“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object. In the sensation which the material object will give us, which we do not suspect.” —1 Marcel Proust
One of my very first memories is of a white plastic cup. I was three years old and woke up to the sounds of my parents playing cards with my mother’s best friend in our living room. I put on my tall rubber boots and proceeded to push my brother’s crib into the hallway — for a reason I can’t now remember. As it bumped the doorframe on the way out of our shared bedroom I heard him cry and saw what seemed like gallons of red liquid pouring out of the side of the wood, wheeled, slatted crib. Fractions of a second later, out tumbled my cup; white, with a wide blue base and screen printed orange lions on the side, terminated by a spill-proof lid that wasn’t snapped on quite tight.
In the 1970s, most Americans were not terribly discriminating in their interior decorating impulse control — they chose wild, fuzzy colors, wallpaper outornamented only by the Victorian and shag-carpet covered everything. Our carpet was technically tan — but it was considerably closer to 14karat yellow. My cup, now emptied of its Kool-Aid®, sat on its side, in perfect condition. An empty, glossy, stout tower; floating prone in the center of a now orange puddle that was growing wider by the second.
In the years since, I’ve spilled or misplaced at least half the drinking vessels I’ve ever encountered. It’s usually not a klutzy in the moment loss, but the result of a slow loss of interest from the moment I pick up a new, cold, beautiful, pink can of Tab® to the flat, hot black liquid it becomes within minutes of opening it. “I’ll just leave it right here, and come back for it later.” But I don’t, and then someone bumps the table, and eventually my iced tea or Diet Mountain Dew or protein shake is something that has to be sucked up with a mop. And then I’m ready to grab something else, the cycle begins anew and I’m just lucky I don’t happen to like glass cups and bottles. What persists isn’t just the habit of not caring for what I’m consuming, but the attraction to the package, the ritual, the vessel.
The first hoarding behavior I remember having was of a series of 1984 Coca-Cola® cans. The Detroit Tigers were to go on to win the World Series that year, and the strongest brand in the world decided to make a few extra dollars by putting the likenesses of the players on otherwise standard 12oz cans. Over a few weeks I was able to purchase one of each of the limited edition mementos, and I displayed them on the mantle of our fireplace. I had other toys and middle-class junk that other kids had, but I had collected these, personally. I had walked my chubby ass down to the Double Barrel Party Store, paid for them, and walked them the half mile back to my suburban house. I had chosen the location to display them and I was as proud of these as anything else I could be proud of at the age of ten.
But I hated, and hate, baseball. I wasn’t a fan of almost any sports — but of the ones I knew about in 1984, baseball was the one I liked least. It was slow, had eccentric rules, I was not good at it and my father liked to get Doberman-punching-drunk while he watched it. Still, I was pissed when my little brother drank almost every can and placed them back on the mantle, in order, over a period of days without my noticing that they’d been opened. My property had been damaged, sure, but something I curated was ruined. It was as if I had designed, fabricated from sheet, and personally printed every single can. I got over it, and flirted with collecting glasses at Arby’s with gold plated rims and antique glass bottles of TowneClub® soda in wooden crates. But none of these nascent collections stuck. • What attracts us to something? Umberto Eco2 laid out dozens of scenarios in On Beauty; from imagined golden proportions, to Aquinas’ notion of natural orders, to modern tensions between the novel and the familiar — beauty is a big part of attraction. If I am viscerally affected by a form I am likely to engage it. If it is useful to me (or I imagine it to be,) that augmented behavior reinforces the relationship. And if the Visceral and Behavioral are strong enough, I may continue thinking about it and that relationship may (even subtly) change the way I interact with other things, other people — and this Reflective experience will transform an attraction into a durable relationship.3 Sometimes even with abstract or unattainable things.
Imagine three vehicles — a Ferrari, a Volvo and a Schwinn bicycle. Each of us brings significant prejudice to each of these — but we should be able to agree that one is largely about form, one about safety and one about efficiency. Particular forms, safety and efficiencies to be sure — a Ford truck may be more beautiful to some, traveling by air is safer than driving any car, and a bicycle is efficient so long as you don’t need to haul things. But part of the meaning of these things, some of why we would buy (or wish to own and use) these vehicles is about (stimulating) form, (occupant) safety and (environmental) efficiency. This general dynamic holds even if we swap out these brands with particular models within the brands, and even if we switch to Porsche, Saab, and Shimano. But these brainds will have both parrallel and perpendicular meanings.
The Ferrari is about speed, exclusivity, racing, luxury, pride, masculinity, a particular sound, conspicuous consumption, craftspersonship, drug dealers, Hawaii, rap videos, plastic models, Europe, snobs, weekends, the smell of burning rubber, Italy, privilege, wealth, sex, the color red, and dozens of other associations we could make, culturally and individually. Similar lists could be made for the Volvo and the Schwinn — and each person making these lists would emphasize different associations in order to advance the aspects that they think about most often when considering these vehicles. Where I might say ‘danger,’ someone else might write ‘exercise,’ and a third would advance ‘clean;’ when describing the Schwinn, for instance. And we may all be right, and may all still be pulled to this vehicle no matter our different reasons — it’s magnetic, a force field where the material pulling and the material pulled must be made of compatible stuff. To say something is beautiful, or useful, is not unlike saying that a thing is natural — or saying that something is organic when it’s made of plastic. These things are true, but semantically situational.
I can explain some of why a teapot attracts me. A particular pot has a compelling belly, spout, handle, material and surface. I like tea, and I like the ideas of tea — the leisure ritual, the accoutrements, the stimulation. But some of it defies my conscious understanding or control — why, in our age, do I need one? I can just put the bag in my cup, and it tastes the same to me (and would bet that the chemical effects of fine brewing are vastly overstated by teasthetes.) The kinds of kettles I like are in a similar condition — I know that the most efficient way to heat water is in an electric kettle or a microwave — and yet I covet the stove top variety. It’s not just the particular, or class of, kettles — it’s me. It’s a positive charge I’ve developed in a lifetime of watching (even infrequent) interactions with water being boiled in a kettle, transferred to a pot to steep tea, and then poured into a cup. It’s a cascade of pouring water, being transformed from hot to cold, clear to brown, from large reservoir to small, and from small to tiny — too small to sate my thirst in fewer than three to five cups.
It is also a staple product of two different fields I identify with; traditional crafts and digital design. While the artist-madeone of a kind teapot is a common, and occasionally singular, expression of contemporary ceramic, metal, and glass craft artists, it is also a default character within computer graphics — one of the standard forms used in rendering and animation test batteries. In both cases it relies on a common cultural recognition and interest in the format, but where the Utah teapot is the most similar to its eccentric handmade cousin is in its frequency of use. There are potters who make reasonably priced functional teapots for use, but most are used exactly as the mesh 3D model of the Utah teapot is — as an explicit symbol: of tea, of stimulation, and a host of other adjunct meanings.
I don’t collect many teapots, but I collect many images of them in stores, in studios, and in the wild. I talk about them, I read about them. And I collect (images of and physical) vessels generally. I don’t own a Ferrari, but I run up on the few I see and molest them with my camera. I read about them, I write about them, I talk about them. And I own, collect, and seek out and study cars in general that owe debts to Ferrari and the meanings of Ferrari. I draw from these things — although usually not directly from their images. Volumes, grounding, entrances, contents, surfaces, exits, handles, speed, materials, familiarity, detail, function, process, color, surprise, creases, lifestyle; these show up in almost everything I think and make.
But images of the Volvo or the Schwinn never show up.
Our collection behaviors manifest for very different reasons. Some are persistently connected to dreams from our childhoods, some are thought of as investments, many dip into compulsion, others come from the shock of having lost something or someone. Last year I listened to an audiobook called Salt, Sugar, Fat. As the narrator read Michael Moss’s book to me, about the interplay of these compounds in the chemistry, marketing and addictions of modern food, I found myself thinking about ingredients more than the morals of this story. I would walk into my studio, earbuds on, and imagine that my shelves of books and objects were base materials. Some of them could be refined into new compounds to achieve different ends; to make a thing more desirable, to give it mass and depth, or to keep the thing I was making from spoiling. Sugar, fat, salt. I was grasping for a triparte structure, because that’s what the book was pounding into me, but it seemed fairly isomorphic to my own practice.
The inputs can be between raw and completely broken down to elements, each can be expressed with near dominant purity or be mixed with other elements until a ‘bliss point’4 is reached in our pleasure centers and extremities. And there is an interplay of the chemistry and the language and other peripheral agents we employ to engage people with our work. I can follow either of the polar recommendations of the book — keep it pure and healthy and in moderation, or use the agricultural and giant food company model of calculating and preparing products designed for high consumption and profit, rather than nutrition. Or something in between the two. If the former is a left lane of traditional techniques and basic materials with time tested historical formal ideas, and the latter is the right lane — filled with the newest tools and materials and formats, capturing the popular imagination, I think I’ve chosen a windy path between and around. It’s a straw man, but one that I like beating on.
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm”5