The Required Hostility: of artists and collectors
Hostility to the audience is one of the key coordinates of modernism, and artists may be classified according to its wit, style, and depth. […] For through it is waged an ideological conflict about values —of art, of the lifestyles that surround it, of the social matrix in which both are set. […] By cultivating an audience through hostility, the avant-garde gave it the opportunity to transcend insult (second nature to business people) and exercise revenge (also a second nature). The weapon of revenge is selection. Rejection, according to the classic scenario, feeds the artist’s masochism sense of injustice and rage. […] One negative exchange is basic: the artist tries to sell the collector on his obtuseness and crassness —easily projected on anyone material enough to want something— and the collector encourages the artist to exhibit his irresponsibility. Once the artist is assigned the marginal role of the self-destructive child, he can be alienated from the art he produces. His radical notions are interpreted as the bad manners expected from superior tradesmen. Brian O’Doherty, “Context as content” originally published in Artforum, November 1976, vol. 15, no. 3. Quote from Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, 1999, pp.73-74.
In the mid-seventies Brian O’Doherty described the traditional relationship between the artist and their public (in reality, the collector) as an inevitable confrontation in which both play roles assigned by their rebel status, on the one hand, and obtuse materialism on the other. For him, as the text goes on to reflect, this bond consists of an ongoing “stress test” of the social order through radical artist proposals destined to failure given the reigning comprehension processes of an art system that “has evolved to barter success for ideological anesthesia”. A hostility that has undergone a transformation since the postmodern era in which O’Doherty was writing, when his condition as public was determined by irony and farse as the exhibition space was no longer that intermediate limbo between the artist studio and the bourgeois salon but, in our understanding, a self-sufficient exhibition space no longer in need of foreign bodies: the institutionalised art space in which the artworks do not aspire to transit, and risk ending up in the scrapyard.
O’Doherty’s revelation in the seventies was to discover the connotations of the white cube, comparing this liberating conscience to an act that falls apart revealing the trick, with the risk of cynicism undermining the excitement. In a connoted space “the wall becomes a membrane through which esthetic and commercial values osmotically exchange [...] The walls assimilate; the art discharges.” The art system of the nineteen forties he is referring to, is the market-dominated populous and changing context, while his, in the seventies, is marked by a series of institutions that have expanded their field of action to the present, in which the noisy party dance has morphed into an elegant pas a deux between the artist and the museum. Institutionalised art is a practise that is conscious, and even critical of the market processes, is not dependent on anyone, allowing it to entirely commit itself to its ultimate fulfilment: art for art's sake. An art with a public unbiased by mercantile intents and therefore filled with genuine interest, a public that no longer possesses (or possesses by proxy), that is pure intelligence as opposed to these empty “businessman” figures whose sole notion of art is tainted by greed.
The vision of the homo economicus hovers over his interpretation. It became popular in the early seventies in the financial pages of The New York Times, where O'Doherty was an art critic, when Milton Friedman denied that companies had any responsibility other than making profits. This was a theory already refuted back then by those who conceived the company as an entity with a necessary capacity for social responsibility and response. However, it is also tinged with a conception that takes us back to the Romantic somnambulism of an artist who, in search of the “pure monologue”, must refuse to please their public. Romanticism initiated this hostility towards the public in the same moment in which they demanded themselves to be contemporaries, elevating above the mundane to observe with a degree of depth impossible at ground level. Thus, the artist, forced to look constantly into the abyss of the present, cannot allow themselves any other reflection than that of their own ego, a public yet to comeand those select few who are an extension of oneself: the happy few who share their vantage point, neophytes and accomplices in the practise of seeking and dictating the future from the present.
To complete their lofty task, the Romantics needed to free themselves of the world, freeing themselves of its inhabitants in the process. Sensing the hostility of the public, the painters demanded state support in the 19th century, asserting that the recently conquered freedom through the market was not satisfactory to the majority, in addition to being random. Art, they claimed from their truth as initiates, must not be a luxury subjected to the capricious taste of individual fortunes: the State must protect it. With time, this argument would serve to drive the creation of museums of living artists, renovating the now public state patronage. And it also serves to build an absolutist kingdom in the museum, where the art system is conceived from a public State perspective and is therefore for the public… but without the public. The audience is however granted the possibility of sublimation through insult, that is, only if it agrees to its role of ignorant and vulgar materialist.
To a degree, the new institutionalism constitutes the ultimate fulfilment of this promise of art freed from the mundane, that responds to nobody but itself, based on a relational practise —art of prospective futures based on collectivised presents. A practise based on the traditional acknowledgement of artistic production as the space in which man can relate to the world through the aesthetic object. This new space grants a sovereign artist laboratory conditions for the correct experience of their work: limited entry (natural selection) and trick cards generated by rules set unequivocally by the artist in games in which the spectator was invited to participate. In relational art, the public is the very material of the art, the body of work: the workforce. The art in these exhibition spaces is delivered to the public, which relates through it, but cannot negotiate the rules of play as the conditions for a dialogue among equalsare not established. This conversation, absent from the exhibition rooms, does take place in the commercial galleries, far from the sterilised museum test tubes, in spaces with street doors that also let in the pollution and noise from the outside. There, art is forced to confront its discourse because the collector’s selection issues a judgement not to be ignored. It is a space for discovery, like the museum, but also a space for exchange: a space in which these bodies are present and cannot be neglected.
Both parties form an art system that shapes the artistic value based on the close and necessary interdependence between museum and market. In this system, the market becomes an element of contrast and proportion in the validation, working as a necessary counterweight of verification beyond the collusion of the happy few. A healthy market allows for diversity of proposals and a strong institution the positioning and foundation of its own values.
This relationship between the artist and the collector, which for Brian O’Doherty is the negotiation “between principles and money”, constitutes a zone he defines as “militarised” in which the confrontation is conflict. Thus, he saw Duchamp’s gesture in 1938 of suspending coal bags from the ceiling of the exhibition space as an act of belligerent hostility towards the public. And again when four years later, in addition to converting the room into a giant spider’s web, he also paid two children to bother the audience of an exhibition. Duchamp’s action certainly succeeded in bothering the contemplative view of art but what it sought to alter were the art works of his colleagues rather than a spectator perhaps already familiar with prounenraums and merzbaus. In Duchamp it is not the public that becomes the material of the work but rather the art itself and its practitioners. What the Frenchman proposes is a space for contemporary art that is not of passive contemplation: it is a mental battlefield that challenges us to look like we have never looked before at what we would have never looked at.
The bourgeois that Duchamp aimed to scandalise was not the public but the art system that he so often hijacked. Because, in reality, Duchamp’s discomfort was never with the market, which he renounced as an artist, but in which he participated as a dealer: his relationship with collecting was based on complicity and fulfilment. Because his collector was a guest at the adult table, with the capacity to respond: a participant spectator with a privileged access.
Duchamp measured the relationship with the public with the “art coefficient” that mediated, in the subconscious experience of creation, the leap from intention to realisation, refined “as pure sugar from molasses” by the spectator, who ultimately determined the aesthetic value of the work. The creative act, according to Duchamp, does not solely pertain to the artist: the spectator completes the work by bringing it intothe world, deciphering and interpreting it through its revelation, by exposing it to light. It is therefore a spectator who addresses the artist in the present and grants them meaning, allowing posterity a final verdict that must also rehabilitate forgotten souls. Art is the subject that looks at us and the object we construct by looking at it: a two-way relationship that the collector can indulge completely, ending with the appropriation a process of projection and substitution in this materiality. Selection not as vengeance, as O’Doherty sees it, but as the consummation of a dialectic process in which the collector completes the work through possession as the ultimate form of (re)interpretation.
Walter Arensberg —friend, ally and great collector of Duchamp, along with his wife Louise—, was one of those spectators present in the artist’s present. On Duchamp’s instruction, he would finish With Hidden Noise in 1916, introducing an object unknown to the artist into a ball of twine pressed between two brass plates. The noise made by this object when it hits the metal plates provides the music for the transubstantiation of the inert matter into a work of art through the action of a new spectator. It is in this shared authorship that hostility becomes a requirement, turning instead in confidence and transforming the artist’s solipsism into productive dialogue.
Rocio Gracia Ipiña holds a PhD in Art History. She is adjunct professor at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and a visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture of Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona).
For further reading…
The quotes by Brian O’Doherty are from “Context as content” in Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, 1999 (pp.73-74). The article by Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”, was published in the New York Times on September 13th, 1970 and Guillermo Solana speaks of the romantic somnambulism in “El romanticismo francés. El monólogo absoluto”, Historia de las ideas estéticas y de las teorías artísticas contemporáneas, vol. I, La Balsa de la Medusa, 2000, pp. 303-317.
In the article by Karin Orchard in Tate Papers (“Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau” no. 8, 2007) there are numerous images and a brief introduction to the merz spaces conceived by Schwitters between 1927 and 1937 and the 2010 reconstruction of the proun room (pronenraum) by El Lissitzky in 1923 can be viewed on the MoMA website.
David Hopkins speaks of Duchamp’s installations of 1200 Bags of Coal and Mile of String in“Duchamp, Childhood, Work and Play: The Vernissage for First Papers of Surrealism, New York, 1942”, in Tate Papers (no. 22, 2014). Marcel Duchamp’s conference “The Creative Act” from 1957 was recorded by Aspen Magazine in 1967 (November, no. 5+6) and it is at Ubuweb. To recall the trajectory and life (a work in itself) of Duchamp, it is always a pleasure to return to Calvin Tomkins whose book Duchamp: A Biography of 1996 was reviewed and re-published by MoMA in 2014.
Historical Texts & Reflections
Companies with Culture: Grupo Huarte, three postcards and some quotes
I do in fact believe that in the coming, critical years for Spain, and for the business and economic world, we will either join the ranks of those countries capable of standing alone, though modestly, or be added to the endless list of nations in need of guardianship, and to a large extent this will be determined by the drive of the entrepreneurial mechanism as a whole and, therefore, the psychological motivations that feed it. Juan Huarte, “Open letter” in the edition of Arquitectura magazine dedicated to Félix Huarte, deceased on April 12th, 1971.
A reflection that is both gloss and call to arms, written by Juan Huarte on the death of his father, about the essential role companies need to play in the critical period Spain was going through at the time, with a glimpse of tentative democracy mentioned only in whispers as that time in the future when it will be possible to choose one political system or another.
At this time of serious reflection, spurred by his loss, he encouraged modernising the notion of company, arguing that as part of civil society it must be a driver of change, going beyond the profit-driven dogma, that simplifies and defines the complex business world. To that end, Huarte continued, the Economic Theory was already suggesting more in-depth approaches through sociological studies on their real motivations, for a true understanding of their authentic conduct as part of a system.
The man in the machine
First postcard: While in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) the robot is about to supplant Maria and promote discord, on the set, the actress who animates both Maria and the robot has removed part of her armour, suffocating from heat, and is assisted to drink from a straw. "Brigitte Helm in Metropolis sips on a Drink in Between Takes" by Erthstore.
In contrast to the idea of the company as a machine, operated for a single purpose and according to the sole direction of an inexistent economic man, the idea of a company as a complex entity, a living web of individuals that bring it to life and whose interests, in cooperation or conflict, contribute to its functioning and development, was already taking shape in the seventies. This was the philosophy behind Juan Huarte’s words when he spoke of the profound psychology of the business world, that which includes human motivations and enables a company to be seen as a social construct, an association of people, wills and skills to fulfil a set of purposes. A company that knows all those involved in its operations and acknowledges its dependence on them and may, therefore, commit to processes of responsibility and response that structurally radiate the principles and values of the organisation to all areas of the company.
… it is an exemplary company in terms of the team spirit of brotherhood pervading it, not only within the construction Company, but within the entire Huarte structure and all of its parts.
It is something that admires the predominant spirit in this sector, that many may find negative because it is a family spirit, but I consider it a good legacy. (Jose Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún).
While hierarchical and market exchanges certainly do take place in a company, so do other affective logics that are not necessarily rational or determined by the organisation. And it is these logics above all that make up the particular “atmosphere” of each organisation, forming unique characters that constitute a singular and distinctive culture. This familiarity that the architects Corrales and Molezún recognised in Grupo Huarte comes through in the tone and contents of the magazine H-Noticias, created by and for the employees, the first edition of which is dedicated to the personal success story of the patriarch, Don Félix, as the founding myth. The company culture motivates routines and resolves concerns, requires engagement and a consistent conduct and, as a result, delivers meaning. A construction of a meaning that in Grupo Huarte was largely based on the values of its founder, to whom his son attributes three innate traits: guileless ingenuousness, an enormous enchantment ability and huge respect and support for the value of individuals.
The maker
Second postcard: A full-page black and white photograph. In the foreground, a children's playground and, behind a barrier of bushes, an imposing building of rounded shapes rises above the dull, small buildings nearby. Torres Blancas rises in a dystopian snowy landscape like a science fiction dream: a building full of seemingly "wasted" accessory and curved spaces and large landscaped balconies that open to the outside. A building designed for other efficiencies, conceived for the inhabitants of a world that does not yet exist. These images of Torres Blancas under a snowfall illustrate Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza's text "Elogio del constructor" (pp. 44-45) in the magazine Arquitectura del COAM, issue 154, October 1971.
The definition of ingenuous in the Spanish dictionary, “born free and has not lost his freedom”, serves Juan Huarte to draw a comparison between the businessman and the artist, who share a journey in which imagination and a vocation for specific things overlap. The businessman, like the artist, is a man of action who only heeds his own inner voice and for whom external factors are overcome solely with their own creative force. An upright doing, as a maker (“hacedor”) as defined by the architect Sáez de Oíza,
…the makers of things are those who from the dark solitude of their dream, but even more so their office of doing, feed the continuous fabric of human progress, unlimited progress, to give feet to change, brakes to the sea or wings to the wind.
… the figure of the man who executes, makes things happen, enables the dream.
An authentic identity mirroring that of a company is thus described, the expressive dimensions of which produce enormous activity, in this case. A deployment that is always born of the purely entrepreneurial and spreads, occasionally also with an entrepreneurial expression, to cultural projects in very different fields. The magazine, H-Noticias, dedicated its contents to this sphere of interests bound to its main business model, architecture and engineering, in which Grupo Huarte and the family also offered patronage, decisively supporting the new languages of architecture through commissions of outstanding architects such as Sáenz de Oíza, Jose Antonio Coderch, Fernando Higueras or Corrales and Molezún. Architects of their own lives in their dwellings, and also makers in that new world promoted by the magazine Nueva Forma by Juan Daniel Fullaondo, with the patronage of the Huartes, supporting research into new techniques and materials to foster the drive towards industrialisation and the integration of the arts into industrial design. All echoing those early vanguardist ideas that also led to the creation of the company Muebles H, for the production of designer furniture to renew the old-fashioned everyday context of a Spain under a dictatorship.
An active patronage says Ramírez de Lucas, implemented in their lifetime, with a view to acting in the present through that enchantment capacity that multiplied both his interests and his business, as Juan Huarte explains
… this innate psychological characteristic is what explains the birth and style of Grupo H. Today, Huarte is not just a construction company, but an industrial group comprising forty-five companies and almost 15,000 collaborators, operating in sectors as diverse as precision mobile mechanics, steel transformation, paper and packaging, foreign trade or food.
An enchantment capacity observed in its music patronage, that begins on a local and individual level delving into the unexplored and producing some of the most interesting episodes of Spain’s recent culture. Hence, the initial support of the traditional choral society, the Orfeón de Pamplona, is completed with its sponsorship of the Chair of Gregorian Chant in the city’s Conservatory and later on support of the Alea group, founded in 1963 by Luis de Pablo as an experimental laboratory and centre for the promotion of contemporary music and non-western music types while also promoting creation by commissioning compositions from contemporary musicians. This line of action culminated with the commission to Luis de Pablo and the artist Jose Luis Alexanco of the Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972, an international meeting of creators paying homage to the patriarch, marked by an extreme modernity that would change the atmosphere and streets of their city just a few days before the Sanfermines festival with the same collective spirit.
Company methods based on a transfer and feedback that, according to Corrales and Molezún, include
…all forms of development, research centres and a whole series of things, deriving from construction, that require an elasticity and independence all of their own, from the economic to the professional sphere.
An engagement that affects the material execution and the company organisation and seeks to change the context through a form of patronage that expresses the will of all those profoundly concerned with the present and engaged with the future of the society they live in. Thus, the interests of both the family and Grupo extended to meet the needs of contemporary authors by founding the publishing house Editorial Alfaguara in 1964, under the first direction of Camilo José Cela, and creating the film production company X Films, under the direction of Jorge Grau, driving experimental film production together with pieces by artists such as Basterretxea, Sistiaga and Oteiza. And their unwavering support of contemporary art, both with the individual collections of all family members and through the support of public spaces, such as the Sala Negra with Fernández del Amo, director of a precarious Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, allowing him to focus also on informal art, building the structure for art to play its role in the modernisation of the country.
The sense of the common good
Third postcard: In the last images of a documentary, three elderly men talk on top of a hill on a cold morning. They chat while pointing to the landscape with an evident complicity, the result of an old acquaintance. They are Juan Huarte, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza and Jorge Oteiza outside the workshop of the latter. Elderly and with awkward movements but with a steely gaze, they turn to the Navarrese landscape where the last project that brings them together, the Oteiza Foundation in Alzuza, will soon be built. The documentary was screened at the ICO Foundation's exhibition, Sáenz de Oíza: Artes y Oficios, 2020.
A company like Grupo Huarte knows it forms part of a broader structure, with the capacity to impact the society it operates in and seeks a central role in social construction. A company with culture, the individual decision to adopt certain behaviours that make up a collective identity of relationships and bonds. An identity that other companies cultivate with their own version of this vision which, based on the beliefs and values develops internally, and the organisation may choose to convert into an ideology.
All we see is the tip of the iceberg, its outer aspects, those manifested in actions and artefacts, such as the brand or corporate identity, expressed in the resulting cultural phenomena that include its philanthropic actions (social or cultural) or acts of patronage as an art collection, that reflect those corporate or social behaviours deriving from a relationship that sets its course by both its own interest in and its belonging to the group.
…its profound respect and support for the values of others […], that deep psychological characteristic is what explains the birth and style of Grupo H.
This has been rendered possible solely by that capacity to collaborate and foster the value of very different men, which would also explain how the Grupo’s collaboration, following in the style of its creators in fields other than the industrial, such as the Visual Arts, Architecture, Music, etc., is built on that profound and sustained support of specific figures, a support that enables them to take off and give wings to their work and their own personality.
Certainly, the exceptional nature of the names heading up all the undertakings mentioned reflects the last trait Juan attributes to his father and, therefore, the company organisation. The belief in individuals but also a value that goes further, in that inventor capacity the critic Santiago Amón attributes to Félix Huarte, capable of discovering in the ordinary a whole universe, or better still, a fertile corner in which to approach and penetrate the universal coherence that serves as a foundation for things and relations.
In this increasingly complex world, says Juan Huarte, everyday doings are in close interdependence with the functioning of the system as a whole, and each day is decided on the basis of that interdependence. In this world, Santiago Amón’s businessman inventor is capable of finding meaning precisely in the heart of the collective fabric because the inventor exists alongside the intellectuals, the artist, the traveller… all of hem men in possession of both common sense and a sense of the common good. An inventor of new circumstances with the vision to intuit, in advance,
…the stimulus that, in other dimensions of human activity and in line with a new collective conscience, demanded new forms of action, creation, invention. […]
He was a protagonist of life, man and creator on everyday ground, his own master, possessed of common sense […] He made the logic of the experience that lights up the discovery of things his own with his hunch for its first and remote brilliance, his profound sense.
The businessman as an inventor who is rooted in the common, to build on that “respect and support for the value of individuals” who by necessity must be the primary virtue of those who know that in the particular angle (from this, that, this, that and that point of view) of the universe lies the formula for its discovery, its comprehension.
Rocio Gracia Ipiña holds a PhD in Art History. She is adjunct professor at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and a visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture of Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona).
For further reading…
All references in the text are taken from the Arquitectura magazine, num. 154, edited by COAM, published in October 1971 in homage to Félix Huarte. The full version is available for consultation here, as are the rest of the magazine’s back editions. Quotes are included from the “Open letter” from Juan Huarte (pg. 8-9), from Carmen Castro’s interview of Jose Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún (“Los arquitectos critican sus obras”, pg. 25-30); the “Elogio del constructor” by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza (pg. 44-45), the reflection on patronage by Juan Ramírez de Lucas (“Los Huarte: Un mecenazgo activo en la vida española”, pg. 84-92) and Santiago Amón’s beautiful reflection on the common based on the figure of the businessman in “Requiem por un inventor” (pg. 72-77).
This sense of the common good in economics can be expanded on in the book by Jean Tirol, Economics for the Common Good, published by Princeton University Press in 2017. And to complete the discovery and analysis of these psychological motivations that feed the company, Human Foundations of Management. Understanding the 'Homo Humanus'
We like to believe that we collect for sense and sensibility reasons but we also collect to be able to close the door to our homes and plunge, Uncle Scrooge style, into the swimming-pool filled with the coins of our passions. We collect to learn to live and die, because we yearn to form part of something bigger than our own capacities and because the great beyond demands a hope chest composed over time with great care.
We collect in an endeavour to understand and understand ourselves. As children, we gather dishevelled pigeon feathers, rounded river pebbles and seashells from the beach. We stored our marbles in a bag and, in the privacy of our rooms, spread them out on the floor to contemplate their differences -petrol blue, cat eyes, galaxies…-, we remembered which sweet shop we bought some in and when we won others, maybe even from whom. Baudrillard tells us that we materialise “every desire, plan, need, every passion and relation” in the objects of our collections.
We collect to surround ourselves with things that stimulate our minds and our senses, and to enjoy them in private. Like Uncle Scrooge, we collect to be able to dive into our possessions/passions and enjoy them in private at the end of the day. It is not enough to see them in museums, to leave them among the shelves and boxes of the old-man bookshops, the junk dealer’s or the antiquarian’s; we do not want them to remain on display in the galleries and if they must be returned to their packing cases, let these rest in our attics. Possession is a big part of collecting because we need to take these objects out of circulation and enclose them in our mental space to endow them with a unique and different coherence of which only we are the meaning.
We collect to overcome our own expiry and insignificance; because a collection in which only we see the meaning works the miracle of giving us not only a better life but also a better death. Admission to a good party always requires payment and in the end, it is not that different to negotiating with Cerberus, Xoloitzcuintle or Saint Peter: the advance transactions for the care of souls also withdrew assets from circulation, placing them in the care of mortmain, “dead hands”, in exchange for intercession. Thus, charities were equipped in the same way that sepulchres and tombs were filled with the most exquisite treasures and even humans as possessions, that the dead would ultimately take to the great beyond, or rather, the grieving sacrificed from the here and now. A sort of squandering similar to that in which Bataille detected the production of a value that removes us from the merely material and returns dignity to us through a transcendental act of giving. The very nature of the gift makes retribution obligatory and not in kind but in love, including acknowledgement. The pursuit of a pre-eminence also signals a desire for belonging: I want to see myself in your eyes that see me. And there is no doubt that the foundations and some collections do award other life, saving us from death by oblivion and granting us a better life in the memory of others. Maybe even an improvement in the afterlife, who knows. The Mellons and Rockefellers, Lázaro Galdiano, Maria Josefa Huarte or Placido Arango know it. Patricia Sandretto and José María Lafuente sense it.
And we also collect because we long to participate in the creation process, to go beyond contemplation. Because we do not conform to the role of mere spectators and endeavour to create by delegation, as Marina says. Any contemporary art collector knows this, those who visit the galleries because they know that there, they see the art in process with the artists present. And speaking. Contemporary art is the best collection of who we are, in all our circumstances, glory and misery, here and now, because it speaks to us, through the “eternal language of art”, using words that only we can discern all the nuances of. Collecting contemporary art is vertigo, like the theatre where things smell, the floor creaks and we hear the actors breathe: a front row seat in the making of the future heritage.
We collect, in short, because we are alive and want to stay that way, even when we are dead. Because, despite the difficulties, crises, and pandemics, we do not want our lives to be reduced to the solely physiological and material. And because we need to look in a mirror that reflects the thousand images of what we are back at us.
Rocio Gracia Ipiña holds a PhD in Art History. She is an adjunct professor at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture of the Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona).
For further reading…
The article by Marina and references to Bataille on the theory of “the gift” by Mauss, taken from Pardo, are collected in the Cuadernos de Arte y Mecenazgo of the Fundación La Caixa, the fourth edition of which, “Los cauces de la generosidad. Ensayos histórico-críticos sobre los fundamentos del mecenazgo” was edited by Professor Calvo Serraller. It contains reflections on the ethical and philosophical implications of collecting and philanthropy with texts by the art historian himself and the philosophers Victoria Camps, José Antonio Marina and José Luis Pardo. All editions of Cuadernos can be downloaded here.
The quotes by Baudrillard are from “A Marginal System: Collecting” in The System of Objects (1968). Many of the reflections on collecting that inspired this text directly or indirectly, are based on his theories from which they also stem those of Krzysztof Pomian, Susan Stewart, James Clifford and Susan Pearce, who edited an interesting compilation in 1994 in Routledge, that included the above-mentioned authors, in Interpreting Objects and Collections.
In this section we will share past and present texts, news, analysis, personal and foreign experiences and other complicities.
The first contribution to this section is an excerpt from the short text in which Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) speaks about book collection and the ceaseless and futile longing of the collector in trying to complete and apprehend a collection.
- I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of the crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation- which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly obejctive and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection...
Excerpt from: Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, Unpacking My Library. Talk about Book Collecting. Schocken, 1969