March 25, 1974
It was 1:30 a.m., half-hour to closing time in Billy Goat's Tavern, which
is in a basement on Hubbard Street near the Chicago River.
A dozen or so people sat at the bar. Most of them had finished work at midnight,
so it was their cocktail hour. But people who finish work at midnight aren’t
full of smart cocktail talk. They don't even drink cocktails, at least
not in Billy Goat’s, where the "in" drink is still a shot
and a beer.
In 1974, when journalist Mike Royko was hanging out at Billy
Goat's
Tavern,
I was asleep in my
brother’s cobalt-blue Fiberglass racing-car bed. Our paths crossed
again early this year, when I found his book Sez Who? Sez me in
a carton on an Upper West Side curb. Rummaging around in the box I found
more than a few books that
I already owned. Christopher Isherwood, Paul Theroux, John McPhee, Gore Vidal,
David Halberstam. There were a couple of baseball books that were as familiar
as my own hand and the exact same paperback copy of Thomas Merton's Seven
Storey Mountain. I took the Royko, which seemed sufficiently hard-boiled
to be of interest and a biography of the Newscaster Jessica Savitch; which
I don't
recommend because once you read about how TV news works you can't not
see the lips moving as the newscasters read. What struck me about this box
of books,
all suddenly quite disposable, was that it described me as well as it did
this stranger, probably a man, probably someone who got review copies. What
did it
say about me that I had the same taste in books as this mysterious guy who
also read about insider trading and micro-managing?
How much of what you
own is coincidentally
related to you? I thought about that as I gathered the works for this exhibition
and wondered how the owner of such works would be measured. And would that
measurement approximate me. I have wanted to collect a lot of things in
my life, but art
has never really been one of them. I have a baseball card collection I
keep in two shoe boxes. My best cards are kept in plastic
sheets in a binder that
also
houses some of my early negatives. I have a sports equipment collection;
two field hockey sticks, two pairs of golf shoes, a pair of metal spiked
cleats,
5 baseball mitts, an old and a new squash racket, a baseball signed by
Catfish Hunter. I collected first editions for a time. I
have 21 books by Honoré de
Balzac. And Levi's. And army uniforms and paraphernalia. Once, when
I was in college I hung a pair of rowing oars above my bed. Unfortunately
they were
from a row boat. Collections I started and then lost interest in were varied—Limonge
china, Sporting illustrations, LaCoste tennis shirts, Motorcycle pants,
post cards, pens. Once I had the almost complete works of Louis Auchincloss.
I am waiting for my grandmother to give me her blown-glass
paperweight collection, which I always wanted, but wanted
more after I read that Truman
Capote and
Collette had one. I don't think any of my collections are exemplar
examples. And they aren't even that quirky. More than anything,
I think they represent a need to have more than one thing of a particular
thing. I learned this from
my father, who along with cars, rifles, tin toys and slot machines collected
scales, of which he probably amassed 25. The word hoarding comes to mind
and because I think of hoarding as collecting and because I am an artist,
I don’t
like to think of what I make as something to be accumulated. Therefore,
I never really thought about collecting art. This said, I seem to have
accumulated quite
a bit of art. Not a huge amount, not enough to build a foundation around,
but certainly enough to contradict the above statement. With the exception
of one
piece, which came framed, none of this work has ever hung on my walls.
In fact, I now wander around my house worriedly, wondering where and
if I can hang it
when I get it home. Do you hang a portrait of a stranger in your bedroom?
What do people who have my work do with it? Do they look at it everyday
and wonder
who that kid with a sock in her jockey's is? A landscape is fine,
but I only have two and they're both so big. Is it easier when
you have a big house? Do people like to buy pictures of ugly people?
I seem
only to have collected
pictures of attractive people. Does that make me vain or base? I have
almost exclusively pictures of men, mostly by men. Does that make me
a bad feminist?
I think my 80's education made the representation of female so
mired in the problematic that I have avoided her ever since. Is the predominance
of photographs
of young men a reminder of my own work—therefore admitting that
I collect narcissistically? I traded with one artist who went out of
his
way to pick something
that didn’t reference his own work. I didn't have this inner
strength. I have only paid for one piece in my collection and have traded
for only a few.
This satisfies my "it's a good deal, it's a good deal
for me" philosophy,
but also explains how I got so much art when I didn't really go
out of my way to get it.
When you collect art, you have to make choices.
So
then, you
have to really look at it, you have to choose between what you like
the best (for silly reasons) and what you like the best (for
smart reasons).
Then you
have to decide what is the best piece in terms of representation of
the artist's
work, which piece would have the most re-sale value, which piece would
age the best. Which piece would retain its meaning over time. Which
piece would look
the best in your house. By the time you consider all these things,
you start thinking either you don’t want anything,
or, in fact, you only want it if you can have three, because
if you had three then you
wouldn’t
have to choose the best. This can be exhausting. The anxiety attached
to choosing
a piece of art can be so high, that the amateur is likely to give up.
However, after the choosing and the framing and all that is out of
the way, sometimes
you are just left with this great picture that looks really good above
your desk and reminds you of all this stuff that you rarely talk about,
fragments
of memories
that entertain you while you dwell on everything else but the task
at hand.
Collier Schorr ©1998 |
