When Does Crap Become Collection?
Imagine this: a building of rooms filled with objects that no one ever uses, and when those rooms are filled to overflowing, the objects end up in more rooms, where they’re stored away, destined to see the light of day perhaps a few weeks out of the year, if at all. It sounds a lot like the home of a hoarder, but it also describes a typical museum and its collection.
As The Object Lesson, onstage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre through October 4, 2015, demonstrates, the “stuff” individuals amass in a lifetime can amount to an overwhelming number of objects. We’ve talked with professional organizers about how objects help individuals form memories, and how we can learn to cherish what is meaningful and let go of that which is not. But it is the job of a museum curator to sort through a huge range of objects to identify what is meaningful to us as a society. It can be a fine line between hoarding and collecting—so when exactly does “crap” become “collection”?
Museum curators deal with what they call “numinous objects,” which are defined by Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn in The Public Historian as “the objects we collect and preserve not for what they may reveal to us as material documents, or for any visible aesthetic quality, but for their association, real or imagined, with some person, place or event endowed with special sociocultural magic.” So, for instance, when visitors stand in front of Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, they feel as though they are somehow standing in front of President Lincoln himself. But how do curators know what objects will make visitors “feel all the feels”? “Historic museum professionals are custodians of material culture, not arbiters of intrinsic merit,” write Maines and Glynn. Museums stand to identify and tell the story of that which is important rather than judge whether an item should be considered important or not.
A number of museums around the world, however, have taken a different tack in how they choose and group objects in order to tell a larger story. The Catalan sculptor Frederic Mares (1893-1991) collected a variety of his own belongings, as well as cultural paraphernalia over his lifetime, ultimately opening what he dubbed a “Sentimental Museum,” which today is housed at Barcelona’s Frederic Mares Museum. The objects on display there, painstakingly arranged by Mares, include walls of clocks and pocket watches, curio cabinets full of playing cards, cigarette holders, calling cards—even a whole room of photographs—and much more. Harvard professor Giuliana Bruno, in her Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, explains how the displays of “seemingly banal, ephemeral apparel of daily life” tell a story that transports museum visitors back in time, allowing them to emotionally digest the past:
The visitor experiences the spectacle of things that carry no value other than emotional power—objects transformed into narratives by way of emotion. …objects cherished and touched by hands no longer living; used things that have no more use; belongings that no longer belong… When such contents are simply frozen, arrested in time, a museum can become a mausoleum. Here, we can take hold of time and experience it as in the work of mourning.
It is not the individual objects that are important here, but the sum of their parts—the collection as a whole elevates the object to the level of spectacle. No single early 1900s postcard in Mares’ collection tells much of a story on its own, but in the context of the entire collection, it tells so much more: a visual story of everyday life in the last century.
In Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the home of a schoolteacher and history buff has been transformed into the Christian C. Sanderson Museum. Sanderson was a collector, though some would have called him a hoarder—he “collected whatever interested him, whatever touched him—no matter how quirky—probably for reasons that only he fully understood,” according to the museum’s website. That includes stacks of newspapers, accessories, china, autographs, and more. A sign by Sanderson’s stairwell reads, “I apologize for look of house, but everything is precious to me.” The museum prides itself on placing major historical events in personal context—the past through the eyes of Sanderson—though the true historical significance of the objects in his collection is debatable, such as a raincoat worn to President Eisenhower’s second inauguration. The magical quality of the raincoat lies purely in its place within the larger context of Sanderson’s collection, its place within Sanderson’s own life story.
The recently opened exhibition Object Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., turns the concept of numinous objects on its head by displaying “everyday things that changed everything.” The exhibition tells the stories of how new inventions like the bicycle revolutionized the way we live.
“Many of the museum exhibitions that we have present objects as symbols of social movements, or people’s lives, explained project director Judith Gradwohl. Object Project focuses instead on the objects themselves, and the material cultural around them. “We saw it as a way to help visitors understand how to interpret objects in and of themselves, and to weave the museum’s thinking more deeply about the things they use in their daily lives.”
At the Object Project, you can find items like toilets, coat hangers, and thermostats behind glass—and no, they weren’t owned by any important people, nor did they bear witness to any major historical events. “I wanted to—perhaps perversely—focus on the objects that were not famous, the objects that look really pedestrian, and show that even those objects can have really incredibly interesting stories associated with them,” said Gradwohl. The thermostat, for instance, was one of the first inventions to allow people to wield control over their own environment. Now, we don’t think twice as our air conditioner whirs on and off during an L.A. heat wave, but in the early days, this was something to celebrate—and that is the story the exhibition tells.
So what makes any of these items—from the cigarette holders of the Mares Museum to the raincoat at the Sanderson Museum to the thermostats at the Smithsonian—museum-worthy? It all comes down to compelling storytelling. “We try to collect objects that have as many stories as possible,” said Gradwohl. “We try to collect objects in a way so that in the future, people can tell almost any story about them including the human story behind them.”
Like The Object Lesson, these museums ultimately show us that, without a story—without human emotion—objects are just clutter.