The Art of Collecting

[PandorasFate]

So, anybody have any collections they'd like to share?

I have lots of Pez dispensers and Star Wars Stuff.

[malaesthetique]

I collect buttons. Not by choice though, I just have bought so much clothing over the years and cant seem to toss out the extra ones you get with each garment. I should think of some creative use for them.

[LelandJ]

Its more of a piece of Neo-shamanist propaganda.

Creative ad hom!

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further alienation and stratification.

...

Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman's role was to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from nature and dominated, at the deepest level, socially. Art's ability to symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic world, the Fall of Man.

...

The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, enroute to priesthood, leader by reason of mastering his own immediate desires via the symbol. All that is spontaneous, organic and instinctive is to be neutered by art and myth.

Pseudo-shamanist political revisionist!

Zarzan needs to visit and learn from a real shaman in South America, surely would be the most difficult and eye-opening experience of his life.

[LelandJ]

So, anybody have any collections they'd like to share?

My latest acquisition which took two years to find. I don't listen to contraltos much but this is quite exceptional.

[Shogun8]

Which Vitra miniatures do you have?

I have about 50 of them, including several classics: Eames Lounge; Eames Aluminium Group office chair; Eames Le Chaise; Corb Chaise Lounge; LC2; Barragan; Newson Lockheed Lounge; etc.. The most notable one is the original Ron Arad Big Easy Chair in solid cast aluminum, from an edition of 100 - it weighs about 10 lbs.

[KM80]

My girlfriend does not approve of any of this! Although she does listen to some of the music.

Records
Tapes
Boomboxes and older stereo stuff
Magazines (I have almost the entire run of Big Brother Skateboard magazines :P)
Comics
Skateboards
Toys
VHS Horror movies, mostly from the 1980s
swag and passes from concerts
I used to collect pocket knives and rocks when I was a kid.
I've also in the past year gotten into the habit of picking up glass at the beach, but I haven't thrown any of it out. I have a few bags of it at this point, only sharp stuff, no dull beach glass.

[michael_kard]

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to create an honestly enlightening thread. I had not thought about the process of collecting in such depth until now and your posts, besides being generally informative, have really helped give some perspective to my personal habits.
I think that collecting is constitutive of my personality to the extent that my story as an individual is actualised by the collections I have maintained in different phases of my life.

At an early age I collected plush dolls. Neatly arranged and everything. I guess that the distinguishing factor between collecting and simply possessing them was the emphasis I placed on the fact that I did own them, and the value they had to me as a group rather than separate objects.

Later these gave their place to Pokemon trading cards, which were imbued with the added concept of qualitative disparity, that basically goes down to the fact that some cards were meant to be rare, while most were clearly marked 'common'. This resulted in my first experiences with exchange and competition, as well as the harsh experience of weighing my collection against those of other people in the world. Other card games eventually followed including Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh and others that I cannot recall at the moment. Oddly enough I was never interested in using them to play their respective games; I was happy to just see my collections increase in value.

As a teenager I started collecting hardcore punk records. With many punk subgenres being popular among my crowd and a profound need to be different while maintaining a recognizable sense of cool, I began to listen to emo, post-hardcore and alt-rock bands from the period when their sounds were 'authentic' and avant-garde - music by Gravity records, Ebullition records etc. Although I had used the internet before, this series of discoveries turned me into a complete nerd, spending over 6 hours a day archiving mp3s, buying records and ripping them, posting on forums, Discogs.com, writing descriptions on Last.fm etc. In my quest for authenticity I became weirdly obsessed with obscure bands. I was lucky to discover some amazing music in the process. My nickname was Sapila and I had a blog as well. If anyone actually reads these please keep in mind that (a) I was around 14-15 at the time (b) my English was pretty bad (c) I have changed a lot! hehe. My iTunes library was absurdly well-organised, with detailed ID3 info on all tracks (which is a real challenge with rather unknown bands) and I created the 90's emo SoulSeek room. TL;DR: My friends' typical response whenever I brought up a band: 'did they only release a 7" in 1994 in a limited edition of 3?'

And then came fashion. Late high school years, clubbing (I am Greek and thus inherently Eurotrash), the anxiety and pressure of being cool at its peak. I remember browsing websites like Asos for hours, trying to find something that represented me and set me apart from the rest, while still being somehow institutionally approved. Avant-garde fashion is a great and easy way of achieving this: I got to make claims of being different and effortlessly sophisticated, but ultimately I abided to typical middle class ideas of luxury and conspicuous consumption. And then came SZ! Sometimes I read back to my posts when I signed up and I feel genuinely sorry for the people that were forced to read them. But as a wise member once wrote 'acqiuring even alittle taste is such a painfull and sometimes humiliating process'. Thankfully at some point I stopped posting and started reading more, picking up a few things in the process. After getting a taste of SZ designers, I decided Christopher Bailey is my guy. Even at his worst (S/S14 being a prime example) there's something about the way he designs and cuts outerwear that makes sense to me.

The quality of the photo is pretty bad but maybe you can see there's a little typological sequence going on there based on the cuff and collar shapes. The earliest one on the left is from A/W 2008. It's hard to summarize my admiration of Burberry outerwear in a few words, but my main reasons are:

• the juxtaposition of classic military designs with obsessively youthful cuts
• how well made they are. the quality is superior to 90% of men's designer fashion out there, including most of the tailoring seen on this forum.
• The finishing. Custom linings, large horn buttons, custom hardware, all things that make them feel very luxurious even when the quality is not exceptional.
• The widely recognized status of the Burberry brand, communicated through subtle yet conspicuous branding. I have recognized that I am insecure enough to want this
• Some photos can be found here to demonstrate the above

ENDYMA could in many ways been seen as my latest collection. This time, however, many of the objects are not owned by me and I like to believe it has the potential to act as a collective fashion archive of some sort. As far as my input is concerned, I don't know if it's obvious, but the way the clothing is presented and described is extremely formulaic and I always try to precisely date and contextualise each garment. This tightly arranged presentation satisfies my need to make some kind of sense of the assortment that is the store's inventory. It may sound weird but I have so many pieces that are not added simply cos I cannot date them, which I think would lower the standard of the presentation in some way.

(I try to maintain a typological sequence in each designer section)

Collecting is undoubtedly a really big part of my life, and I'm really thankful this thread made me understand that a bit more precisely. I apologise if this post is a bit ranty.

[Shogun8]

Vitra Miniatures

In an attempt to keep this thread going, here's a couple of shots of some of my Vitra chairs:

[malaesthetique]

Most compelling case for collecting I've come across

[ulrich133]

I collect Japanese antiques, with a focus on carvings and sculpture :)

These are my two babies ....hopefully we'll be adding a few more shishi carvings to the mix in the next year or so...its rare that the stars align for me (/that i find something i like at the same time i've got the money to afford it).

[Shogun8]

Nice shishi, Ulrich! Are they Edo?

I'll try to post a pic of a ranma that I have.

[Shogun8]

Temple Ranma (Transom) in the form of a Phoenix in flight, Keyaki Wood, Edo Period

[ulrich133]

Nice shishi, Ulrich! Are they Edo?

I'll try to post a pic of a ranma that I have.

They are indeed, and i think either keyaki or kuri.
That's a seriously fantastic ranma you've got there too if i may say so! Can i ask how big it is?
I'm still on the hunt for a good shishi or dragon one for myself...

My last big purchase was my first kuruma tansu

[Shogun8]

They are indeed, and i think either keyaki or kuri.
That's a seriously fantastic ranma you've got there too if i may say so! Can i ask how big it is?
I'm still on the hunt for a good shishi or dragon one for myself...

My last big purchase was my first kuruma tansu

Thanks, Ulrich! The ranma is approximately 5' X 3'. The beauty of this ranma however is it's thickness which is at least 12" in some areas, giving it a real depth.

[ulrich133]

DAMN! That's even more impressive!
Consider me very envious of your treasure!