Self-Portraiture - Collecting Ourselves

Clifford, James, On Collecting Art and Culture, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988, 215-251.

James Clifford trained as a historian and is currently a professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California. His research interest is in understanding the forces and interactions that shape cultures. He discusses how acts of collecting or ‘gathering’ embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rule-governed territories of self. The gathering involves the accumulation of possessions, and the idea that identity is a kind of wealth. This wealth can be objects, knowledge, memories or experience. Collecting, as a strategy of desire, uses a ‘possessive self, culture, and authenticity’. (1)

Walter Benjamin believes collecting appears as an art of living intimately allied with memory, with obsession and retrieving order from its binary opposite, disorder. Benjamin says ‘every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories’. (2) The threat of loss generates desire to record and collect in order to keep the past visible, so all is not lost.

Frederick Butler, who lived most of his life in New Plymouth was a self confessed obsessive collector who imposed order on disorder. He spent sixty years, until he died, selecting newspaper clippings that had particular personal relevance and arranging carefully in books and displaying in his private museum and house. The volumes compiled of clippings were on subjects such as antiques, nudists, crime, education and Second World War casualties. He spent his lifetime compiling his archive of 80,000 index cards, 50,000 books in his library as an attempt to preserve the past and memorialise its. According to Francis Pound, he intended for his private collection to be public as twice he approached established museums, ‘with the proviso, they remained as a permanent entity'. (3) Wanting visibility to the public, along with the taxonomic nature made his collection cross the boundary from fetishism to collecting according to Susan Stewart. (4)

The obsessive collecting of clippings of topics of interest to Butler made this library a cultural construction of his identity or self-portraiture, in the same way as Isabella Stewart Gardner who was an avid collector of art. Both left their collections in their entirety to be viewed in museums with conditions that they remain intact, fully embodying the intentions of the collectors.

Much contemporary art explores fetishism and collecting. Artist, Ann Shelton documented the collection of Butler by photographing the library to scale, enabling the titles of the books to be read by the viewer. The titles of the book provide a biography of Butler, giving information on the motivations of his collecting and culture. Her work articulates his desires to ensure the past was not under threat of loss, but instead to remain visible. Visually Shelton’s images reflect the binary notions of order and chaos that underpin this collection. Shelton's work explores the desire of the possessive self, culture and authenticity in collecting, thereby constructing the identity of Butler.

(1) Clifford, James, On Collecting Art and Culture, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988, 218.
(2) Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking my library: A Talk about Book Collecting”. Illuminations, Eng. Trans. London: Fontana, 1982. 59-60.
(3) Pound, Francis. Library to Scale : The Reflecting Archive, Govett Brewster Gallery. 2007. 7.
(4) Clifford, James, On Collecting Art and Culture, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988, 219.