TINY GEMS

Collect Yourself

This month, Copy Gallery in Philadelphia presented an exhibition of personal collections of objects “gleaned from the darkest dustiest corners of artists from Philadelphia and New York.” The show, curated by Luren Jenison, featured Family Circus books belonging to Andrew Jeffrey Wright, squeaky toys from Adam Wallacavage and ski masks from Ben Peterson, among other things.

Writing on the show in Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s artblog, Brandon Joyce (of the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study) characterizes it as “gathered from the private caches of various New York and Philadelphia obsessives.” He goes on to say that “the nice thing about the Collections Show is that it allows us to see the social utility of our imbalanced fascinations. It welcomes obsession; rather than the proportional, reasonable, and loveless way in which we usually hoard our everyday artifacts.”

In this context, “New York and Philadelphia obsessives” clearly comes to stand for “various well-known personalities of the Philadelphia contemporary art scene.” Rather than really “welcoming obsession” and demonstrating “social utility,” the show illustrates the cult of personality that rules the art world in Philadelphia (or, I’d presume, any art scene, anywhere). These collections are not the points of interest in and of themselves – it is the collectors that are (as always) on display. How, for example, can the viewer account for K-fai Steele’s collection of office stationary “gathered from her temp jobs in New York from 2004-2007” (below) without seeing it as, not a demonstration of personal obsession, but a work of art meant to illustrate the artist’s past employment struggles?

If, as Joyce writes, the desire to collect on display this month at Copy Gallery is really “contingent, weird, and so specific that it seems to land the collector somewhere on the Aspberger’s spectrum,” for the show to really represent the mind of the obsessive collector, it wouldn’t need to justify a sense of artistic value with collections from the hands of established or up-and-coming local artists.