Collecting as Modernist Practice

Introduction: Collections Mediation Modernism

Introduction: Collections Mediation Modernism A study of the central role of the collection within modernism might simply start by observing how many modernist artworks themselves resemble collections . We could begin by pointing to the citations and quotations that mark Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and, following Marjorie Perloff, connect these strategies to the collage aesthetics of futurist painting, synthetic cubism, and Dada.1 Alternatively, we might follow André Topia’s suggestion that another kind of collection, the archive, is the principal referent for the writing of Eliot, Pound, James Joyce, and Gustave Flaubert.2 The archetypes of the collage and the archive would each find a correspondence in Walter Benjamin’s well-known claim that he wished to compose a manuscript entirely out of quotations, or in the passages that constitute his unfinished Arcades Project (a text whose resemblance to the Cantos J. M. Coetzee has proposed).3 In a related vein, we could include the works produced under the banner of Soviet factography in the 1920s.4 Looking to the United States, and invoking still another important form of collecting, one could point to the early blues poetry of Langston Hughes, in Fine Clothes to the Jew, or Sterling Brown, in Southern Road, to underscore those poems’ more than accidental resemblance to the transcriptions of folk songs that had been published in the collections of scholars such as Natalie Curtis Burlin (under the aegis of the Hampton Institute) or John Wesley Work (at Fisk University). This recognition may in turn remind us of the pointedly blurry line between Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and her anthropological work as a collector of folklore, as well as the evocations of a vanishing folk culture in the writing of William Butler Yeats and Jean Toomer.5 Hurston’s anthropological training under Franz Boas could then return us to Eliot and Pound, whose debts, respectively, to James George Frazer and Leo Frobenius are well known. And we could finally note the 2 Collecting as Modernist Practice thematic importance of collecting in novels of the period, from Ulysses, whose opening pages feature the English character Haines who has come to Dublin to collect Irish folk material, to Wallace Thurman’s roman à clef Infants of the Spring, where variations on the word “collection” provide a leitmotif of the novel’s assessment of New Negro institutions.6 As this heterogeneous list reveals, what might be broadly named a “collecting aesthetic” can be identified as a paradigmatic form of modernist art. And yet to isolate the collection as an available form for art obscures the constitutive role of the collecting practices that the works invoke: archiving , ethnography, museum display, anthologization. It is significant that nearly all of the works listed above were produced in the 1920s, not at the historical origin of what would later be called modernism, but rather at the high-water mark of “high modernist” productivity. The emergence of a collecting aesthetic at this secondary moment signals a more general concern with the art’s institutional representation and future authority: just as Pound heralded The Waste Land as “the justification of the ‘movement ,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” Hughes would write, a few years later, “we build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.”7 Such questions had special currency in the United States, where the works of modernism were received within a relatively fluid, or unformed, institutional field. At the beginning of the 1920s, it was not simply the case that no American museums were prepared to commit to the representation of modernism; nearly all of them remained unbuilt. This was also true for the American literary field, which would have no Poet Laureate until 1937, and where a history of canon-defining anthologies was far shorter and thinner than it was in Britain.8 To consider the institutional reception of the new work of art was for this reason to consider the very nature of the institutions themselves. It was in this situation that material collections of art and literature were advanced as means not simply (or even primarily) of institutional consecration but of cultural and social intervention. In this book, I do not aim to reveal and interpret a range of canonical works according to their secret affinity as collections but rather argue that if a collecting aesthetic describes a salient form of modernist art, it is because it bears witness to a larger set of crises and possibilities that the...