omnium-gatherum
I am a scavenger by trade.
Since I buy and sell for a living, things I really admire often pass through my house for only a short time. While one sector of society is busy backhoeing into the landfill the tsachscka and bibelot left over after the first few waves of mass-production. I'm busy with my magnifier, comb and velvet tray -sorting, cataloguing and assessing value.
I've always wanted to be one of those people whose living conditions and temperament allowed them to have one perfect table for the consideration of individual objects, some sort of pristine modernist frame in which to think fully-rounded thoughts. Or even better, someone who owned a duplex with identical sides. one side for simplicity and display, the other for real life with its' half-finished projects and piles of damp clothing.
In real life, my horror vacui runs rampant in the crowded side of my rental. I'm the stacker and the listmaker (the thinnest of structures) trying to maintain sense in my surroundings. My house is far too busy to allow much space between objects. For relief, I have one ordered spot- my own personal museum. In a chinese dowry chest, behind oddly hinged doors is a tidy bit of space for a scripted interior narrative. It's seems larger inside then out. the only available spaces here are indexical of pieces not yet found. It's full of cornball mirrored niches, tiny drawers, hiding walls, revealing walls and controlled views. In this ordered and reflecting space live groupings of
similar objects, toe to toe. The objects are sorted according to their similarities but often they're only interesting in how they differ. in their cabinet they've lost much of what they started with: their original time frame, their use value and entitlement, even their status as individual things.
In my cabinet: They are the loot and booty of a faux archeology club run by me in which i get to place, replace and decide where the excavation ends. I get to be the academic and they are the proof, my empirical data for some question I haven't framed yet. I'm Emily Post and they are my prescribed elements for domestic ease and refinement. I'm the historian griot looking at the past from my imagined future. They are my useless objects of reverie and i get to
decide where the list stops.
