Ephemera: Finding a Purpose
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Ephemera: things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time; items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity. This collection of essays explores the meaning of the word “ephemera” from many varying viewpoints. The emotions and perspectives of these authors who own or collect memorabilia, often considered heirlooms, expose what it is truly like to inherit or hunt these items. Whether the person values their possessions and desires more of what they consider “treasures,” or the person yearns to rid their life of clutter and of what they consider “burdens,” the heirlooms are given a greater meaning. These objects, with varying degrees of importance, are no longer just physical things. Instead, they are one of a kind items that help to document history, rekindle memories of family members, reduce waste by reusing “trash,” or represent the passage of time. It is almost as if the ora of the object has more meaning than the object itself. Each essay provides an inside look
Author’s Note
Kara Schutte
as to what these heirlooms and collections can mean and how they can affect one’s life. When reading these essays, I encourage and challenge you to think about the treasures and burdens in your own life. Think about the special doll your grandma passed down, the binder of baseball cards from your grandpa, or even the towering pile of worn out books from your great uncle. Maybe after reading these you will have the motivation to go home and finally throw out those dusty boxes sitting in your attic, or maybe you will finally unpack those boxes and display the items proudly around your house. Regardless, I challenge you to ponder and explore the perspective of each author. Put yourself in the shoes of whoever owned or passed down the object. Why was it important to them? Why did they decide to pass it down to you? As you read through the essays, you may find clarity and decide what to do with your “clutter” or “treasures.” And most importantly, you may finally find a purpose for those objects in your life.
Table of Contents Touching the Authentic John Foster
How to Lose a Legacy
Ellen Lupton
Point and Shoot
John Foster
Merill Berman, Design Connoisseur
Steven Heller
Throwaway Culture Rick Poynor
Some Thoughts on Collecting
Rob Roy Kelly
How Addiction Developed Into a Calling
Design Indaba
The Never-Ending Struggle Against Clutter Rick Poyner
From the Collection: 008 Tobias Frere-Jones
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Touching the Authentic
If I told you that I owned an authentic dinner plate from the Titantic, would you be impressed? I don’t. What about a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair? Might that make you gasp? I don’t own that either. What would you love to own, simply to be closer to someone or something that is meaningful to you? Is it The Beatles you love or Babe Ruth? Rare baseball cards and comic books can go for princely sums. Jim Morrison fans have always chipped away fragments of his tombstone in Paris, and there are people today who are still looking for the crashed remains of the Porsche Spyder James Dean was driving the night he was killed. The vehicle has been missing for fifty years. If you are a Civil War enthusiast, it is quite possible to own a minié-ball from a famous battle for just a couple of dollars. The Catholic church has its holy relics, and on Antiques Roadshow it’s not uncommon to see someone show up with the rarest of things, like a flag from a famous battle. For most of us, a guitar pick by a favorite singer will do, or maybe a first edition of a muchadmired book.
John Foster
The desire by many people to possess the rare and remarkable is legendary, and always has been. People commit crimes for rare things— just research the New York Times or read an Agatha Christie novel. If you have the money and the initiative, you could have recently purchased Elvis Presley’s very first record, the legendary one he made for his mother at Sun Studios in Memphis, in 1953. It just sold for $300,000 at a recent Graceland auction. Just imagine owning that. I think the buyer got a steal. In today’s world of digital imagery, where treasures of the world are being showcased online by museums across the world, what is it about owning a rare treasure that can be so alluring? Scholars can be happy to just read and learn, but others want to possess. I found this dealer on eBay selling some remarkable things, and for reasonable starting bids or “Buy it Now” offerings. As a collector, I admit that I am mesmerized by authentic things.
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How to Lose a Legacy
Ellen Lupton
An “heirloom” is an object steeped in family history, handed down from generation to generation: your mother’s wedding dress, your grandma’s espresso cups, your great uncle’s underwear.You can’t buy an heirloom at Pottery Barn or Ikea. It comes via gift, bequest or a heated sibling brawl. But who’s to say you actually want this stale old stuff? The desire to pass objects on to one’s offspring is part of our longing for immortality. Even folks in the “die broke” crowd, determined to enjoy their remaining assets rather than leave them to the ungrateful grandkids, may secretly hope the family will love and honor their dearest possessions. In a culture of scarcity, useful things are rarely discarded, but in a land of superabundance and incessant newness, inheriting a household packed to the windowsills with books, furniture and memories of drunken holiday infighting can be more burden than blessing.
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You can’t buy an heirloom at Pottery Barn or Ikea.”
Heirlooms aren’t just hand-me-down artifacts anymore. Fruits and vegetables with ancestral pedigrees are a surging trend in farmers’ markets and garden centers. When confronted with my first heirloom tomato a decade ago, I wondered, why does it have to be so ugly? A splotchy mass of unruly, misshapen lobes bursting out in all directions, this high-priced agro-oddity posed a sophisticated alternative to perfectly shaped hybrids. But I find it hard to beat the robust flavor of a Jersey tomato in July, its physique as toned and glossy as a beach body from “Jersey Shore.” Appearances aside, heirloom fruits and vegetables represent the leading edge in sustainable farming, owing to their unique genetic characteristics, which agronomists would like to protect. The Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, preserves genetic material for more than 25,000 “endangered” vegetables. And now avid cooks and slow food aficionados can also buy or raise their own heirloom livestock, from Blue Foot chickens to Red Wattle pigs. Growing these rare breeds
heirlooms from our own family, including a set of Wedgwood cornflower blue china inherited from my mother’s mother and a mounted deer Objects risk extinction, too. Antique stores are head passed down from Abbott’s grandfather. The glassy-eyed beast followed us loyally through our filled with failed heirlooms — that faded quilt youth in a series of East Village apartments to our or knotty pine commode that was abandoned current renovated lodge in a woodsy Baltimore by its owners, or worse, its owners’ children. Nicole Holofcener’s film “Please Give” revolves neighborhood. Although it finally seems at peace here, surrounded by trees, installing it was an around an antique dealer (played by Catherine emotional battle. “It makes me sad,” our 11-yearKeener) who acquires the possessions of old daughter said. “And it’s embarrassing. My recently deceased apartment dwellers and sells friends will think it’s weird to have a dead animal them for a profit in her hip urban furniture in our living room.” My husband tried defending shop. While she frets about the morality of the the artifact on ethical grounds (“We didn’t kill postmortem markup, her pragmatic husband it”) and then on decorating grounds (“It looks (Oliver Platt) sees what they’re doing as a fabulous with the Ted Muehling vases”) before service for middle-aged offspring who want to cut loose from old baggage (and some very ugly finding his last defense: “It’s the only thing I have vases). That musty smell in your favorite antique from my granddad.” This argument worked; the doe’s second execution was stayed by its status store? It’s death warmed over, served with a as an heirloom. splash of vintage vinegar. and slaughtering them for food keeps their imperiled DNA alive.
Although my own house contains many midcentury objects rescued from oblivion by shops like the one in “Please Give,” my husband Abbott and I possess only a handful of official
Dust unto dust, the saying goes — and books, hat boxes and ceramic figurines unto dust. Especially books. Unlike speech, text survives when the writer is long gone. The voice fades
lifeti but a well-bound book could last forever — as long as someone bothers to keep it on a shelf somewhere, clean, dry and free from the onslaught of hungry cockroaches. (They feast on the glue used in bindings.) Books dominate our house, thousands of them, mostly about art and design. Despite ruthless periodic purges, new volumes creep in. Our kids are mystified: “Why do you have so many books?” A vast personal library — once the sign of wellschooled intellect — may be more bewildering to the rising generation than a collection of mounted game heads.
We love our library, which entombs a lifetime of fleeting interests and enduring obsessions, but we’re also oppressed by its physical and emotional weight. Like many others, we worry about what will happen to all these volumes when we’re gone. Do books have souls? Is there an out-of-print afterlife? Do midlist titles die and go to hell on a flaming Kindle? Every year, Jennifer Tobias, a librarian, receives many offers of personal libraries; rarely are these acquired in full. Even a single text must meet exacting standards before making it into a library’s
me collection. She advises people seeking to unload their books to be realistic about the usefulness of any volume (does your local high school truly need a book about postmodern teapots or Photoshop 1.0?) and to discard anything afflicted with mold or mildew, which can spread to other books. If you lack the courage to sell or destroy your superfluous belongings, you can put them in storage. Rented cubicles are a costly form of denial: you don’t really want these things, so you send them away — often for good. Self-storage, says Richard Burt, a professor of English at the University of Florida, is about storing the self. When we place our personal effects in an air-conditioned locker, we put away part of our physical and emotional being, keeping it on life support for as long as we can foot the bill. Premature heirloom loss can be devastating. The novelist Jessica Anya Blau told me that when she was separating from her first husband, she relocated to another city to attend grad school while he placed their combined
possessions in storage. Blau left behind things she loved but could survive without for a while, including albums of baby pictures and some silk dresses and pink china from her grandmother. Alas, her ex neglected to pay the rent on the storage unit, and all its contents were auctioned off, gone from her life forever. Her first reaction was shock and desolation. These were cherished things that couldn’t be replaced. But dismay quickly gave way to feelings of lightness and freedom. She had come to enjoy living in an open space unburdened by things. It felt good to be emptied out. Physical possessions are, indeed, a burden. They gather dust and take up space. They also lose and acquire meaning over time. I probably wouldn’t have kept those blue dishes if I had bought them in a junk shop 20 years ago. But they were my grandmother’s, so I keep them safe, and take them out a few times a year for family celebrations. As I wash each piece by hand, I wonder, with a pang of melancholy, if my daughter will someday do the same. Maybe, and maybe not.
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Point and Shoot
John Foster
Recently, Vint Cerf, the vice president of Google, warned that an entire century’s worth of images and words are in danger of being lost forever. He was quoted as saying: “Piles of digitized material—from blogs, tweets, pictures, and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails—may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them (in the future) will become defunct. … We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.”
Waldman asked twenty-three of the most prominent collectors of vernacular photography in the United States to contribute images to the show. The result was an outstanding exhibition that showcased each collector’s particular focus.
Collectors of twentieth-century vernacular photography have been saying this for much longer than Cerf’s “revelation.” Collectors like Stacy Waldman, curator of the show It’s a Snap, in Easthampton, Massachusetts, believes that the long overlooked and humble snapshot can provide an important connection to who we are as a people, and valuable context to the photographic field of art. Unlike the digitized world of image making we live in today, the twentieth century was rich in artifacts like the snapshot. It’s why this collecting field is so active today.
To this point, it is usually collectors—not museums—who engage first with specific niches of art that fall outside of the mainstream. Vernacular photography is a perfect example. While museums have long disregarded the snapshot as an unimportant and almost trivial byproduct of camera mass consumerism, we can see by the quality of images in this exhibition that is not the case. Any art institution that considers photography a cornerstone of their collecting focus, anonymous vernacular images should be included.
In exhibitions like Waldman’s, we are witnessing a field that is driven largely by collectors. Ms.
In conjunction with It’s a Snap!, Kristen Gresh, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, moderated a panel discussion with some of the participating collectors, including Mark Glovsky, WM Hunt, Nigel Maister, Ron Slattery, and Stacy Waldman.
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Merrill Berman, Design Connoisseur
Steven Heller
A discussion about the art and design ephemera collecting practices of Merrill Berman, who has amassed a vast portfolio of design history from the past century and more. In the mid-Seventies, Merrill Berman (b-1938), a security analyst and partner in Berman, Kalmbach & Co, a private investment firm, began collecting the rare and forgotten artefacts of graphic design. His collection has grown into one of the foremost troves of late 19th and 20th century posters and ephemera — essentially the roots and routes of commercial design as art and profession. His material has been the nucleus of numerous exhibitions and publications, including the recent “Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age,” originally presented at Williams College Museum in Massachusetts and The Cooper Hewitt in New York and currently travelling. His collection
has also been exhibited in the 1996 exhibit “Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, 1917-1937,” at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and the 1984 “Posters: The 20th Century Poster Design of the Avant Garde” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Berman continues to loan materials to design shows throughout the world and a record of his holdings can be found at www.mcbcollection.com. Beside amassing a rich historical archive, Berman uncovers the documentary evidence of graphic design’s formidable legacy. In this interview he explains how he entered this field and the criteria for building a collection.
Your career is in investment management, and you have been an art collector. So, how did you become the leading connoisseur of graphic design in this country? I started as a teenager collecting political Americana, which included celluloid buttons, ferrotypes and other graphic material. Although I never formally studied art history or graphic design, I had a natural predilection toward the graphic. When I was in my twenties, I studied late 19th and 20th century art history and began to collect paintings. This required considerable investment, where did the money for your collection come from? It was during the 1960s, and I was working as a research analyst for an investment banking firm. I followed the electronics and service industries and had the good fortune to discover and invest in outstanding young companies like Automatic Data Processing, H&R Block, and Rollins, Inc. But I also have had my bumps and bruises in the market.
What kind of paintings did you collect? Post-Impressionists, Abstract Expressionists, and Photo-Realists. I built a strong collection from 1967 to 1973 that included works by Soutine, Dufy, Utrillo, as well as Pollack, DeKooning and Gorky. I had one Impressionist painting by Renoir and three Photo-Realist canvases by Richard Estes. However, I never had the feeling that I was more than a trendfollower or investor-type of art collector. I was developing my eye along the way, but never added creatively to understanding the history of the period. What turned you from following the trends of art collecting to this rather arcane form of collecting? I was topped out. I realised that my taste in collecting was ahead of my pocketbook. I wasn’t capable of competing with Norton Simon and some of the heavy hitters of that era on the next best Gorky or Kline. In addition, I took some giant hits in the bear market of 1973-4. So, I
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I realised that my taste in collecting was ahead of my pocketbook.�
really had to sell my paintings. I pretty much deaccessioned everything between 1974 and 1976. I couldn’t move forward, so I had to move in another direction. I also had come to realise that the political field that I jumped back into that arena in hopes of building a more comprehensive and graphic collection including poster, textiles and ribbons. The political field had taken a strong turn towards the graphic since my early collecting days.
How did political Americana evolve into an interest in European graphic design?
At the time of my renewed interest in political collecting I was travelling in Europe, and by chance came across shops and dealers selling posters. This was the moment Art Nouveau and Art Deco posters were being rediscovered. That is where I really got exposed to graphic design on paper. But I had limited knowledge and had to learn about posters and graphic design on the fly. First I started with posters by Mucha, Cheret, Privat Livemont and Cassandre but I
reme didn’t really have a clue what this was leading to. Then after bearing down in this area, I came across thirty posters which included five photomontage posters by Gustav Klutsis and an important one by Alexander Deineka. These reportedly came from a Communist museum or archive in Belgium. Why did you decide that these posters were worth obtaining? I researched them with a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She kind of demeaned the Klutsis posters saying I should concentrate on Russian film posters by the Stenbergs and Prusakov, not the politicallyrelated items. But I was a natural contrarian. Instead, I could see that there was a lot in this group — the photo-montage, the typography, the constructivist layout. How much did you know about typography and design in general? I knew almost nothing about graphic design at that time. But I did as much research as I
mber could. Shortly thereafter, I came across a very important Herbert Bayer poster from 1929, ‘Section Allemande,’ which is in the book 20th Century Poster, a project I did with the Walker Art Center It was a big 40-by-60 inch piece with Constructivism, photo-montage, and fantastic dimensionality. At this point I felt I was on my way, that there were really important things out there in the design and poster fields.
In looking at important design, particularly artefacts of the Modern avant garde, you were also defining what important was. I mean, you have the key pieces of the Bauhaus and the Constructivist movement and Modernism in general, but your collection is not solely composed of those pieces that have now been reproduced in every history book, but you feature rarer work by leading and other lesser known designers. It took me until probably 1978 to gain enough understanding. I realised that Holland and Germany had been the Mecca of graphic design in the 1920s — those countries as well as France and England, also Russia and
Eastern Europe. But remember, I was also not solely focused on design. I was going back and forth between art and design. I was always interested in related disciplines like collage, architectural drawing, photography, and the inter-relationship between all of them.
There are collectors who collect for investment, then there are collectors who collect to document history, and somewhere in the middle there are collectors who collect great things that will document history and also be good investments. Do you fit into any of those three, or is there another category? Well, there’s probably another category. I arrived at this collecting because I saw the contempt of Madison Avenue art dealers for anything with type or rooted in commercialism. I noted the lack of understanding of most collectors for really good design. I had a huge advantage because I never approached this field with the idea of resale. I approached it with the idea of commitment and dedication, and with the goal of building a major museumlike archive over time. I realised that the
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...somewhere in the middle there are collectors who collect great things that will document history and also be good investments.”
descendants of all these avant-gardes cared little about this material, which was readily available at the time. I could do here what I wasn’t able to do in art. I had run out of steam in fine art because of my budgetary limitations. Here everything was affordable and I didn’t have that much competition. I saw this as a major defining opportunity and challenge. I was further motivated by the self assurance of the institutions who took everything they had accumulated in this area for granted.
Okay, why do you feel this commercial work was and is so important to the history of Art, Culture, Society? Well, that’s a little hard for a self-taught guy, but I’ll do the best I can. Many of these people who were doing this were integrating and synthesising some of the most important techniques of what other people would call fine art into what they were doing, and many of them had to support themselves through commercial work. And these designers were on the cutting edge of everything — you know, Dada, Constructivism, Suprematism, De Stijl, as well as photography and architecture. Everything that was happening important in the century...So this work is actually the foundation of what curators are
addressing in art exhibitions today. Where once they turned their noses down, now the art establishment is embracing commercial work, at least historically. I saw I was way ahead of them. I realised by being able to interface with thousands of images, which included posters and ephemera, one saw the interplay between art and design. I was ahead of most people because I had an archive to train my eye on. I had the material. I realised that to stay in visual condition, I had to keep doing this. It was later that shows like ‘Paris/Moscow’ or ‘Paris/Berlin,’ (major exhibitions mounted at the Beauborg in Paris) were presented with typography and graphics interspersed along with painting and sculpture. In fact, you have made your collection available to some major exhibitions.You supported the Walker Art Center’s “Twentieth Century Poster,”Williams’ College “Building The Collective,” and The Cooper Hewitt’s “Graphic Design In The Mechanical Age” shows. Once you conclude a show like these do you then move on to another area, or do you continue to build within this area?
You have to accept what the yield is. In other words, you’re interested in Italian Futurism, and yet that might not be available at the moment. And you just can’t demand that the material be available suddenly.You have to set up a framework. And maybe it won’t ever be available. But then suddenly Russia falls apart, and museums deaccession and sell. So you have to take on what the market yields.You have to be ready and flexible to deal with everything from Bernhard and Hohlewein [pre-avant garde German poster artists] Will Bradley and Edward Penfield [turn of the century American designers]. These represent a totally different aesthetic than Dada Collage, De Stijl, or Russian Constructivism. Do you also pursue other genres or venues of design?
Yes. Last year I had to step in and buy a Polish avant garde book and ephemera collection, because I knew it was headed right for the Getty if I didn’t. Furthermore I was weak in Polish avant garde area. I needed to do that to maintain my franchise, so to speak. I didn’t want to do it at the time. It was was expensive and I was having a hard year. But in order to I continue to build within this area. There’s a lot stay fresh and relevant I have to always challenge myself on new areas. to be done. I like to compare it to agriculture:
relev Well, it’s interesting that you would use the term ‘fresh and relevant,’ because you are dealing with history.There are some that look at the historical materials and say,‘Oh, that’s old tradition; we want new tradition.’ But that you view this as a kind of continually refreshed stream of information.
Fresh and relevant can be applied to historical material as well as contemporary. Historical collecting and research often unearths artists (i.e. designers) who were little known at the time and unknown today. Finding a body of their work often helps to place them in a proper historical context, broadening and freshening up our understanding of the period. Speaking of fresh, what determines what you’re going to go after on the contemporary side? Are you acquiring material that’s being done as we speak? This is hard, because so much material is being done, and to cull through it is too great a challenge for me, frankly, because of the space requirements, to store, to select, to meet designers and to stay with it. But I’ve been trying to get good representations of the best
ant graphic design that’s being done today in the world. I write, call and meet with designers or have mavens in the field put my nose in the right direction. I read the design magazines like Print, Eye, and Graphis. Just storing your massive collection is a Herculean task. How is it maintained now?
Every poster, if possible, is put in mylar in print cabinets. I have three or four locations. If it was framed, I used to keep it in the Neuberger Museum. Now I have my own storage places where I can house both cabinets and framed pieces. Do you have cataloguers and archivists? Well, no. I have one person who helps me with the facilities part-time, and I have another man who does all the photography and handles registrarial duties. This is a lot, because we’re serving not only my own projects, but I contribute to others, such as the 1998 Rodchenko exhibition at MOMA. They needed twenty works by Rodchenko; the Rutgers show on Russia needed more items, etc.. As the profile of this collection rises, curators want pieces.
Do you have a a museum show in the planning stages right now? I am certainly interested in developing a closer relationship with the Cooper-Hewitt, which together with Williams College presented “Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age,” and are design-focused; I think they could help profile their museum to the public by exhibiting a collection of this richness, rarity, and depth. Do you foresee yourself as having a museum, or do you foresee yourself more as being this resource for other museums? I’d like to be able to take a stab at having a free-standing operation some way or another. I don’t want this collection to get submerged by the painting and sculpture department of an art museum controlled by trustees and administrators that do not appreciate this kind of material. In other words, if this collection gets buried, it’s just going to go the route of the Stadelijk (in Amsterdam) and the MOMA, where the design is a stepchild of other departments and a lower priority section.
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Throwaway Culture Rick Poynor
After a recent lecture, a British artist and publisher named Tony Hayward approached me with a slender book in hand, containing some fine sepia photographs of Indian-made rat traps. In the Hindu faith, the rat is regarded as a sacred animal and a bringer of good luck, despite the great health risks posed by rodents. The traps in the photos were intuitively conceived and beautifully fashioned by local craftsmen from waste materials. They mainly used wire, but in a few cases the walls, ramps, and flaps were cut out of old tin containers. The last thing an inquisitive rat would see before its incarceration would be promotional graphics for engine parts, Fujicolor film, or Cuticura talcum powder—a popular brand in India. There is something immensely satisfying about objects made from materials that would otherwise have been thrown away. These gently subversive inventions intrigue, charm, and gladden the heart. As the great Patti Smith sings in “25th Floor,” “The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man.” Even before we started to worry so much about “sustainability,” the process represented a kind of everyday alchemy: the base material
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“There is something immensely satisfying about objects made from materials that would otherwise have been thrown away.”
of garbage—spent, downgraded, discarded, and unloved—is ingeniously transmuted into something splendidly useful. But it’s almost always more than that. The new hand-forged artifact possesses an allure, an artfulness, an air of the unexpected, a magic and mystery that often make it far more desirable than the manufactured version, which offers the same, or even superior, function. If I ever find myself in need of a rat trap, I’d much prefer to buy a recycled Indian one. The strange thing about garbage is that the trick of transformation can be worked irrespective of function. All that’s necessary is to extract the detritus from its usual context. When it’s underfoot in the street or consigned to the dump, every kind of garbage looks redundant, negligible, and impure. Most of the time, we prefer not to look at trash at all, assuming that it is unworthy of our attention. When the trash can overflows, and the waste matter breaks out of its allotted area, we want order restored as soon as possible. If dirt is “matter out of place,” in the famous anthropological formulation, then garbage out of place is just as likely to cause offense. Yet put a frame around the trash (implied or actual) and it can be become a compelling
object of interest. In 2001, a School of Visual Arts student named Justin Gignac began selling garbage for $10–$100 a pop. Gignac wanted to show the importance of packaging in making something—anything at all—impossible to resist, and he started enclosing carefully chosen trash samples “hand-picked from the fertile streets of NY, NY” in clear plastic packages dignified with the legend “Garbage of New York City.” The project continues, and Gignac—a former advertising man who is now an artist—claims to have sold more than 1,300 of the hygienic little cube sculptures to garbage aficionados in 29 countries. Although Gignac is clearly onto a good thing, only the scale of the enterprise and the populist price are new. Artists have been reclaiming lowly trash and upgrading it into collectible gallery art for the last century. One of the purest examples of this tendency (if “pure” isn’t a misleading word here) is the 1960s Frenchborn, naturalized-American artist known by the single name Arman. Arman had a genius for reclamation. One piece of his, Poubelle (1971), consists of the contents of a trash can displayed in a vertical glass case like the crushed and half-obscured revelations of some future archaeological dig. He also liked
to direct our attention to the distinguishing features of particular kinds of castoffs. One early Arman consists of nothing but used dentures. Other pieces ask us to consider the insistent, peculiar, utility-stripped “thingness” of watch faces, electric razors, vials, doll hands, squeezed-out toothpaste tubes, gas masks, and women’s high-heeled shoes (title: Madison Avenue). Arman’s fellow New Realists were just as attracted to waste. Jacques Villeglé built a career out of tearing down the thick layers of tattered street posters that accumulated on Parisian walls, finding in these brutalized surfaces images of beguiling delicacy. His pieces, presented in the gallery like paintings, were a form of collage composed largely by the invisible hand of chance, then given a bit of assistance by the artist. Looking at Villeglé’s trash-pictures, which never fail to entrance me, I find myself wondering how something so ripped to shreds could come out looking so good. For graphic image-makers, collage remains the instrument by which defunct printed matter is reanimated into strange new life. “Cut and paste” is one of the great cultural ideas of the modern era, with applications across all the arts. The history of collage spans the 20th
purp century, and based on present evidence, it looks likely to run through the cultural production of this century, too. The more visual things we make, the more material we have lying around to cut up and reassemble into pleasing and meaningful new shapes. It’s hard to imagine a time when the urge to transform this kind of waste would simply wither away. If anything, our increasingly textureless digital existence (could there be a less haptic surface than a touch screen?) has encouraged designers to reengage with the physicality of things. The more we try to limit the use of paper in the coming decades—because we should—the more appealing the substance will look and feel. The transformation of waste by means of collage, though comparable to the use of bits of old wire and tin to build a trap, is not the same kind of recycling. An Indian rat trap redirects existing materials and puts them to new use, and its fabrication requires few resources.
ose However appealing it looks, it exists only to catch unwanted intruders. In a society that regularly built its traps in this way, there would be much less need for manufactured traps that consumed new materials. Though making a collage has the small virtue of being an inexpensive way to construct an image, anyone concerned with paper as a finite resource would do better to collect waste- paper and return it for processing so it could be used again. The impulse to make a collage serves a different purpose. The collagist is usually engaged in the symbolic, rather than actual, rearrangement of reality. Elements of the collage—a hand, a bird, a bicycle, a chair—come from the world we know; we can often identify their provenance and date them to a decade. But their new setting is a kind of proposition in compressed visual form that pictures an idealized or even utopian dimension. In the combinatorial space defined by a collage, colors change, ordinary
perspective collapses, the usual scale and relationship between things is inverted (a flower dwarfs a person, a head becomes an eye), different eras in history fold together, and figuration and abstraction merge together on the same visual plane. The idea of waste matter is intrinsically displeasing. But the collage-maker knows otherwise and refuses to allow waste to go to waste. In plan chests and filing cabinets, lovingly assembled hoards of cutout pictures and torn paper strips await their moment. Their chance combinations, as they repose in the drawers, will often suggest new images. By a paradoxical twist, the collage’s surface area becomes an arena of intensified aesthetic attention. In a successful collage, superfluous and otherwise unwanted visual matter—trash by any other name—is transfigured and redeemed, and the garbage comes back to us as a paper jewel.
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Some Thoughts on Collecting
Rob Roy Kelly
I don’t know if collecting springs from some sublimated form of man’s primeval instincts to hunt, but it certainly can be just as intense. I am never happier than when hot on the trail. Whenever I find a good piece after years of looking, and especially if the dealer does not recognize it’s true value and it is underpriced, I could easily throw back my head, raise my arms and bay at the moon. Success in the hunt is a most rewarding feeling. The pleasures of collecting for me have always been more than acquisition of items. It has been the travel; meeting other collectors or dealers who often are interesting people and the thrill of finding something new or unexpected. I experience as much satisfaction discovering information as I do finding items for the collection. I have researched almost everything I collected and knowing how, when, and where appropriate, who made it to be extremely important. Equally satisfying is writing about the subject and attempting to communicate with others about what is most interesting for me.
There is often an innate sense for shape, form, color or use of materials demonstrated by the makers that induce true admiration for their sensibilities and workmanship. For me, maturity of a collector is shown by placing the most prized items into inauspicious corners where knowledgeable visitors can discover the treasures for themselves.
“The pleasures of collecting for me have always been more than acquisition of items.”
I live with my collections using them for decoration in both my working and living space. I enjoy looking, comparing, studying and thinking or speculating about each item. The kitchenware collection has been most rewarding in this respect. The materials, ingenuity and craftsmanship are all worthy of respect.
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How Addiction Developed Into a Calling
Design Indaba
Graphic designer Steven Heller chronicles how his addictive collection of objects leads to the subject matter for his books. American graphic designer Steven Heller talks at the 2013 Design Indaba Conference about how he has been “motivated to chronicle the history of graphic design in broad terms” largely through a massive collection of found objects and products that he has amassed. “I’m addicted to visual design objects of all kinds – especially graphic design,” he says, describing a collection that spans politically and socially propagandistic printed material to hundreds of avant-garde, alternative and counter cultural magazines to scores of product mascots lining his shelves that are “poised to pounce.” “I like to think of my collection as an archaeological dig. Typographic styles are indicators of certain types of culture and tracing their timelines is endlessly fascinating. As designers we make marks,” says Heller.
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Typographic styles are indicators of certain types of culture and tracing their timelines is endlessly fascinating. As designers we make marks.”
He is less interested in the design objects of commercial cultures themselves as much as what or who they represent. He describes the miniature retail mannequins he collects, for example, as “the Roman or Greek statuary of the 20th century.”
He collects to fulfill a neurotic obsession, but having a loftier rationale is imperative. His “loftier rationale” is the hope that his collection leads to other things that have more of an impact on other people – in his case, a series of authored works. From books on various forms of typography – one co-written with his wife on shadow fonts was due to be published shortly after the conference – to a study on a hundred magazine designs with English designer Jason Godfrey, Heller describes “the distinct relationship commercial design has with art and how one feeds another.” He talks about “mundane consumables” and product packaging – on the aura of a product
trumping its function – and why certain forms and representations cause people to consume items and others don’t. “What is the visual code that needs to be cracked to understand consumption?” Heller asks. Another of his books is a critical look at the “horrific but enigmatic” symbol of the swastika. Heller describes how the swastika had a benign history before Adolf Hitler appropriated it as his own. The book deals with the history of the symbol and its ability to be reclaimed and changed back into its original non-threatening form. The subject got him interested in how major totalitarian regimes of the 20th century created “visual representations and mythic appearances that captured the hearts and minds of its citizens,” and how fear manifests in popular media. “Fear is a great way to keep people in line and I’ve been avidly collecting material graphically designed to increase fear levels.”
Heller devised and co-chairs the graduate programme at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. He started his career in the underground press working as an art director and designer for magazines including an underground sex tabloid paper and a rock music periodical – publications where he “criminally mixed type fonts” much of the time. In 1974, age 24, he was hired as the art director of The New York Times op-ed page and later as the art director of The New York Times Book Review. There, he says, he was one of three art directors to have graduated from Screw, naming one of the sex magazines he designed for in his youth. “Turned out it was like doing Screw but with better typesetting equipment,” says Heller. “I was able to exercise my love for books, type, comics, satire and popular culture. It was the best job in the world and I lasted there for about 33 years.”
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The Never-Ending Struggle Against Clutter
Dysfunctional clutter. Anything can become clutter, including books. I took this picture a few weeks ago in a used bookstore in Nice, in the south of France. I was looking for old French paperbacks and I had seen one or two possibilities in some rotating racks on the street, so I went inside. In the cavernous space, more like some mad entropic warehouse than a shop, the books rose from the floor in great looming cliffs of paper, the volumes crushed against each other like tectonic plates shattered into thousands of fragments. Near the cash desk in the gloom at the back, an overloaded shelf was leaning so far sideways it threatened to collapse and bury alive an unwary book lover under an avalanche of printed matter. Apart from me, though, there weren’t any visitors. I could see the kinds of book I was after, but they were inaccessible, locked in place by the great weight of paper above. The owner approached me and I told him what I was looking for. “Come back tomorrow,” he said.
Rick Poyner
I paid for a couple of books and left. The following afternoon, taking him at his word, I returned. The place was empty again. He didn’t look too pleased to see me. He hadn’t moved anything since the day before, or found any paperbacks. I would just have to look for myself. Cautiously, I began to move a few volumes in a stack that appeared promising. The owner became agitated. “We’re closed,” he said. “You go now.” Perhaps I should have given up at once and left him to his chaos, but I persisted, reminding him he’d told me to come back today. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. I called it a day and left. This impenetrable grotto of print didn’t look remotely like a functioning shop and I found it hard to believe after two brush-offs that the owner cared much about selling anything. Most of his stock had been reduced to clutter and rendered completely inaccessible, and any kind of persistence, let alone disturbing the precarious piles, was clearly unwelcome. Every item had its
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Clutter and design are inseparable as concepts because clutter is the negation of design.”
position in the edifice of paper and there it would stay. It was as though unbridled directionless hoarding rather than selling to book seekers had become the true purpose of the store.
The shop was an extreme public example of the condition of compulsive hoarding that afflicts many of us now. Clutter is the stubborn, shameful, wanted-but-not-wanted residue of our affluence. It thickens around us and clogs up our living spaces. We paid for these things, or perhaps received them as gifts, so it can be hard to throw them out. We preserve them, jam them on to shelves, push them into corners, cram them into cupboards, and stash them out of sight under the bed. There is often a designated zone — a room, basement, attic or garage — where these inert, decommissioned objects accumulate en masse. In my home, this storage depot is the loft, which houses 30 or more years’ worth of accreted domestic clutter, some of it wanted (the personal things) but much of it no longer used or even remembered, yet somehow too good, too potentially useful again at some once vaguely imagined moment
in the future that will never actually arrive, to let go. Each year the cargo of loft clutter becomes more swollen, unbreachable and pointless. (And I’m not even talking here about the seemingly ineradicable drifts of day-to-day clutter in the house below.) But enough is enough. Over the summer, little by little, we’ve been clearing out the loft. Sorting through the clutter, deciding what to do with it, and breaking it down into categories has taken many days of work: things that are genuinely worth keeping; things for other people to take if they can find a use for them; things for recycling; things for the charity shop; things with no conceivable second life that will have to go into the trash. How good it feels to shed the burden and give proper order to what remains. Can we stick to our post-clearout resolution never to let clutter on this scale (a necessary qualification since there is always clutter) overrun us again? Clutter and design are inseparable as concepts because clutter is the negation of design. The
items that compose a heap of clutter might be well designed in themselves, but their ragged disposition strips them of beauty and purpose. Jammed against other objects that are often entirely different in provenance, genre, purpose or style, they lose their particularity and aura, as well as their function, and become dead matter. There is a fine line, though, between raw, superfluous, life-draining clutter and an intermediary, more exalted kind of clutter, which I have touched on regularly in this blog because I am obsessed with it. Treated as part of a collection, whether in a museum or a junk shop, and put into artful arrangements with other objects, units of clutter can become charged, poetic and strange. Objects that were once someone else’s clutter may carry the potential to acquire new meaning and, under new ownership, become desirable commodities of a different complexion. As I have written in a recent column for Print, even the lowliest trash can be redeemed.
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From the Collection: 008
Tobias Frere-Jones
Everything is collected by somebody, and I’m grateful for that. Ephemera, the fragile snapshots of everyday design, would be lost without collectors.
“Ephemera, the fragile snapshots of everyday design, would be lost without collectors.”
Old cigar boxes were a fascinating pileup of typography, with labels or stamps on every surface. They variously identified the manufacturer, described the goods and certified their authenticity, revealed any possible tampering or intrusion, and attested to regulatory compliance. It was a precise hierarchy, like a tobacconist’s version of halftitle, frontispiece, title and colophon. We get to enjoy all of these labels in pristine condition because manufacturers would order a larger print run than was actually needed, to allow for errors in assembling the boxes. The humblest member of this troupe was certainly the “edging,” the paper strips glued over the nail heads and splintery edges of the thin wooden boards. At about one inch across, they only had space for a few lines of lettering and perhaps some ornamentation. The engravers and printers could break out the flashy embossing and foil stamping elsewhere on the box. But here, they had to be more concise, compressing the brand identity down to a looping pattern.The big labels are captivating in their ornate finery, but I find these edge strips fascinating in a wholly different way. Design history is made of these moments just as much as the famous exhibition posters and private press books. If we can ever get a complete history of our craft, we can thank the collectors.
Book Designer and Photographer: Kara Schutte
Miami University 2017 Š