Debjani Bhardwaj: My Journal: Finding ,Collecting, Documenting

Why do Museums collect?

Before the 19th century, it was fashionable to collect curious objects such as unusual shells or fine mineral crystals. Explorers brought back natural objects to eager, private collectors. Discoveries built up as European empires expanded and collecting became more systematic and organized. To categories and collect was to tame and understand the world. This was the era of the great museums, of the mapping of unfamiliar continents. Scientists wanted to build a catalogue of Earth's diversity to help remove superstitions using rational arguments and tangible facts. Medical scientists and anthropologists collected human remains for the purpose of study. Even to this day, Museum scientists are continuing to make important discoveries about our planet and its present diversity. Collections and records reveal new information whether it is discovering an undetected species in an old collection or using new techniques such as DNA analysis or CT Scans to reveal previously unseen details.

Why do individuals collect?

Everybody collects something. Whether be it photographs of a person’s vacation, ticket from football matches, souvenirs of trips, pictures of one’s children, athletes’ trophies, kids’ report cards or those who collect junk and dispose them in garage sales. Some people collect for investment. Some collect for pure joy – it’s fun. Some collect to expand their social lives, exchanging objects with like-minded souls. For some people collecting is simply the quest, a life-long pursuit that is never complete. Additional motivations to collect include psychological security, filling a void in a sense of the self. Collections could be a means to immortality or fame. The motives are not mutually exclusive, as certainly many motives can combine to create a collector.

Why do artists collect?

Throughout history artists have collected objects for professional and private reasons-as studio props, sources of inspiration, references for their work and personal mementoes Unlike museums, artists do not typically take a scholarly approach to collecting, nor do they seek to assemble comprehensive and representative collections. Reflecting personal interests and obsessions, their collections are reflected visually in their work. While many artists make direct use of their collections for research and study, or as raw material to create new work, others keep them in storage for possible future use.

The use of objects in art

objet trouvé are objects which are either manufactured or of natural origin, used in, or as, works of art. With the exception of the readymade in which a manufactured object is generally presented on its own without mediation, the objet trouvé is most often used as raw material in an assemblages with juxtaposition as a guiding principle. Prior to the 20th century unusual objects were collected in cabinets of curiosities, but it was only in the early 20th century that found objects came to be appreciated as works of art in their own right.From the Renaissance to the 18th century, the cabinet of curiosities celebrated the act of collection for its own sake, in an almost haphazard accumulation of natural-history specimens and other bizarre objects. Crocodiles were hung from rafters, skulls (animal and human) vied for shelf space with toads supposedly found alive in rocks – and then there were the "mermaids", composed of monkey torsos sewn to fish tails. These items invariably came from far-flung, semi-mythic places: from the ultima thule of the Arctic to the mysterious reaches of the far east; from profound oceans to impenetrable jungles where any kind of monster might lurk. These were a bridge between ancient myths and the new scientific reality.

Like the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th century, which mixed science and art, ancient and modern, reality and fiction, the 2013 exhibition "Curiosity and the Pleasures of Knowing" juxtaposed historical periods and categories of objects to produce an eccentric map of curiosity in its many senses’ said Curator Brian Dillon.Ranging from the absurdly over stuffed Horniman Museum walrus, which travelled to the seaside having left its home for the first time since the 1890s, works by contemporary artists including Katie Paterson, Pablo Bronstein, Tacita Dean, Gerard Byrne and Nina Katchadourian exposed past and present fascinations such as astronomy, animals, maps, portraiture and humankind’s obsession with collecting, blurring the boundaries of art, science and fantasy.

"Curiosity and the Pleasures of Knowing" exhibition that celebrated collection at the Turner Contemporary

Some contemporary artists realistically depict or represent ordinary domestic objects (a paper bag, a garden hose, supermarket produce), while others accumulate/collect quantities of found materials (plastic Coke bottles, rubber flip-flop sandals, audiotape) or serve as functional forms in their own right (light fixtures and furniture). Several artists transform existing materials to become components of other everyday things—such as wall sconces made with portable coolers and colorful benches composed of handrails.

Many of these artworks reflect current societal themes, addressing issues from waste and recycling to domesticity in relation to industrial production to the impact of functional objects’ design on daily life. Whether featuring traditional or non-traditional materials, they heighten our awareness of how everyday things—from the banal to the transformative—characterize our world.

Contemporary artists who have used a collection of everyday/ natural found objects in their installations

Much of the Scottish artist Christine Borland’s work appropriates this 19th century obsession with collecting and classification. It is as if by accumulating enough bits and pieces she might be able to chart and make sense of this disparate modern world. Between 1991-99 she created an installation entitled Small Objects that Save Lives. These were items received by post after a letter sent out requesting a response to her project. The resulting objects: a packet of hair dye, a paper-back of W.B Yeats’s poetry, a finger stall and floppy disc, to name but a few, were the collected ephemera of modernity that told us in great detail about the specifics of contemporary life, without giving any sense of what it was actually like to live it. It is in these interstices between meaning and interpretation, between the organic and inorganic, fact and fiction that Christine Borland works.

Christine Borland often collaborates with experts on scientific fields using the specialist knowledge on forensics or genetics. It has lead to many questioning whether what she does is really art, or whether it relies too heavily on its source material, not transforming it sufficiently into the realm of metaphor. But Christine Borland is an ‘investigative’ artist, the Sherlock Holmes of the art world. She looks for clues and signs to explain the complexity and fragility of human existence rather than presenting her audience with finite statements.

It might be argued that some of Borland’s work is rather arcane and too dependent on a knowledge of the scientific data that it appropriates, too heavily laden with complex references and unable to cut free from its original source material and ‘be’ in its own right. In this Brave New world of genetics and cloning huge ethical questions are raised that go way beyond mere scientific debate. We stand on the brink of being able to decode and deconstruct the very essence of human existence. Perhaps, therefore, it is entirely appropriate that these huge issues are not left entirely in the hands of the scientists but are reflected back to us through the eyes of artists and the debates of philosophers. In this commitment to social issues, Borland is unusual among artists of her generation more usually addicted to easy irony. If her work has value beyond its formal artistic concerns and merits, it is in its insistence on asking difficult questions and probing areas that many are all too happy to leave to the experts.

Christine Borland calalogues objects like a mseum would. "Small Objects can save lives" 1996- 170 images of objects nominated and sent by mail from different people Christine wrote to requesting them to respond to the title.

Another artist who collects objects is Mona Hatoum. Hatoum appropriates objects related to the domestic kitchen, traditionally a feminine domain, and gives them a menacing, uncanny edge. The work’s title expresses an ironic, ambivalent relationship to the safe, nurturing environment that the word home implies. The artist has explained, ‘I called it Home, because I see it as a work that shatters notions of the wholesomeness of the home environment, the household, and the domain where the feminine resides. Having always had an ambiguous relationship with notions of home, family, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation, I often like to introduce a physical or psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.’ (quoted in ‘Mona Hatoum interviewed by Jo Glencross’, in Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance, p.68) Home evokes the small scale anguish of domestic drudgery and the claustrophobia of gender roles. Hatoum has commented, ‘I see kitchen utensils as exotic objects, and I often don’t know what their proper use is. I respond to them as beautiful objects. Being raised in a culture where women have to be taught the art of cooking as part of the process of being primed for marriage, I had an antagonistic attitude to all of that’ (quoted in Domestic Disturbance, p.65).

Mona Hatoum catalogues objects dealing with gender roles or displacement. "Home" 1999 consists of metal kitchen objects placed on a metallic table and light bulbs inside the objects illuminate them and speakers amplify a crackling sound.

In London, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Damien Hirst produced a series of 'cabinet' pieces in which ranges of objects were presented in the type of glass vitrine typical of scientific display in a museum or laboratory. Including such remnants as the packaging for pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals , empty drinking glasses, cows' internal organs and fish, they also evoke the 19^th century gentleman's hobby of collecting specimens. Related installations utilise large glass and steel chambers which function simultaneously as spaces for containment and confinement and invoke notions of cyclical birth and death. Referring to the aesthetic of Minimalism established in the 1960s, and developed in the 1980s, Hirst's glass cases reflect the contradictions implicit in the (scientific) pursuit of knowledge. They provide an ironic commentary on the inevitable loss of life as a body is taken apart for scientific examination: sterility and death accompanying identification and preservation. He has said: 'I like ideas of trying to understand the world by taking things out of the world. You kill things to look at them.' (Quoted in Morgan, p.24.)

Damien Hirst's installation "Forms without Life", 1991, seashells in a MDF cabinet is about mortality."Can life still be beautiful after death like the seashells?".That is his question. He says why he likes collecting" I mean, I do like the idea of making collections, because by making collections you make connections, which can be very minor. I think it's a good way of looking at the world. It's like a grid over a landscape, it's like using some mathematical logic to understand something which is basically emotional, I guess."