Classifications and collections:
Nineteenth Century Museums have a different aesthetic to the Modern art museum with “…an aura of curiosity…The diversity of its essentially ‘non art’ collection, which lacks the tendency of modern museums to over-interpret, inspires the imagination and tends to generate questions rather than give answers.” (Putman 2001: 8)
This draws to mind my initial interest in the collections at Helston Folk Museum: the way the labels of objects only give you a fragment of information. To me this is more interesting because you begin imagining the rest of their potential narrative.

The Wunderkammer – Cabinet of Curiosities – existed in Europe in C16 – C18 “This early ancestor of the museum possessed a special quality in tune with the creative imagination, a quest to explore the rational and the irrational and a capricious freedom of arrangement.” (Putman 2001: 12)

… On Karsten Bott…
“ many C20 artists have followed a collecting principle, akin to the Wunderkammer, which embodied an element of free association where the mind could roam at will. The subject of such a collection might be both eclectic and personal, bound up with memory and imagination…” (Putman 2001: 12)

Karsten Bott’s works links to ideas around collecting and classifications:
Karsten Bott’s instalation 'One of each’ is “…an archival exploration of everyday life.” (Winzen 1998: 82), in which “Even the most obsolete, broken and trivial everyday items are meticulously ordered in rows.” (Putman 12001: 39). Creating a collection of objects – perhaps things nobody else wanted - maybe lost things, like the collection of clothes I collected in a charity shop rag bag. In this installation he made categories such as “ …the kitchen, the garden shed, the bedroom…” (Winzen 1998: 82). And also categories like: occupations, festivals/customs and death. Into these categories he puts objects such as “…stockings, wage sheets, feathers, neatly folded plastic bags…” (Winzen 1998: 82). The images in this post are from this instalation.

Karsten Bott’s Trouser pocket collection 1996: “Bott gathers from the streets a plethora of colourful discarded items, each small enough to fit into his trouser pocket.” (Putman 2001: 83). These are displayed like museum artefacts, a way of classifying and collecting, somehow it seems to link to my project exploring the collections of objects people carry with them everyday in their various types of bags.

Matthias Winzen writes:
“Everybody collects. Something. Anything. Again and again. Sometimes consciously and with a long term strategy, other times without thinking much.” (Winzen 1998: 22)
(Again, I link this to the collection of clothes I explored in a charity shop rag bag and the ‘unconscious’ collections formed in people’s bags and pockets.)

…on shoes and ‘unconscious’ collections…
“Most people I know own more pairs of shoes than they regularly wear or at least have use for. These appear to be collections with no conscious intention behind them. They just have somehow accumulated.” (Winzen 1998: 22)

References:
Putman, J. 2001. Art and Artifact The museum as Medium. Thames and Hudson.
Reepen, I. 1998. ‘Karstenn Bott’. In: Schaffner, I. And Winzen, M. [eds]. Deep Storage Collecting and Archiving in Art. Prestel Munich and New York.