During my first term at Chelsea I have been attending lectures that include theory and tasks for my blog. I have summed up my notes from my lectures in this piece.
The set of lectures I went to were based around the theme of Collecting to form a relationship with our practical theme.
There were many different threads of thought for the lectures, the pathology of collecting, collecting the exotic, obsessive collecting, what phycologists think of collecting and how we view certain collections.
The set of lectures we had made me open my eyes to not only my own collecting habit's but why we do it. My belief is that we do it to keep hold of certain memories or times when we believed we were happy or times we want to remember and cherish.
One of the lectures concentrated on “Collecting the Exotic” of which looked into the paintings of the 1830’s. The sample of paintings we looked at all depicted women being sexual objects and very free and “easy” and the majority looked like they were foreign. However the women in britain at this time had strict rules to wear corsets and dresses that cover their arms and ankles. Therefore most of the paintings were sold to western men who were fascinated about these desirable creatures from strange and wonderful countries. The purpose of the paintings were to for full the mens fantasy of women being sexual beings. Their wives were purely there to create heirs.
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La Grande Odalisque.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
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The Turkish Bath
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Therefore the collection of the exotic in the 1830s was purely to create a fake fantasy world of what the Orient looks like. The paintings would also be excessively expensive therefore the paintings could also of been an investment or to show off how much money they have.
This could be said that this “collecting of the exotic” could be going on nowadays, with Asian people visiting Europe to buy fashion pieces made by designers such as Louis Vuitton, Juicy Couture and Gucci. This shows that they want to be more Western.
Another side of Collecting the Exotic is the “Human Zoo” or “Freak Shows” where Western people would pay money to see women/men from the orient. One image shows a muslim woman wearing a burka with her breasts reveled. I find that particular image hard to look at. her face looks in pain.
There is a museum in Oxford names the Pitt Rivers Museum of which collects such artifacts and images from the time of the divide of the Orient and western country and sets all the artifacts together for example they would put all the fans together. People think that this is the only museum that does not create a divide between cultures.
Another Lecture I had was the pathology of collecting. This lecture concentrated on the thought that collecting things is a way of categorizing things. This links to the example of a collection of My Little Pony collection where the person organized the objects by colour, location and name.
Its easy to categorize our own collections however what about when it comes to collections in a museum? How do they do it?
In the collecting world sometimes we find it embarrassing to admit out collecting, for example on youtube there was a man and wife who collected sex dolls and kept them in their house. Therefore youtbe is a way of showing your collections to the world without actively telling people about your addiction to those objects.
I find looking through youtube at collections really insightful, some of them are admittedly extremely odd but its abit of an eye opener. Therefore you could arguably say that I am collecting the exotic by looking at the youtube videos of people collecting odd things.
Why do we collect things?
Collecting objects that are personal to you is another way of organizing or documenting your own life. For example collecting train tickets.
What should we collect? Why do we collect certain things? Could it be that we are trying to control our own memories? For example we don’t collect certain photographs because we want to forget them such as old photos of you and your ex boyfriend.
We collect to forget: What isn’t in a collection is often as important as what is in the collection.
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Freud’s view of the Human Mind.
In Frued’s “Iceberg” diagram of the mind, it has three stages Conscious, Preconscious and the Unconscious.
The Conscious Level is part of the mind of which we are aware of, perceptions and thoughts.
The Preconscious level is the part of the mind that stores ordinary memory, where we collect knowledge and memories.
The unconscious level is the part of the mind that isn’t directly accessible to awareness, of which stores fears, violent motives, selfish needs, irrational wishes, shameful experiences and unacceptable sexual desires.
Looking at Frued’s diagram, it helps me understand the mind and helps me understand examples of behavior. For example a middle aged man had a deep desire to have sex with prostitutes however he knew it was wrong due to his conscious level. This resulted in whenever he had the desire to do so he would watch Blood Brothers to relax due to his preconscious level.
The Holocaust.
The Holocaust could be thought of as some sort of collection. In the way that the germans collected the Jews together and dressed them in the same striped clothes before they were sent to the concentration camps.
There was an actual collection within the Holocaust also. Of which the Jewish people would have to give up their personal belongings which was catalogued and tagged by the german soldiers. The collection of objects were then sold on or recycled.
The Holocaust is by far the most sick and disgusting collection of all history and time.
The last lecture we had was “People Leave Traces”.
This lecture looked at the personal story of collecting and more importantly the memories that we hold.
We looked at how clothes were the most personal thing we own. They are intimate, they sit on our skin and some even mould to our shape.
We don’t really have a personal connection with fashion or textile photography but I believe we have a small connection with the clothes themselves even if they are polished.
Fashion drawings however we understand and connect with better as it is how the designer actually believed it would sit on a person.
Fashion images in a museum are harder to connect with., they are even more polished and they sit behind glass so they are literally untouchable. When the image is behind the glass it reenforces the fact that it is in icealation that we couldn’t look at it closely if we tried, this compares to the images in fashion magazines where you can look at the image closely and study it in great detail. Museums such as the fashion section in the V+A have froze the fashion garment in time. It takes the use out of the actual dress and it becomes a object to study, not a object of desire.
The notes I have written up are from the lectures I thoroughly enjoyed or made me open my eyes.
Collecting is a present thing in everyones day to day life it goes from where you stack your mugs, to standing on the tube to the extreme like collecting sex dolls. We all do it, its just how we do it that is interesting.
