Robert Cornelius: daugerohot
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Last month, I finally threw out a dozen paintings I made in high school, but not without photographing them first. The paintings are angry, amateurish, and hasty — some I spent little more than several minutes on — but they are a part of me. I may never look at these files again, but the thought of losing these pictures entirely to my unreliable memory filled me with anxiety for many years until I finally got them out.
Everyone has an aunt or grandparent that paints, but there is limited bathroom wall space for fruit bowl still lifes. We like to think there is value in a painting just for being a painting, but there isn’t. If you, as the descendent of a deceased “artist” cannot bother to store their collection in your attic, than it costs more than it is worth. I wonder how Salvation Army deals with the glut of artistic donations. Do they burn them? A lot of thrift store goods are bought in bulk by Haitian and African immigrants to bring back to their home countries, or are simply donated (this is detailed in a wonderful short documentary called Secondhand Pepe.) But few if anyone in the third world overseas is hankering for an 11×25 seascape.
Childhood mementos are just as sacred. How many of your old dresses and toys are in your mother’s attic? At a book reading last fall, William Gibson explained the predicament of wanting to see an old toy from childhood, but not caring enough to actually buy it. His solution was to save a search on eBay for it, and when the toy was finally listed, he saved the images to his desktop. If you grew up in the 80s you might recall the Sylvanian families. Here is every reason to dump (or sell) that old box of them somewhere.
Obviously the experience of an object as an image is different than as a shape. And the sentimental impulse just might not be there without it. Says Art Fag City on this subject:
People experience sculpture differently than painting for example, because there is a different physical and spatial relationship to the object. In many ways these concepts remain the same when viewing art on a computer even if the variables change. So for example, unlike a photograph or a sculpture, a net artist has less control over a viewers interaction with its framing mechanisms. The size of screen or the color of the browser a user choses to view their work in, vary from household to household, and there’s very little an artist can do to customize that experience. Other aspects remain constant — viewers will experience work on a flat screen, images will be always seen at 72 dpi, they will always be framed by a browser, in all likelihood the smallest screen size will be 800 pixels which informs how an artist works.
All of this of course is old hat to designers and net artists, who have been working with this set of problems for a while. However, for those who don’t think about these concerns all that often, it’s worth remarking that a large part of an artist’s web practice — whether they think too much about it or not — is implicitly concerned with image file management and display. In other words, decisions about the size and placement of a jpg or video file are always being made. In this way, I see a lot of aesthetic similarities between net art to collage and photography, because frame, composition, and layering, are always a concern.
The tactile experience is often what makes objects meaningful to us. Other things, like books and moleskines, are too time consuming to transfer. Somethings aren’t even worth the disk space when you really think about it. But you never know when it comes to photos. Unclutterer recommended the snap-and-save method in recent post. One of the commenters says:
About 25 years ago, while in college, I took a picture of three people that I have not seen since. They were good friends at the time, but school ended, we all moved on. Although I often came across that picture and had fond memories of those people, I would also think, “Why do I have these piles of pictures of things, or in this case, people, who I will never see again?” So, about six months ago, I started sorting, and tossing old pictures, trying to unclutter– including that picture.
Flash forward to two months ago. I was visiting a hospital as part of my clinicals as a student nurse. I recognized one of the nurses, but couldn’t place her. It was driving me crazy. We started talking, and one of the first things out of her mouth was, “You used to live in the dorm right across from us, 25 years ago.” You guessed it. She was in the picture that I threw out. I should have scanned it. I still have it on my todo list to look through my negatives and see if I can resurrect it (I think that day of uncluttered was spent in front of a shredder). To make matters worse, her old boyfriend, that she never fully got over, was in the picture as well, and she wanted to see the picture.
But these things happen. I find the less I save, the more I value what I do save. It isn’t worth it to feel sentimental for a garage full of what might be garbage, when you can really cherish a few select things.
Related links:
- “Evocative objects” edited by Sherry Turkle
- The PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art
- Eddie Breen “Piggyback Art”
- “Throw Away, Give Away, Put Away” at The Psychology of Clutter
- Alexander von Vegesack’s “Adventures with Objects”
Morbid Anatomy’s Joanna Ebenstein just launched a website for “Anatomical Theatre”, a touring photographic exhibition of medical museum artifacts spanning from the 16th to the 20th century.
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