[There are few
practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical,
cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and
analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please
share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]
On a couple
takeaways from a very strange recent story.
I’ve long waited
for an opportunity to blog about Phil Collins, and finally with this series the
chance has presented itself. Actually, that’s a bald-faced lie, and backwards
to boot—I had never given Phil Collins the slightest bit of blog-thought (although
“Land of Confusion”
might be worth a post down the road, now that I’m doing such thinking) until my
colleague
and friend Irene Martyniuk sent me this late June BBC story
about Collins donating his ginormous collection of memorabilia related to the
1836 Battle of the Alamo to a San Antonio museum. It was that story which
inspired this week’s series on collectors and collecting, and so it’s only fitting
that I end by thinking about a couple angles to that weird—or at least seriously
random—bit of AmericanStudies news.
For one thing,
note Collins’—or at least the story’s—conflation of cultural and historical
versions of the battle. Collins says that he has “had a love affair with this
place [the Alamo] since I was about five years old,” the age when he saw “the
1950s TV series Davy Crockett, King of the
Wild Frontier” (King was a 1955
live-action film edited
together from episodes of the
TV show, but I think we can allow a 5 year-old some latitude in memory). It’s
probably likely that most of us are first drawn to history through cultural
rather than historical texts, but there’s still some significant slippage in
Collins’ statement—neither the TV show nor the film, nor for example the John Wayne film of
five years later, would have connected Collins to “this place” itself, but
rather to versions of it just as constructed as the one he gradually assembled
in his Swiss basement. And certainly none of those versions were likely to have
included the
Mexican histories and stories that comprised a significant part of the
battle as well.
For another
thing, and one relevant to this entire series of posts, there’s the distinction
but also the overlap between private and public collecting. The two would seem
quite different, both in purpose (Collins assembled his collection to make
himself happy, while a museum does so to share its artifacts with and inform
the public) and relatedly in audience (Collins’ collection was limited to
whomever he invited to his Swiss basement, while a museum’s is ideally open to
whoever can travel to, afford, and otherwise access it). But on the other hand,
every collection I’ve highlighted this week came into existence because of the
efforts, the choices, and even the personal interests and quirks of
individuals, and I think it’s fair to say that there are few if any museums
about which we couldn’t say the same. Phil Collins doesn’t seem to be in the
same discussion as Isabella Stewart Gardner or George Catlin (P.T. Barnum,
maybe—I kid, Phil fans, I kid!), but maybe a century from now we’ll see his
donation and collection in the same light.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other collections you'd highlight?
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