The collector of obsessions

José Jiménez

 

        

Seeking, finding, storing. Creating a series, a collection. The passion to collect is an attempt to overleap the contingent, the here and now, in search of permanence or lastingness. “There are many kinds of collectors and each one of them is moved by a multitude of impulses,” Walter Benjamin once wrote (2002, 262). This multitude of impulses—plurality, dispersal, intensity—in pursuit of acquiring, preserving and treasuring is probably what best defines Lázaro Galdiano’s life’s work. The collections currently held by the foundation bearing his name, now fortunately state owned, comprise a particularly meaningful example of just to what extent the impetus to collect opens up a multiplicity of paths for the enrichment of experience.

Nonetheless, the very core of the passion for collecting is none other than its bond with memory. In the objects he collects and treasures, the collector tries to preserve the thread running through his life experiences. Ultimately, what he is revealing through them is a resolve to retrieve that time past. In consequence, one could well state that collecting is a struggle against time, a tenacity to endure materially in objects of all kinds. In the objects on which, at some moment in life, our gaze or touch lingered. In short, it is a kind of corporal and sentient appropriation. And, though no one would question that there is an underlying concept, collecting is more an intense sentient and sentimental investment in the pieces of the collection.

The fact that collecting, in its multiple forms and variations, is tantamount to an obsession and a fetishistic fixation is patent in the idea behind Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, at once a literary museum and a museum or collection of objects. Despite the fact that Pamuk published this novel in 2008, the inspiration came from much earlier: "The idea of the ‘Museum of Innocence’ was already fully formed in my mind by the late 1990s: to create a novel and a museum that would tell the story of two Istanbul families—one wealthy, the other lower middle class—and of their children’s obsessive romance." (Pamuk, 2012, 10). Kemal, the novel’s main character, is tormented when the woman he loves marries another man. He then spends many years collecting things that she has touched, anything from a cigarette stub to a hairpin, from shoes to school reports, to exhibit them in a museum. The fetishist displacement is evident: if he cannot have her, he can at least have the objects she has touched. However, from there Pamuk takes it in another direction: the creation of a museum with all kinds of objects that can be found in the most diverse places of the world, and which would capture features of the lives of ordinary people better than official museums, normally aimed at forming a state or national vision. "The routes that objects take is as great a mystery as those of migrating birds", says Pamuk (2012, 10), who finally opened his Museum of Innocence with a collection of these ordinary everyday objects in Istanbul in 2012.

Passion: a desire to vanquish time. This central bond between collecting and memory allows us to appreciate the existing parallel between the function of art, of the arts as a whole, and what the collector is seeking. There are all kinds of collecting, and in all of them there is a desire to safeguard in the elements of the collection some dimension of the vital experience, of detaining in them the passing of time. But in collections of art objects, from whatever discipline or expression, we find this will, this passion or desire to vanquish time doubly reinforced. And this is precisely one of the specific, core functions assigned to the arts in our tradition of culture.

This was manifested in Classical Antiquity, which called down the Muses, from whom poetic song and sentient representation emanated. From Mnemosyne, the mythical figure or goddess of Memory. This can also be appreciated in Goethe’s Faust, the epic that symbolically fixes the destiny of modernism, at its outset, after Faust loses his wager with Mephistopheles when expressing his desire to halt time. Yet not just any time, but the plenitude of the aesthetic moment, in contrast to the time of action and of work: "Stay, thou art so beautiful!" Faust exclaims. When losing his wager, and thus his soul (though it is finally saved by the grace of The Eternal Feminine), Faust allows himself to be carried away by a passion to capture the moment which the collector knows all too well.

This passionate struggle with time is, without a doubt, also the ultimate key to the work of Bernardí Roig, whose practice has always been subtended by memory and desire, two qualities that are equally consubstantial to the passion of any collector. The concept behind this exhibition has to do with the discovery of an image that goes unnoticed in the mirror: the artist himself is also a collector, though not of pieces or objects, but of visual representations, of ideas materialised in works. In that regard, the art practitioner is also a collector, but a collector of obsessions, of obsessions he materialises in his practice in pursuit of a work of art, that obsessive impulse in quest of the impossible which Balzac knew how to depict so intensely in his instructive story The Unknown Masterpiece.

The artist’s quest must go beyond mere sentient representation, however faithful this might be. In Balzac’s story, Frenhofer criticises Porbus because, while visually well resolved, the latter’s work has no "soul", no life: "That’s it—and that’s not it. What’s lacking? A trifle that is nothing at all, yet a nothing that is everything. You’ve got the appearance of life, but you don’t express its overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul, floating like a cloud over the envelope of flesh" (Balzac, 2001, 15-6). Ultimately, Frenhofer’s ambition is unattainable: nothing less than to render life itself, intact, full, in its depiction. For this reason, when Porbus and Poussin, accompanied by Gillette, finally get to see the secretive work which Frenhofer has guarded so jealously, all they see in it is a confusion of “colours daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint." (Balzac, 2001, 40).

A wall of paint that does not allow one to see what is underneath: life itself. And, yet, when Porbus and Poussin examine the canvas with greater attention they discover something more: "part of a naked foot" in a corner of the canvas, "emerging from this chaos of colours, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist". On making this discovery Porbus cries out: "There is a woman beneath all that" (Balzac, 2001, 40-1). In his pursuit of the impossible, to combine painting and life, Frenhofer had accumulated on the canvas the pieces of his obsession, to give life to a woman. Of course, the final result is fragmentary and incomplete, even though life beats in the inside of this wall of paint. After all, as Frenhofer himself had exclaimed, "My painting’s not a painting, my figure’s a feeling, a passion!" (Balzac, 2001, 34). Similarly to Balzac’s story, if all one can see in Frenhofer’s painting is the tip of a woman’s naked foot, in Bernardí Roig’s work all we see are pieces or fragments that speak to an unattainable whole. A modulator of bodies, of self-absorbed figures, Bernardí Roig is chasing an obsession, a pilgrim in search of light, which he tries to reach, to arrive at. A collection of images and bodies that, on this occasion, are scattered around the spaces where the pieces gathered by José Lázaro Galdiano are stored, coming across them on their way, but with their own destination. As such, it is not about establishing a dialogue with the pieces in the Lázaro Galdiano collection, rather it is a case of starting up a kind of self-absorbed conversation between two kinds of quest, driven by different motivations, yet fuelled by the same passion for collecting.

All the elements in the exhibition—the drawings, the light book, the sculptures, the cast that confronts the armour, the video filmed for this show in the spaces of the foundation, even the board of images—revolve around the same modulation: to reach the light. For his works, Bernardí Roig dips into a sundry stockpile of images ranging from art to everyday life, from familiar roots to the unknown, to drive forward his quest from memory under the light of desire. This is clearly reflected in Tablero de imágenes, a board of images on a wall in his studio, where he continuously adds clippings of images culled from here and there, and which is now presented in public for the first time in this exhibition. It is a kind of intimate record of how an obsession evolves, expands and matures until ending up as a work. A work which is, nonetheless, like the tip of a woman’s naked foot in The Unknown Masterpiece: underneath there is life.

Light is the field of vision. And for Bernardí Roig the key question is this: to see or not to see. His pieces are caught in an obsessive dilemma: they want to see, even in the knowledge that seeing, fully seeing, is impossible. La invisibilidad de la memoria (2012) and, especially, Prácticas para la infidelidad (Melancolía II) (2012) are good illustrations of this dilemma. The figure bent over the light creates a kind of secular altar before the intervened chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s etching. Bathsheba’s foot tells us that there is life, there is a woman underneath. The desire to see is the driving force of Eros and the spur for art. Actaeon cannot repress his desire to see the naked body of the goddess. He looks with desire, just as we look at artworks with desire. Therein lies the seed of metamorphosis: we change, we become another, when we look and manage to see. Bernardí Roig’s sculptures are metamorphic bodies in search of light. We can find them transporting neon tubes, trying to suck the light out of them, or looking for the protection of a lamp. Or somewhere between trapped by or hypnotised by the lamps. They are also hidden among the trees and vegetation. But, even there, they come out and move in search of light as if they were butterflies irresistibly drawn to a flame. Because this is the ultimate longing, the code of all obsessions: to touch, to become one with the light.

A collector of obsessions, driven by passion, goaded by desire and the trace of memory, Bernardí Roig’s work is underpinned by an intense parallel with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), one of the greatest writers of our time and also an obsessive butterfly hunter and collector. Nabokov started collecting butterflies in his childhood: "in the early summer of 1906—the summer I began to collect butterflies—I was seven" (1996, 364). And this "hobby", which he kept up his whole life long, led him to become a highly respected lepidopterist, to the point that, now living in the United States, after leaving a note in the suggestions box on his first visit to Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1941, it commissioned him to organise its butterfly collection. In this museum one can see some of the seven species of butterflies discovered by Nabokov and named in his honour, including the genus Nabokovia.


  


In his autobiography, significantly titled Speak, Memory, Nabokov (1996, 420) makes a connection between the "almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty", after having repeatedly made "the act of vividly recalling a patch of the past", with the memory of a moment from his father’s life which he had constantly transmitted to him and his siblings from a young age: the lucky netting of a rare and coveted butterfly, which he, Vladimir, would end up inheriting for his collection a quarter of a century later, although, he adds, with "one touching detail: the wings had “sprung” because it had been removed from the setting board too early, too eagerly" (Nabokov, 1996, 421). Father's Butterflies, a previously unpublished text by Nabokov was released in 2000. In this short story with a backdrop of entomology, besides literarily recreating the obsession with butterflies in relation with the father figure, he says that for him the attraction for butterflies is unfolded only against a backdrop of art and words: "I personally belonged to the category of curieux who, in order to acquaint themselves properly with a butterfly and to visualize it, require three things: its artistic depiction, a compendium of all that has been written about it, and its insertion within the general system of classification. With no words and no art, without a penetrating and synthesizing process of thought, for me a butterfly would remain incomplete." (Nabokov, 2000).

Nonetheless, as well as words and art, Nabokov’s passion for collecting butterflies is strongly coloured by desire and sensuality. For him, butterflies flutter to the rhythm of desire. Therein his recollection of his childhood in Russia, when he used to catch butterflies: "Hopping across the grass, a diminutive Ringlet called Hero dodged my net. Several moths, too, were flying — gaudy sun lovers that sail from flower to flower like painted flies, or male insomniacs in search of hidden females" (Nabokov, 1996, 453). The artistic and literary underpinning of Nabokov’s interest in butterflies leads us directly, when combined with desire, to the most widely known character in all his work: Lolita, the adolescent nymph, herself in an unstable phase of transition comparable with the chrysalis phase which a butterfly goes through before taking to flight as such. Lolita, the chrysalis or nymph, is able to turn the butterfly net of the adult hunter Humbert Humbert back on him.


  


In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls his memory of Polenka, a teenage girl he used to see during the summers he spent on the family’s estate between the age of eleven and thirteen. He never actually spoke to her, though he did chance upon her one day while out hunting butterflies, as she and three or four other children, all naked, were engaged in highly erotic play along the river bank. One of the two "especially vivid aspects of her," writes Nabokov (1996, 539) "that I would like to hold up simultaneously before my eyes in conclusion of her haunting image (…) lived for a long time within me quite separately from the Polenka I associated with doorways and sunsets, as if I had glimpsed a nymphean incarnation of her pitiful beauty that were better left alone." Haunting image and nymphean incarnation that would plunge him into the deepest vortex of passion, the woman-butterfly who would flutter around his dreamscapes: "Strange to say, she was the first to have the poignant power, by merely not letting her smile fade, of burning a hole in my sleep and jolting me into clammy consciousness, whenever I dreamed of her" (Nabokov, 1996, 539).

Although there are women in Bernardí Roig’s bodies and figures, they are not very frequent, and less so in recent times. Probably it is more a question of underscoring their absence, of evoking them through the process of search. A search for desire, a search for light. The light that one pursues in order to give body to images, to exorcise absence and to represent what is not there without making it visible.

Besides the artistic and literary dimension and the erotic component, Nabokov’s passion for butterflies ties in with his attraction for mimicry, which he reconstructs in a particularly brilliant extract from Speak, Memory:


"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubble-like macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected”). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like birds dung, but after moulting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and colour, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection”, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behaviour, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” (Nabokov, 1996, 465).


Mimicry comes from mimesis, a word which in ancient Greek had a much wider and more complex meaning than imitation, as it is usually translated in modern languages. The Romans translated mimesis as imitatio, and that is where the error in our translations comes from. But imitatio has the same semantic roots as imago, image, and that reveals to us the most profound meaning of mimesis: the production of images. Butterflies produce images to better their lives, in a kind of adaptive process used by all living beings, including humans. When the play with the image is introduced into a space of fiction we are, however, entering the realm of art. But, then, what is truly meaningful is the intersection of art and life, the recognition in the behaviour of butterflies of an action that takes us to the realm of the image. These metamorphic and flying insects are thus transformed in the eyes of a gaze that looks for art in everything, like Nabokov’s, in subtle mirrors of art, in flying sparks of the image.

The thrill of hunting, searching, setting a trap whenever necessary, casting the net and, finally, catching the piece. Or indeed missing it. The excitement of adding a new piece to a collection of desire. Those wings and colours that sparkle in my desire for possession: to make it mine, to possess the butterfly. Finally, hunting and collecting butterflies was, for Nabokov, a way of vanquishing time: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal." (Nabokov, 1996, 479). Though some butterflies inevitably escape, and one is not always able to catch them, the experience of failure is all part of the game: “I remember one day when I warily brought my net nearer and nearer to a little Thecla that had daintily settled on a spring. I could clearly see the white W on its chocolate-brown underside. Its wings were closed and the inferior ones were rubbing against each other in a curious circular motion - possibly producing some small, blithe crepitation pitched too high for a human ear to catch. I had long wanted that particular species, and, when near enough, I struck. You have heard champion tennis players moan after muffing an easy shot. You may have seen the face of the world famous grandmaster Wilhelm Edmundson when, during a simultaneous display in a Minsk café, he lost his rook, by an absurd oversight, to the local amateur and paediatrician Dr. Schach, who eventually won. But that day nobody (except my older self) could see me shake out a piece of twig from an otherwise empty net and stare at a hole in the tarlatan." (Nabokov, 1996, 468).

In addition to literature, art and butterflies, another of Nabokov’s great passions was chess. The pieces are moved around the chessboard in a process of plastic construction similarly to the way that the images on Bernardí Roig’s board shift back and forth from his memory to the idea of the work, in another kind of game: that of art, of sentient representation.

But, why establish this contrast, this play of mirrors not only with Lázaro Galdiano, Orhan Pamuk and Bernardí Roig, and not also with Vladimir Nabokov and his hobby of hunting and collecting butterflies? It is all about intensifying even further the refraction in the mirror of the passion for collecting, of the image of the collector. Contemplated, as Nabokov did, from an optic that is at once artistic and literary, butterflies are, within their own lives, metamorphic beings that aspire to reach the light. Like Bernardí Roig’s bodies and figures. Like his drawings, like his sculptures and like the wandering character with his eyes blinded and a source of light on his head, who wanders through the darkened spaces of Fundación Lázaro Galdiano spreading light, yet without himself being able to see.

In his most inner being, in his deepest part, what any collector, including the collector of obsessions, cannot ignore is that his passion is inevitably condemned to failure. Every collection is fragmentary and incomplete, however extensive, complex and rich it may be. It will always be incomplete and unfinished. And this is owing to the vicissitudes and difficulties of the endeavour in itself, as well as to the fleetingness of life, which, sooner or later, will also slip through our hands. Like butterflies that escape the net. A collection is a sign, a fetishistic substitute, or, in short, a staging of the unfulfillable quality of desire.

Bibliography

Honoré de Balzac: The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. by Richard Howard, New York Review Books, New York, 2001.
Walter Benjamin: "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian", in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 260-302.
Vladimir Nabokov: “Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited” in Nabokov, Novels and Memoirs, 1941-1951, The Library of America, New York, 1996.
Vladimir Nabokov (2000): Father's Butterflies, in: THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY - NABOKOV'S BUTTERFLIES; April, Volume 285, No. 4, online version cited.
Orhan Pamuk: The Museum of Innocence, trans. by Maureen Freeley, Knopf, New York Toronto, 2010.
Orhan Pamuk (2012): "Los objects viajan por rutas misteriosas", in El País, Babelia no. 1095, 17 November 2012, pp. 10-11.

 

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