Dream trash/trash dream: the artist as collector, historian, and archivist

Figure 1.

Richard Artschwager, Untitled (Crate Sculptures), 1996 [foreground] and Robert Rauschenberg, Lake Placid/Glori-Fried Yarns from New England, 1997 [background]. Installation shot from Deep Storage at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 1998. Photo: Courtesy Cathy Carver.

Figure 2.

Barbara Bloom, The Collection of Barbara Bloom, Wexner Center for the Arts, May 9–August 8, 1998. Installation view: Photo: Kevin Fitsimons, courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts.

Figure 3.

Karsten Bott, Von Jedem Eins (One of Each), 1998. Found objects and wooden boardwalk. Photo: Courtesy P.S.1.

Figure 4.

Meg Cranston, Who’s Who by Size (University of California), 1993–97. Installation. Photo: Courtesy P.S.1.

Figure 5.

Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Floor Installation, 1995–98. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Courtesy of De Chiara|Stewart, New York.

Figure 6.

Thomas Virnich, Weltkugel, 1993–94 [foreground] and Jason Rhoades, The Great See Battles of William Schürmann, 1994–97 [background]. Installation shot from Deep Storage at P.S.1, 1998. Photo: Courtesy Cathy Carver.

Collectors have traditionally been a category distinct and far-removed from artists. So what does it mean when artists begin to define themselves by collecting objects, rather than creating them? Lately it has become commonplace for artists to exhibit things they have gathered, categorized, documented, counted, archived, stacked and stored—objects that often they have neither made nor altered. At the same time, others are documenting, counting, and archiving aspects of their lives and making objects that record these processes.

The urge to catalogue probably stems in part from our current obsession with information and data. But, besides defining our time as “the information age,” we also measure ourselves by what we purchase, collect, rearrange, and appropriate. We’ve always been impressed when otherwise normal people collect large amounts of something—from coins to action figures to wigs—but now artists are getting into the act and, as often as not, collecting items that might otherwise be considered trash. For contemporary artists the collection strategy makes intuitive sense; after all there’s no hope of creating anything new and original, so goes the argument. So whatever artist dies with the most snapshot photographs, Q-tips, or newspaper clippings wins.

There are plenty of antecedents for work based on the archiving process. Clear predecessors of the current trend are the artists associated with conceptual art and Fluxus—such figures as On Kawara, Allan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono—many of whose creations consist of documentations of transitory events. In general, however, the work of these artists focuses more on process than accumulation; their work documents and records events in time instead of prizing objects which take up space. Many of the contemporary archivists’ practices are the opposite of this: rather than create objects that will later be discarded or destroyed, they collect and preserve objects they didn’t create. Other contemporary conceptual artists have created physical bodies of work about the process of archiving and recording. In the past few years, the Dia Center has mounted two shows that have archived vast amounts of data: those of Gerhard Richter and Hanne Darboven come immediately to mind as perhaps the first of the rush of recent shows on related themes. Among the many exhibitions that have focused on these issues since those Dia presentations are: Nancy Chunn’s 366 New York Times front pages (at Ronald Feldman); Robert Longo’s 366 daily drawings (at Metro Pictures); Jason Rhoades’s (at David Zwirner) and Sarah Sze’s (at White Columns and P.S.1) obsessively disorganized stockpiles of mundane and not-so-mundane household items; and...