Collection of collections – by Meredith Jelbart
ISLAND | issue 168
The lady’s hand muff in the folk museum is made of fruit bats. The fur is sleek and glittering jet black. Each body is arranged beside the next, head to toe, toe to head, so that the tiny faces form a decorative scallop at either edge of the thing, a little like crochet.
Beside the glass case with the fruit bats is a dressmaker’s dummy displaying a long white dress of simple cotton, trimmed with blue ribbon. A handwritten card pinned to the bodice explains that this dress was worn by Miss Dianne Collins to the Wentworth debutant ball in 1936. Beyond that is a dentist’s chair from the ’50s, cream enamel with pale-blue vinyl padded seat. And further on again, a glass-topped box contains a collection of swans, crocheted and starched into shape, the work of Mrs Olive Robinson, now deceased.
There appears to be no overall plan to the folk museum. The viewer may approach each display case with pleasurable anticipation, having no idea what it will hold. Turning a corner round some larger piece of furniture – the wine press from 1957, the pedal organ from St Ignatius church replaced after the big floods of 1923 – it is impossible to guess what will come next.
Things are preserved here because they seem of too much interest, personal or general, to be thrown away, lost, forgotten. It is objects like these that loom up in dreams, the connections mysterious but potent, idiosyncratic, particular, unexpected. The museum is the prop room for the town’s collective dreams.
*
On the nature strip an old doona is looped over a de-cushioned couch, upon which there is also a large rusting metal disc of indeterminate purpose. To one side, an old mattress.
The artist, Julie Shiels, uses items abandoned on hard rubbish days. The things are rearranged. Text is added. Across the mattress is stencilled, Hold Everything Dear.
*
In Ballarat, around the turn of the last century, it was known that any broken plate, jug, teapot or mirror could be taken to the elderly couple who would use these pieces to entirely cover their small miner’s cottage and their quarter-acre garden in mosaic.
Within their property, The Old Curiosity Shop, there are extensive walkways of blue and white – all that Chinese and pseudo-Chinese porcelain. The northern side of the house is mainly mirrors, glittering away, hard-edged, like the work of some modern abstractionist, Mondrian perhaps. Here and there, mosaicked towers, a couple of feet high, rise from the ground like stalagmites or tiny Buddhist stupas, to hold up some item of particular interest – a small chipped bust of Beethoven, a teapot.
And there is the doll wall.
‘Little girls,’ the catalogue reads, ‘would bring their broken dolls to Mr Warwick to mortar into this wall.’
It is nice that these dolls should not simply be lost. But being mortared into a wall already sounds lightly disturbing.
In a sunny corner of the garden, the doll wall is kind of festive. Lots of bright smiling faces, sometimes whole figures with their baskets and bonnets and old-time costumes. Fixed into place, wherever they will fit. But, somehow, this random and innocent arrangement allows the completely broken pieces of dolls to take on a life and power of their own. Pale pink, china body parts are set out together, cheek by jowl, dismembered arm by torso, the odd leg fitted neatly into some leg-shaped space. The effect can be like the aerial view of some natural or unnatural disaster – a bombing in a crowded market place, a mudslide, a flood. There are the heads of what were once waking–sleeping dolls, whose eyes would have clopped open or shut depending on their angle. Their eye sockets are empty now, and give access only to darkness or, if the light is right, to grey cement. What has happened to the eyeballs? Would it be more or less disquieting if they were here?
*
A blue-and-white-striped couch beside the footpath faces away from the viewer towards a wall. Across the back, Does it unsettle you? A large pile of mattresses, some semi-rotten, but some look useable enough. Do you look away?
*
Museums have changed since I was a child. They are more interactive now, more hands-on. In my day, items were set out in cases, made of dark wood, with glass lids sloping towards the viewer, and always kept clean. Nothing could be touched. So clear was that rule that I recall standing with my hands kept deferentially behind my back as I moved along, examining exhibits at approximately my eye level.
Visits here were a little like going to church. The rooms were all high ceilinged, echoing, so voices were kept low. Constructed in the previous century, the building was huge, stone, neoclassical, the portico with its nine Corinthian columns, the dome of the reading room.
It was all very imposing. The verb to impose. Order was imposed upon everything within this building. In a way, this was reassuring to a child. The adult world had things in order. What is that stone, that coin, that insect, that fossil? Well, there was the answer, on its label, and it was quite good to know all that was indeed known, though it did not allow curiosity much of a run.
It was quite pleasing that things acquired gravitas just by being here, by being properly named. What I saw before me was no longer just a piece of rock I might have come upon out walking. It was quartz, which would have indicated to early miners the possibility of gold. And some adult had been so interested in this topic that they had collected these things and laid them out for me to see, all with neat labels, sometimes handwritten, that lovely copperplate script, the dark black ink, quite unlike the grey-greeny stuff in inkwells at school. The labels were exhibits of another time as much as the items they described.
But what I liked most were the costume displays. Those tiny women. Were they a slightly different species? The corsets. What balls or polite afternoon teas were they attending in those dresses? The fans and embroidered purses. How were they made? Who made them? Did those men need walking sticks, or were they for style? On gold chains, the fob watches, to keep track of time in that other time.
*
Discarded pyjama sets are arranged on an abandoned couch, sitting as they might once have done with their owners within them. A sign says, Please touch. And across the couch base, Always something there to remind you.
*
Though I doubt there is a rule about this, all the carved wooden crucifixes on the ground floor of Barcelona’s Frederic Mares Museum have their right feet forward, posed above the left. Their heads all tip to the right, as do their knees. With their arms outstretched to one another they extend along the museum wall like a line of chorus girls.
Passing through the lower floors of the building is much like being in any other art museum. There are religious icons, many carved wooden versions of the Madonna and child, assorted saints. The kind of objects you would expect an artist, a sculptor, to collect. Are there telltale spaces in churches all around Catalonia and beyond? Frederic Mares was here.
Climb the stairs to the higher floors, however, and things change. Things increase. Over 50,000 objects, according to the catalogue. Collections of anything and everything. Tobacco pipes, dolls, ladies’ fans, walking sticks, pocket watches, seashell-encrusted vases, keys, hand-tools, playing cards, advertisements, dried flowers under glass, scrapbooks, ashtrays, antique cameras, tobacco jars, binoculars, watches, bouquets of flowers made from human hair. Anything which caught Frederic Mares’s wide-ranging eye, and which he found irresistible.
All exquisitely displayed. Hundreds of pocket watches are set out in a perfect diagonal grid. Right across the top of one wall is a row of keys, their bows at one height, their bits all turned to the left. Smaller keys are set out in lines beneath them.
There are no captions or explanation. Imagine the provenances as you will. Someone played with those cards, grieved over that memento mori made from the hair of a loved one, rode that bike, did whatever was to be done with that slightly sinister carpentry tool, gazed on a stage somewhere with those opera glasses, smoked that pipe, used that key to open or keep secure a house, or chest, or something somewhere containing other things of value.
Here are the things. There are thousands for you to choose from. Admire.
Or admire the arrangements.
It’s up to you.
Enjoy.
*
Discarded plastic chairs stacked one on top of each other like conga dancers are balanced on a cushionless couch. A different order of things?
*
The opening sequences of The Stalker reveal interiors which are bleak, semi-derelict, grim. There is very little light, and little colour, being shot in sepia. This will not be a cheerful movie. The walls of the bedroom appear to be covered in brown paper and are blotched, uneven, bulging. The floor of the bar is battered. The electricity may or may not work.
Above all, these spaces are incredibly bare. There are no pictures on walls, there are no photos of friends and relatives, no random bunch of flowers collected somewhere and set up in a vase or jar, there are no vases, no special tea-cup inherited perhaps from a favourite aunt, no knickknacks someone happened to hold in affection for whatever reason.
Do these people have no objects to offer them comfort, to personalise the environment in which they live, to make it theirs and alive?
Most of the film is set in the Zone: a place of ruin and destruction, after some cataclysmic event, perhaps a meteorite strike, though possibly something more mysterious. There are overturned vehicles; roofless buildings crumble; disused telegraph poles lean about at rakish angles; weeds grow over unidentifiable bits of metal; there is quite a lot of concrete.
At the centre of the Zone is the room where you may be granted your heart’s desire. Will that be too dangerous to enter? The main characters struggle onward, philosophising as they go about the meaning – or meaninglessness – of science, art, literature, alcohol, humanity and life. It is extremely Russian.
And visually glorious.
There is the pool sequence, four minutes long, gliding cross a flooded floor where things from past lives remain, just down there below the water’s surface. There are coins, religious icons, rags, a gun, a spoon, a tin tray, wire and springs and indeterminate pieces of human machinery. The camera moves, slow and dreamy, and, as in a dream, you may have that sense of anticipation, unsure quite what will happen, but sure that it will matter. Ah, yes, that is not random metal but the handle of a pistol. As if you knew all along what was to come. As if you had been here before.
*
Two armchairs. One has its base cushion, one does not. Their arms are worn and stained with wear. You never think it will happen, stencilled across one of them, and left like that for quite a while. A week or so later, words appear on the other chair. Then one day it does.
*
Connections are made between The Stalker’s Zone and Pripyat, the town abandoned when the nuclear reactor of Chernobyl went into meltdown. People were told to take just what they would need for three days, till they could go back to their homes, which they would never do. But visitors return now. It has become a popular tourist destination.
Those living spaces stopped dead, held in that exact moment of time. The stove ready to cook the next meal, its doors hanging open. The everyday things, the plates and cups and teapots, sitting waiting on collapsing shelves. The office with cabinets sagging, spilling documents, which have been taken about by wind entering freely through glassless windows. A tree grows up through the floor of a school science room, while creepers move in over the now open windowsill. The pianos, rotting in weather, fall apart.
The kindergarten. Small chairs are set out in a ring. The plastic animals and doll’s house and books. Among blocks and rusting toy trucks and balls and quite unidentifiable bits of metal, a doll lies, her leg twisted out beside her. Over years that these photographs have been taken, the toy trucks can be seen to rust a little more, pictures and tiles have fallen from the walls, colours fade. Dust gathers.
*
A mattress. A modular couch in pieces, a cushion here, a chair base there. An electric frypan, two saucepans, a bed base across the edge of which the words, A life is a life.
*
Pink and white flowers in a vase with a pink-and-white floral band. They appear in a work by Giorgio Morandi in 1946. And another from 1945, another from 1953. And so on. This is possible because the flowers are artificial. Not plastic, but some kind of fine cotton which would once have been starched into shape, though now, sitting on their shelf and as they always appeared in Morandi’s paintings, they seem slightly crushed and faded. There is the colour described as dusty pink. Dusty pink wash, wash of pink dust, time sifted over everything.
In Bologna, it is possible to stand in the doorway of Morandi’s studio and observe. It is a small room, perhaps four metres by five, in a suburban house. This is where he lived for all of his life, with his family, in later years just his sisters. This is where he painted. A narrow single bed. A high window offers light. His easel and palette and a fairly modest collection of paints, brushes and art equipment are set out to one side.
And there are his objects. For the still lifes. Or is it still lives? Bottles and flasks and jugs, which are quite often chipped. Oil lamps and tins and plain blocks. Small wooden balls, of indecipherable purpose. Anything which caught his eye in junk shops, rubbish tips, the backs of friends’ cupboards. And with which he lived for years. The chipped blue-and-white vase, and the small blue-and-yellow fluted spherical thing appear in paintings thirty years apart.
Perhaps a hundred small items here. They are arranged on three levels. On the floor is the largest group. Many are vases, or jars, or bottles, so their open tops gaze upwards, like hopeful open mouths. Pick me, pick me. Above them are the objects Morandi would have been considering seriously. The short list. The shelf at eye-level holds the objects for the next work. Yet to be arranged. The paintings themselves might take only a few hours, but placing five or six small objects in a way that felt right could take much longer.
‘It takes me weeks,’ Morandi said, ‘to make up my mind which group of bottles go well with a particular tablecloth. And yet still I often go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast.’
He said, ‘I live in conversation with my things.’
*
Three kitchen chairs and three wheelie bins set out on the pavement to catch the late westerly light. Some things cast long shadows.
*
Artists’ assemblage works. Louise Nevelson’s offcuts of carpentry, chair legs, balusters, are arranged neatly within box frames, then spray-painted all one colour – mostly black and white – to become really something else. Andy Warhol’s time capsules – newspaper clippings and magazine ads, greeting cards, children’s books, record albums, original drawings, and hundreds of strips from photo booths of friends, celebrities and strangers. Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. Rosalie Gascoigne’s slicing and rearranging of wood, iron, feathers, faded drink crates, torn floral lino, tin, corrugated iron. Always best, she said, if they had been open to the weather. Arman’s accumulations.
And there is Joseph Cornell. Those modest, neatly crafted display cases, in which items are arranged with scrupulous precision. They capture your gaze, and draw you in to contemplate connections. Two seashells, six wine glasses set before maps of the northern and southern night sky. A cockatoo, with watch faces and a music box. The cardboard cut-out of the girl in her Victorian crinoline suspended by many, many fine threads above a landscape of snow and mountains. The keys, the shells, the domino pieces, the pages from books, the bits of music scores.
I can spend a very long time looking into Cornell’s boxes. I’m never going to work out how one thing is connected with another, however long I look. That’s why I go on looking.
*
A couch frame. Wall shelves designed in quite specific shapes, presumably to hold specifically shaped objects, which are missing now. A bright tangerine armchair lies on its side, its legs kicked up against a paling fence. Across the back, It can haunt you for the rest of your life.
*
The allure of objects. The way we are drawn to them. Especially those from elusive, unknowable human lives. The impulse to gather and set things out together. Where connections may emerge, like images on old film emerging from developing liquid.
The process itself is deeply intriguing. Thus, whenever I come across examples of such collections, they stay with me.
Some are actually on file in my computer. But mainly they are just in my brain, drifting about, ready to settle. On a page. Where I must choose the order. Do I have the spaces right?
*
A pale blue mattress and a cream sofa without cushions lean against the sea wall. Across the mattress, All that remains. There is a nice view of cream-coloured sand and pale-blue winter sky and sea.
*
The last entry in Joseph Cornell’s diary. Gratitude, acknowledgement & remembrance for something that can so easily get lost. Sunshine breaking through going on 12 noon. ▼
Image: Savannah Wakefild - Unsplash
This essay appeared in Island 168 in 2023. Order a print issue here.
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