Interesting article about collecting by a female collector of fugly folk art.
I can relate to several points in the article:
That first time.
At what point do the objects become mere wallpaper, whose beauty no longer registers?
The use of the Internet
The use of gut instinct while collecting
Getting completely carried away
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Collecting: Loving the Ugly Mermaid
By LAURA LIPPMAN
June 14, 2008
I was drunk when we met.
It was April 15, 1989, and the entry in my journal reads: "Shopping orgy in Tlaquepaque." I was reaching the end of a three-month sabbatical in Cuernavaca, where I had been awarded a National Press Foundation fellowship to study Spanish; a classmate and I had struck out for Guadalajara for the weekend. But the trip was turning out to be an all-round bust. Bad hotel, bad food. But there were definitely margaritas, mammoth ones.
After two of them, I lurched around Tlaquepaque in a sour mood, unmoved by the pretty things I saw. Pottery, feh. Hand-blown glasses, meh. Clothing? No way, José. Then I locked eyes with the world's ugliest mermaid, a shallow-chested creature with dragon-wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. Her face was anguished, probably because her tail turned out to be a serpent that was swallowing her. A hideous thing, if I haven't made that clear, and I would later learn that she was also infested with wood mites. About 2 feet tall, she was a pain to transport. To get her into the U.S. I had to swaddle her in dirty underwear and T-shirts and check my laundry bag as a separate piece of luggage.
Since that love-at-first-sight encounter, that mermaid has followed me to San Antonio, and then to four addresses in Baltimore. She is, to my eye, one of the standouts in a collection of Mexican and American folk art that I now realize numbers 50-plus pieces.
Collecting itself can be a dangerous, misunderstood act, a compulsion forever on the verge of getting out of hand. Back in the mid-'80s, about the same time I started collecting folk art, my mother hung a lovely lithograph of a watermelon in her home, then commissioned a neon watermelon. Multiple watermelons followed her, harassed her, overtook her, until she had to issue a no-more-watermelons edict.
Pity my houseguests. They are barely across the threshold before they have to confront various items that many consider outstandingly ugly, although most are too polite to say so. A cadaverous IRS agent stands sentry at the stairs, while a lopsided cathedral, riotous with people, sits on the hearth. Nearby, the winged mermaid scowls. I've noticed that most of my guests don't look too closely.
My taste changes, but once I own something, I never disavow it.
I think I've been emboldened to collect folk art because I have an unwavering confidence in my taste, something I wouldn't claim when discussing, say, fine art or music. Long before Malcolm Gladwell celebrated the genius of impulse in "Blink," I decided that gut instinct was the only way to go in collecting, whether the object costs a dollar or a thousand dollars. There's a group of five crudely carved women bought for $1, for example, which were briefly misplaced when I moved back to Baltimore. I'm ashamed to say I literally wept when I thought they were lost to me.
In all other aspects of my life, I'm a great fan of throwing off things, of trimming the fat, lightening the load. But I have never given away a piece of folk art and I can't imagine a day when I say, "Ho-hum, that's enough."
My collecting career began in my untethered 20s. I had moved to San Antonio to work at the Light, a Hearst newspaper, and I was making the princely sum of $400 per week. There was a small gallery near a restaurant where I frequently ate the quiche special -- hey, it was the '80s -- and I was drawn to its windows, full of brightly painted wooden animals. After weeks of longing and deliberation, I bought a small leopard, which turned out to be from the family of famed Oaxaca woodcutter Manuel Jimenez.
From that moment on, I was hooked. At first, I stayed with Jimenez's oeuvre, putting together quite a menagerie. At one point, I went into credit-card debt in order to acquire a large tiger and cheetah. I relied on galleries and go-betweens, or border towns such as Piedras Negras and Nuevo Laredo, where the tackiest tourist shop sometimes yielded spectacular finds. A horse-drawn carriage, for example, where the passengers and the horse are skeleton figures, or a series of tiny animal masks.
A few months after I met my mermaid, the Evening Sun newspaper, in my beloved hometown of Baltimore, offered me a job. Upon my return to Baltimore, I slowly shifted my attention away from Mexico. I also started writing novels, completing seven books in seven years.
The two things are not unconnected. Perhaps the most important piece I own, in strict emotional terms, is by the Baltimore Glassman, aka Paul Darmafall. This now-deceased artist relied on found materials -- not only glass, but feathers, wood and magazine illustrations. My piece shows a man in a blue shirt and red pants, grinning beneath the motto: "Hot coffee on a cold day/You don't say." I've always kept it near my desk. Because, for me, novel-writing is a kind of folk art. That line will probably come back to haunt me in future reviews, but so be it. I work with a lot of found objects, and I'm no enemy of serendipity; things/ideas/facts cross my path, and I add them to the work in progress, much as Darmafall glued a single, incongruous feather to "Hot Coffee on a Cold Day."
Part of being a novelist, if one is lucky, is the arrival of odd checks from odd places. It's my habit to put aside any check in the $500 to $1,500 range and use it for the purchase of another piece of art. For example, I recently received a check from Baltimore magazine, in return for excerpting a chapter from my latest novel. I knew immediately that I wanted to use it to buy something by Mose Tolliver. After studying several Internet sites, I decided I wanted either a self-portrait by Mose, or one of his wonderfully disturbing birthing scenes. It took some careful hunting, but I found a self-portrait via Google.
Yes, I use the Internet, although I have mixed feelings about this. It seems a bit of a cheat tracking down pieces that way, especially with this kind of art. But unless I'm going to commit to getting in my car and driving the country's back roads, there's always going to be a middleman involved in my purchases. I search out galleries while traveling as well. One favorite, Peligro in New Orleans, is now padlocked, another victim of Katrina's aftermath. I'm also devoted to Cherie's Eklectika in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was there that I found Anthony Pack's IRS agent.
I am, by the way, solicitous of my husband's opinion; I don't think anyone should have to live with objects he finds objectionable, even when I'm adamant about their beauty. "It can go in my office," I said when the IRS agent arrived via UPS this winter. But my husband rather likes him.
There's some small segment in my brain that wants to shout this insanity down, challenge the restless, driven quality. How many objects does one need? At what point do the objects become mere wallpaper, whose beauty no longer registers? After all, John Fowles's 1963 novel "The Collector," in which a young woman becomes one of the title character's objects, is simply one of the most terrifying novels ever written, the logical conclusion to the compulsion of collecting.
To be a collector is never to be satisfied, to continue on with the thrumming frustration that there's something else you need, want, crave, even if you have no idea what it is. Happily monogamous in my domestic life, I pace galleries and craft shows with a promiscuous restlessness. Engage me, scare me, draw me in. Re-create that afternoon in Guadalajara, when I fell in love at first sight. I'm waiting. I want you.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1213403 ... 578_topbox
