| 
20 February - 3 May 2004
About | Visiting
Information | Room Guide | Events
and Education
| Buy Tickets Online 
The Uncanny | Scale
| Colour | The Body Part
and Wholeness | The Readymade and the Double
|
Statues and Death | The
Statue as Stand-in | The Harems
The Harems
The Harems represent collections from all periods
of my life, the earliest being the rocks and marbles that possibly
go back to when I was five or six years old. Some are collections
that I pursued with great fervour, such as my preadolescent comic
book collection. While others are not collections at all in the
standard sense – such as the business card group, which is
simply an unorganized selection of cards given to me over the years
that were found stashed away in a kitchen drawer. The squeeze toy
collection, which might strike some viewers as being on display
for their ‘charm,’ was, in fact, accumulated for a completely
different reason. They were bought over a ten-year period for use
as percussion instruments; their visual qualities were of no interest
to me. Some of the collections consist of as few as six objects,
while others contain hundreds of items. Certain groups are overt
jokes on established collector genres: the shot glasses and spoons
for example. However, the spoons are not even of the type designed
for collecting: those miniature spoons with place names etched on
their handles. My spoon collection consists of every household spoon
I have: a ragtag accumulation of cheap utensils acquired from years
of moving from place to place. This particular collection could
have been substituted with any other random assembly of like items
in my house.
Thus the Harems consist of objects that range from
those that had great importance to me, to ones that have absolutely
no importance to me at all. They consist of objects consciously
collected, and of things unconsciously accumulated. What is consistent
is that none of the Harems are complete collections; every single
one of them contains absences. The uncontrollable impulse to collect
and order is itself, uncanny; the strange sense of loss and wonder
attendant to the gaps in collections is uncanny. At the same time,
most of this stuff is utterly mundane - the everyday crap that fills
the house. It could be tossed out tomorrow and it wouldn't
make any difference to me at all. |
