Melancholy Orders and Violent Aesthetics: the Dialectics of Collecting

David Banash
Department of English
Western Illinois University
217 Simpkins
d-banash@wiu.edu

Focusing particularly on the American pop-surrealist Joseph Cornell and the theorist Walter Benjamin, I define a dialectic of artistic production that pits a melancholic rage for order and funeral definitiveness against the violent smashing and cutting necessary to generate fragments for new works, including visual arts, film, and literature.

Pastiche, college, cut-up, and parody define both modernist fine art and postmodern popular culture. However, the obsessive collecting that the producers of cut-ups and pastiches depend upon mostly goes unremarked. For instance, while we only hear their slick samples, hip-hop productions demand vast collections of unseen albums, and most DJs spend an inordinate amount of time amassing, refining, and ordering their collections. Film makers like Craig Baldwin have developed vast archives of industrial films to support their found-footage features, and even those who work on narrative pastiche have thousands of books and films in their personal collections, and they call upon these collections to produce everything from novels to television shows. For instance, John Waters has devoted more time to collecting film, music, and related ephemera than he has spent actually making films, and certainly his films and sensibilities have been made possible by his collections.

In this paper I will call attention to the unseen collections and the practices of collecting. Though this dialectic accounts for a remarkable number of artists, I focus on Cornell because his collecting was vast (including books, one of the most significant collections of silent films amassed in the era, music, unrivaled Ballet ephemera, avant-garde ephemera, in addition to vast collections of dime-store objects and popular-press images of all kinds). Because Cornell so carefully documented his collecting, and because he dreamed constantly of devising ways to present these collections to a public, his work allows us to most clearly see the relationships between collecting and producing works of art. Nonetheless, while Cornell provides an ideal practice to explore this, I claim that other fine and popular arts depend on this same relationship, and I will conclude by briefly turning to statements on collecting by Andy Warhol, Terminator X, John Waters, Peggy Guggenheim, Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo, Kenneth Anger, and Nicholas Ray.