Wednesday 6 May 2015

KATHRYN RYAN


Collecting: promise and loss – constant objects and ephemeral narratives.

'The sheer number of the things needing to be arranged and the near-impossibility of distributing them according to any truly satisfactory criteria mean that I never finally manage it, that the arrangements I end up with are temporary and vague, and hardly any more effective than the original anarchy. The outcome of all this leads to truly strange categories. A folder of miscellaneous papers, for example, on which is written 'To be Classified...'

Georges Perec 'Species of Spaces and Other Pieces'

Kathryn Ryan is an object and installation artist who uses found objects, casts and texts, and is interested in the processes surrounding documentation, collection and arrangement. She is drawn to the transformative potential of disused objects and their connections to poetry, promise and loss, and the natural world. Her forum talk on 6 May 2015 will focus on her collecting practices, the shifting spaces a practice inhabits, and how we are all, in some way, collectors.


GIORGIO MORANDI

Giorgio Morandi
Grande natura morta con la caffettiera (Large Still Life with Coffeepot)
1933, etching, 38.3 x 51.1cm




Morandi with part of his collection

Morandi's collection and studio 
Dong Yuan Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles (composed of 80 pieces),
2009; oil on canvas, 160X178.5cm SOURCE

FIONA HALL




installation view

Fiona Hall Leaf Litter 2002 
detail: Brassica cumpestris - turnip
gouache on bank notes

CLICK to see more Leaf Litter

Tuesday 5 May 2015

EDMUND DE WAAL

I have spent the last few years writing a very personal book. It is the biography of a collection and the biography of my family. It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora and about the survival of objects.


The collection is of 264 Japanese netsuke. It is the common thread for the story of its three Jewish owners and the three rooms in which it was kept over a period of a hundred and forty years.

FLUXUS


Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "flow, flux" (noun); "flowing, fluid" (adj.) (Wiktionary)—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. read more

Daniel Spoerri, detail of Anecdoted Topography of Chance, 1962

In connection with a one man show of his snare-pictures at the Galerie Lawrence in Paris in 1962, Spoerri wrote his Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (Anecdoted Topography of Chance). Spoerri was then living at the Hotel Carcassone in Paris, in room number 13 on the fifth floor. To the right of the entrance door was a table which his wife Vera had painted blue. Spoerri drew on a ‘map" the overlapping outlines of all the 80 objects that were lying on the table on 17 October 1961 at exactly 3:47 p.m. Each object was assigned a number and Spoerri wrote a brief description of each object and the memories or associations it evoked. The descriptions cross referenced other objects on the table which were related. The Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard was printed as a small pamphlet of 53 pages plus a fold out map and index and was distributed as an advertisement for the exhibit. The Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard is more than just a catalog of random objects, however; read in its entirety, it provides a coherent and compelling picture of Spoerri's travels, friends and artistic endeavors. read more


see more fluxus

JOSEPH CORNELL




Joseph Cornell: artist/collector/archivist 



Joseph Cornell Taglioni's Jewel Casket 1940 MOMA


The first of dozens Cornell made in honor of famous ballerinas, this box pays homage to Marie Taglioni, an acclaimed nineteenth-century Italian dancer who, according to legend, kept an imitation ice cube in her jewelry box to commemorate dancing in the snow at the behest of a Russian highwayman. The box is infused with erotic undertones—both in the tactile nature of the glass cubes, velvet, and rhinestone necklace (purchased at a Woolworth's dime store in New York) and in the incident itself, in which Taglioni reportedly performed on an animal skin placed across the snowy road.  read more

                                             
Untitled drawing / collage by Joseph Cornell 1030-40
read more - Smithsonian American Art Museum


read more

and more

PHILIP GUSTON



Philip Guston, Mazurki Ink on Paper, 
approx. 14 x 18 inches, whereabouts unknown

read about the collaborative and enigmatic nature of the lost Mazurki here

see more strangely familiar collections here and here and here and here.

and see more artists doing strangely familiar drawings hereherehereherehere and here.

MARK DION


detail from Mark Dion, The Curiosity Shop 2005 

Mark Dion, Drawing for "Aviary (Library for the Birds of Massachusetts," 2005

"Collecting may be a passion or it may be impulsive, but then there’s ordering, taxonomy, classification- putting things together in a way that makes sense. Of course we have a scientific way of organizing things- but there are other kinds of taxonomies based on use, folklore, personal tastes, and imaginary hierarchies. That’s really what is fascinating for me. Scientific classification is constantly changing as information shifts." Mark Dion 

OBJECTS MUSEUMS ARCHIVES and COLLECTIONS


Cabinet of Curiosity (or Curiosities) came into popular use starting in 15th century Renaissance Europe. They were originally rooms filled with all type of objects from nature, from antiquity, and from the art world. Eventually these collections would be stored in elaborately modeled cabinets, full of drawers and shelves of different sizes and shapes. Today's modern furniture analogy would be a curio cabinet. Very large cabinets of curiosities, with massive numbers of specimens, eventually became the base collection for many of the world's great public museums. Physicians, merchants, nobility, and royalty were the many kinds of citizens that would collect and build cabinets to display their collections.


In Germany in 1550, Kunstkammer ("Chamber of Art") was 1st used to describe these collections. Also used was Wunderkammer ("Collection of Marvelous Things") to describe collections more populated by objects from the natural word, such as fossils, mineral formations, and animal and plant specimens. Eventually the two words were joined and were used as Kunst-und Wunderkammer ("Cabinets of Art and Wonder"). Cabinets became increasingly popular as the printing press came into wide usage (allowing publication of catalogues displaying all of a collector's unique treasures). The newly expanding mercantile class, benefitting from New World trade, provided wealth to purchase items from around the world. Expeditions to North and South America, Asia, and Africa sent many ships back to Europe full of natural history merchandise for collectors.