Classifications

In the article Communicating Vessels: Andre Breton and his Atelier, Home and Personal Museum in Paris, Dagmar Motyka Weston explores ideas around objects and collections. Here are some quotes and some of my thoughts from her article:

She discuses types of classification that are intuitive rather than logical … objects as a way of capturing a thought or making it solid… narratives told by the relationship of objects with one another in a collection…
‘With an intuitive understanding of the spatial dimension of thought and memory, Freud saw his personal museum as a kind of spatial embodiment of the human soul. Each one of his objects became for him a mnemonic device for a theme, making tangible the element of thought.’ (Weston 2006: 103)

‘The spontaneous juxtaposition of daily, sometimes broken objects – highlighting the analogical connections between things…’ (Weston 2006: 104)
… The classification of objects leads to the formation of groupings and collections – thus when creating an illustrative print narrative within my own work, do the objects that form that narrative become part of the same collection or category simply because they help to tell the same story? A house or tin-box in the same category as a feather or a butterfly?
… A description or list of a collection of objects in an individual’s everyday bag, begins to tell a story of the person who owns that bag… told by the types of objects within…. One singular object doesn’t tell enough of a story… a collection gives just enough information to begin imaging the rest of the story of the person…
‘… the recognition of the peculiar power of things in our world to act as ‘positive’ fragments… their ability to import memories of their original situation into new assemblages, thus greatly extending their meaning.’ (Weston 2006: 104)

Types of collections: cabinets of curiosity
‘The Kunst or Wunderkammern, and Studioli, which thrived in the European culture of curiosities of the sixteenth and seventeenth Century, were private collections of naturalia and artificiala, containing wonders of nature, scientific instruments, treasures of art and exotic, bizarre or occult rarities. These objects possessed a magical, fetishistic quality for the collectors…they were grouped together thematically within the space of a specially designed room or container in a way in which revealed their latent resemblances and contrasts.’ (Weston 2006: 110 – 111)

…Objects and imagination, the magic in the everyday…the everyday object interested the surrealists…
‘Restoring to them the richness they possess in the poetic imagination. This phase of the movement’s explorations produced many new kinds of surrealist object, including the object trouve and the poem-object. It also heightened sensitivity to the ways in which things in daily experience inevitably harbour associations, memories and meanings that make them a powerful source of the marvellous.’ (Weston 2006: 112)

References:
Weston, D. 2006. ‘Communicating Vessels: Andre Breton and his Atelier, Home and Personal Museum in Paris’. In: Architectural Theory Review, vol 11, no 2.