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From hoarders to the hoard: giving disciplinary legitimacy to undisciplined collecting

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Abstract

In this essay, we juxtapose experiential understandings of the Staffordshire Hoard and Song Dong’s 2005 installation Waste Not as the starting point for a consideration of collecting, hoarding, curating, and art historical scholarship. Far from conclusive and sometimes purposefully provocative, our text proposes avenues for theorizing collections based on the deconstructive possibilities introduced by this comparison. As scholars, we often see our role in relation to collections in curatorial terms, drawing order out of the always-already-existing archive through an analytical process, carefully preserving its most precious information. What this study suggests, however, is that the archive does not predate our curatorial impulse at all. Imagine laying everything you own – every Q-tip and saved twisty-tie, as well as every book and every pair of socks – out on a gallery floor, carefully ordered by object type into grids, with aisles between them so that visitors can tour your possessions as though browsing the tidiest thrift store on earth. Wouldn’t you look like a hoarder?

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Figure 1

Photo: Andrew Russeth

Figure 2

Photo: © Birmingham Museums Trust

Figure 3

Photo: Tom Page

Figure 4

Photo: Paula Salischiker

Figure 5

Photo: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich © ZHdK

Figure 6

Photo: courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

Figure 7

Photo: Jennifer Borland

Figure 8

Photo: Russ Glasson, 2010

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of hoarding pathology, see Jane Bennett’s 2011 lecture, “Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency” (https://vimeo.com/29535247).

  2. See Bachelard (1994), Stewart (1992), Benjamin (2002), as well as Swan (2002, 2010), and Wechsler (1995).

  3. Although we do not intend to claim that all people have been hoarders for all time, hoarding is a trait with an extensive and widespread neurohistory; see Smail (2014).

  4. ‘Mother was pleased and said to me: See, these saved things are useful’ (Yu, 2007, 177).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Art, Graphic Design, and Art History, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Jennifer Borland & Louise Siddons

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  1. Jennifer Borland
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  2. Louise Siddons
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Borland, J., Siddons, L. From hoarders to the hoard: giving disciplinary legitimacy to undisciplined collecting. Postmedieval 7, 407–420 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0001-7

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