I once worked with a young artist from Washington, D.C., Vanessa Kamp, who, like Collecting Dust and Other Things, literally collected such things as dust, cat and pubic hair, and any other sediments that fell to her apartment floor that she then meticulously compacted into little blocks of grey and brown proboscises displayed on shelves in the style of Donald Judd.
Vanessa’s “act,” I believe, is similar to that of collecting, and yet another manner of recording time and place. Isn’t it also a testimony to a certain desire or need, that at the same moment is instantly fulfilled? Collecting can become an accurate portrait of someone’s life — their thoughts, physicality, hopes, tragedies, and vision ad nauseam, willed upon an object of consumption or passion which supposedly contains an inherent quality or meaning — a thing that has no voice, but speaks volumes about its saviour and benefactor.
It is an illusion of comfort we cannot possess nor attain in our lives that gives us a bit of solace and contentment, and a physical connection with an object that keeps us spiritually weighted and materialistically or financially bound. Do we, therefore, collect because we do not want to be alone?
Collecting probably involves some ancestral reflex rooted in survival that has become diluted over time as the need to survive has been replaced with the question of what to do with the leisure gained. Instead of foraging for food, we now forage for entertainment.
Huddled around the campfire, safe in numbers, and with a full belly leads naturally to the most ancient and universal form of leisure time: storytelling. Gossip, jokes, and first-hand accounts of tragic or spectacular events are also forms of telling stories in which we have participated, received from other collectors, or parlayed to others in bars, locker rooms, hair salons, board rooms, and in the deepest darkest depths of the jungle.
It is by far the most democratically social form of collecting that exists. We are no longer savage; we only enjoy hearing that we are. Besides, everyone likes a good story, don’t they?
Collecting Dust and Other Things, under the auspices of Four Walls gallery, is a different story altogether. I wonder, as a participant and someone writing this preface, was this art, an interview, or just talking shop? Or, for that matter, was this reality TV, since everyone knew they were being recorded?
It appeared from the outset that we were all invited to come in to get our hair cut. Stylists were present, appointments taken, and clients sat down as stories were clipped from their mouths in the process. Falling to the ground, each raconteur’s history was swept up like dust in Vanessa Kamp’s aforementioned pieces, and then later compiled into neat little stacks of insight and dialogue.
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