for the Olympics and the painting was a thank you present to me from a work colleague.’

Friend One’s Mantelpiece

Friend Two – ‘Photos of my daughter and our wedding, dog ornament was a wedding present, candle holders from Ikea and cards for my husband’s birthday tomorrow. A very boring mantelpiece.’

Friend Two’s Mantelpiece

Friend Three – ‘Recently redid lounge and recycled ornaments from other parts of house to fit dark wood so elephant, clock. Bought good vases from Next to go into gold theme. Then it seems to be a place to gather dangerous or breakable things like my husband’s stanley knife I keep nagging him to move and my daughter’s money box. It’s also a place I keep tickets so Steam train Xmas tickets there and party invites so one of my daughter’s invites there. Left hand side are her birthday thank you letters I forgot to post!’

Friend Three’s Mantelpiece

Friend Four – ‘It has on it: three black vases from one village [shop], one has some fake flowers in which were given to me for my birthday; three little pretty dishes in my favourite blues made by a potter from Leigh-on-sea who we used to see annually at a festival in Cheltenham – I bought a dish each year and gave several away as gifts to friends; a little blue heart decoration given to me by a good friend; a candle; a little plate with a cat’s face on – I have had this for years and years (since I was a teenager I think…) but can’t remember where it came from; and a crystal rock brought back from the Philippines by my dad when I was a child, it’s always fascinated me.’

Friend Four’s Mantelpiece

Friend Five – ‘Glass of water salad Sarnie (my lunch) DVD & a zapper.’

Friend Six – ‘Not very exciting! Clock a gift from your sister, photo of my daughter aged around 7 or 8, Bristol blue glass jug a gift when I left Bristol!’

Friend Six’s Mantelpiece

Friend Seven – ‘There are nice smelling candles for those romantic evenings very few and far between , there is a photo of me and my boyfriend one of the only photos of us together!! The nun is a reminder of the witch (aka my boyfriend’s mum) but shhhh she’s Catholic and it kinda looks like her it made me smile when I brought it from school fair! The other random person is just a random we who I like! Behind that is a photo or the kids!! There is also a couple of random things on there like a coat hook! I’m just too lazy to hang it back on wall in the right place ha ha!!’

Friend Seven’s Mantelpiece

Friend Eight – ‘Note the only thing we have apart from liquid candles is our love film DVD waiting to finish watching and post back.’

Friend Eight’s Mantelpiece

Friend  Nine – ‘Old formula can with bits of junk from pockets. Makeup brush I got for my wedding makeup. Toy horse from Washington wildfowl park. ‘Best dad’ trophy from Rainbows. Husband’s wallet. Toy skull with half a toy brain. Timer for making the kids share. Glitter glue. Perfume. Nail varnish remover. Assorted children’s books. On top of books is a painting I did, face down covered with letters I really should sort out. Sun cream. E45 cream. Another box f junk. Jumbo ludo.’

Friend Nine’s Mantelpiece

Friend Ten – ‘From the left there is a photo of my youngest son, a candle, a fabric rose in a vase, photo of mine and my friend’s kids on holiday, another candle, news paper cutting about toy library, bits of lego, various other random photos and the phone.’

Friend Ten’s Mantelpiece

Friend Elven – ‘This is ours with candles from body shop on top and one from a great friend, holiday money money box and CD cupboards.’

Friend Eleven’s Mantelpiece

Friend Thirteen – ‘Glass reed air freshener – Asda (haha) clock – I bought it myself to match room colours, pink BFF card given to me by my best friend when I was going through a rough time earlier this year. Glass candle jar asda again I’m afraid! Sorry a bit boring!!’

Friend Thirteen’s Mantelpiece

Friend Thirteen has a second mantelpiece – ‘Air freshener, three curtain pole brackets (from pole we no longer have) small clock, gift to husband after 20 years in a previous job. Big clock gift at Christmas a few years ago from my dad and step mum, mouth piece from my tenor horn – found when unpacking after our house move 18 months ago! Small motor bike as mouth piece – but it was on husband’s 40th birthday cake eight years ago. Finally two glass coasters with pictures of our boys in, put up here to keep little fingers off them. We don’t use this room very much as its so cold!!’

Friend Thirteen’s Second Mantelpiece

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I collect dolls

Posted on 15 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Morton Bartlett

As mentioned in a previous post, I visited the Hamburger Bahnhof, and whilst there I also saw a collection of elaborately designed, modelled and dressed dolls by American artists Morton Bartlett.

Central works of Bartlett’s collection were 15 semi-life-sized dolls, twelve girls and three boys. Bartlett started making his dolls in the 1930s attempting to make them as life-like as possible. He studied anatomy texts and costume history in depth, he taught himself how to sew and work with clay. It took him up to a year to create each doll. It is said that each head could take as much as 50 hours to model. Bartlett also made various heads for each doll, and he even designed various costumes and wigs in order to stage and photograph the dolls in true life situations – for example a girl in bed reading, a boy at a kitchen table, or a girl scolding a toy dog. His collection was private, never displayed, until after he died.

The collection was discovered in 1993 and seen by me in 2012 in Berlin. This was the last thing I saw in the museum, just as I had reached my art limit, and it was the most disturbing of all (even more disturbing than the big slabs of animal fat).

It was disturbing because of the silence: the dolls had been placed around the room poised in various poses, as if frozen in time. Many of the dolls were very childlike in their features and size and very realistic. Many were slightly prepubescent in their physical development. Some were almost womanly. Was this the work of a very lonely man with paedaphilic tendencies? Did he keep this work a secret because he knew it would be disturbing? Perhaps it disturbed him, disgusted him, yet he felt compelled to keep making more and more of these dolls. It may have been that he thought it safer to channel his socially unacceptable urges into art rather than through actions. Or it might be that his desire to make these dolls had nothing to do with his own sexuality, but was more part of a private study of the trend of the greater sexualisation of children in the twentieth century.

The dolls that were just very odd.

References:

Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Ausstellungen / Exhibitions Spring Summer 2012, museum brochure

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I see dead people – or at least I collect pictures of them

Posted on 15 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Hans-Peter Feldmann

In September I went to Berlin. And I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum Fur Gegenwart – Berlin. And there I saw two very moving and disturbing collections. The first one was by Hans-Peter Feldmann.

Feldmann collected, archived and compiled familiar and everyday motifs from print media since the 1970s.

He also collected images of the dead, gathered as if forming an archive, and he decided to bring them together in a deliberate gesture of an unbiased documentation. He photocopied newspaper images on to A3 paper to portray the police officers, hostages, terrorists and civilians who died  in the aftermath of the 1967 shopping of Benno Ohnesorg at a demonstration in Berlin. Following this, violence and terrorism  escalated, leading to the deaths of around 100 people. It is images of the deaths of these people that Feldmann collected.

The images were arranged chronologically by date of death, each individual on a single sheet of paper, the sheets all in a long line at eye level. The name and date of death of each person was listed below each image. Sometimes additional information was provided such as age, status or cause of death.

The A3 images of dead people.

The work is supposed to be a confrontation with the deaths of people as the result of terrorist acts.

I found the images very moving and disturbing. They definitely made me think and ponder the lives of the people in the images, and the sadness of their deaths. Some showed a simple snap shot of a life, including one of a man sat with a cup of tea by his side, captured just sitting, chatting, about to have a sip of tea. That image affected me more than the gory blood-soaked images of death.

References:

Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Ausstellungen / Exhibitions Spring Summer 2012, museum brochure

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Collecting – notes from a tutorial – is it geeky to collect or art?

Posted on 15 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

What does it mean to collect?

Every little boy’s dream collection.

What does the notion of collecting mean?

What does collecting mean for an artist? (Can we get away with it in the name of art?)

Olympic artist artist in residence Neville Gabie collected pictures of goal posts. These were images of goal posts from around the world, of all sorts of shapes, materials, sizes, places. All these photographs were captured with no people in the shot, and from the position of a penalty shooter. Gabie wanted to study the sculptural qualities of goalposts and how they become a way of understanding the city, landscape and community in which they were located. He found the structure of the goalpost fascinating, and particularly liked the way it framed the shot – acting as an outline yet still retaining the quality of being an object of interest in itself.

Goal Posts

When does collecting become hoarding? When does it become a mental disorder?

Why do artists collect?

  • for visual purposes
  • to organise and reflect upon
  • to illustrate a culture

An artist collects as a way to form ideas, develop a concept, and think of an approach.

Andy Warhol

This guy was the epitome of the geeky collector. When he was a child he collected 1960s Hollywood icon images which naturally fed his fascination with Hollywood stars later in life.

As an established artists he gathered together 500 3-4 minute long silent film shots of famous people – he wanted to capture them in a raw state.

He also spent a great deal of time hoarding his now-famous time capsules. The existence of these was completely unknown until his death in 1987. The time capsules were Warhol’s largest collecting project, in which he saved source material for his work and an enormous record of his own daily life. Warhol began creating them in 1974 after relocating his studio. He selected items from correspondence, magazines, newspapers, gifts, photographs, business records, and all sorts of material that came to him. Once the box was full he sealed it with tape, marked it with a date or title, and put it in his archive. As a whole, this material provides a unique view into Warhol’s personal life, as well as a fascinating cultural backdrop illustrating the social and artistic scene at that time. From the early 1970s until his death in 1987, Warhol created 612 finished of these amazing boxes of ‘stuff’.

The boxes in all their glory.

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell collected boxes of strange things juxtaposed together to create a story, a dream, a memory.

By collecting and carefully juxtaposing various things in small, glass-front boxes, Cornell created visual poems in which surface, form, texture, and light are joined. Using objects which we are familiar with, Cornell made boxes about concepts we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams.

One of the boxes.

There are three types of collecting:

  • Personal collecting – artists use collections in symbolic ways. For example Stefan Hoderlein collecting images of clothes against a black background or Whitfield Lovell collecting hands.
  • Professional collecting – collecting from an anthropological point of view, collecting for interest, collecting items from a culture or to illustrate history. For example Portia Munson collected discarded plastic objects to examine the larger cultural attitudes towards the contemporary world, and to look at current trends. Or we could look towards Karsten Bott who collected, stored and classified objects in various ways.
  • Institutional collecting – this is what museums do. In 1999 Mark Dion carried out the Tate Thames Dig, commissioned by the Tate. It was an archaeological project, basically to dig up the bank of the Thames and show off what had been dug up. The result was an imposing show case of glass-fronted display cabinets containing a multitude of weird and wonderful artifacts. The exhibits were displayed in the Millbank Tate. The end result was an illustration of a process of recovery, conservation, classification and installation. However, Dion considers himself an artist, not an archaeologist. His work is a work of art, not a study of history.

Mark Dion’s things on show.

Is collecting just part of human nature? Why do children love to collect so much? What is it about human nature that loves to catalog and collect, to chart, to organize, to display? Do we feel our lives are too chaotic without classification? Children will collect even the most mundane of objects such as pebbles, sticks, or pieces of string. And they will classify those objects into colours, size, strength, attractiveness.

These guys are just begging to be classified by colour, size, skimming ability or aesthetic qualities.

What does a person’s collection say about themselves, about their history, about their personality?

A collection of shopping lists over time might show changes in lifestyle (pregnancy, children, children growing up), eating habits (both personal and cultural), they could show a personal history (extra items bought such as gifts, books, CDs, DVDs).

Our current shopping list – what does this say about my family?

People naturally collect relationships – letters, cards, presents, etc from another person. Sometimes these collections are published.

Rachel Hurdley

Rachel Hurdley is another famous collector. She applied her collecting to a study of culture. She made a study which aimed to apply narrative methods to an analysis of the meaning of British domestic culture. The data she used came from an exploratory project investigating how and why people displayed objects in their homes, using mantelpiece displays as the principal focus (although other methods of display were used). Respondents were invited to tell stories about the provenance and meaning of objects. The article analysed the narratives as social performances demonstrating the extent to which the apparently ‘private’ experiences of the self are manifested by means of display objects and domestic artefacts. Narratives and objects come together to marry the personal and the social.

I decided to do the same…

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The things you think about sitting in the bath…

Posted on 13 October 2012 by beckybendylegs

Today, my bath-time ponderings were whether there is a connection between mental illness and creativity. I was actually reading a print-out of a book’s chapter abstracts for work and they came from a book about publicly-funded asylums in 1880s America which became unexpected centres of cultural activity. It was a book that explores the creative lives of the patients living in those asylums. One of the abstracts mentioned the ‘outsider art’ movement in terms of being part of the vogue for glamorizing mental illness and the effects mental illness has on the creativity of the mind, which got me pondering whether a troubled mind leads to more creative art or in fact the opposite could be true; a more balanced and positive mind is more open to creative thought and the desire and willingness to put that thought on paper (or whatever medium).

Of course this idea doesn’t just apply to art but could also be applied to literature and other creative fields. Perhaps both are true, and it is during those times when a creative person is feeling at neither end of the spectrum that they suffer from ‘artist’s block’.

The term ‘mental illness’ doesn’t just cover depression, of course, and the internet tells me that some research has been carried out on suffers of Bipolar II Disorder who may experience periods of heightened creativity during the somewhat milder manic phases of the illness (when compared with Bipolar I Disorder where the mania is more disabling). Apparently, creativity and psychopathology have been shown to share some common traits, such as a tendency for ‘blue sky thinking’, brain storming ideas, speeding up of thoughts and a heightened perception of visual, auditory and somatic stimuli. It is believed that certain very famous creative figures had bipolar disorder or mood disorder, mostly writers and musicians but also some artists.

I also found out about a survey carried out by the Open University in 2005 on artists, poets, random people and suffers of schizophrenia. On analysing 425 responses, the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on ‘unusual cognition’, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts.

So arty people themselves might not be suffers of mental illness, particularly in this case schizophrenia, it might be that they are just able to direct their creativity, and maybe they carry genes that predispose towards mental illness.

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

References:

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_illness [last accessed 13 October 2012]

Ian Sample ‘Mental Illness link to art and sex’ in The Guardian Newspaper online (30 November 2005), http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.highereducation [last accessed 13 October 2012]

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