Art on the Underground: The Stratford Hoard

An exhibition I saw in London recently...

In the lead up to the 2012 Games, Art on the Underground are delivering a series of contemporary art commissions in Stratford that have individuals and communities at their heart. Alan Kane has been commissioned to produce a new work for 2008. It is estimated that one in four adults in the developed world could be considered to be collectors or to have a collection of some sort. What people collect is entirely influenced by their individual circumstances and tastes.

Collections can be seen as personal histories or self portraits created through the accumulation of objects. A collection of collections from one area could therefore be considered as a unique image of a particular place at a particular time. The Stratford Hoard extends Alan Kane’s fascination with the process of researching, finding, categorising and displaying a wide range of objects from the valuable to the obscure. Not a collector himself – although he could be described as a collector of collectors! – Kane’s practice as an artist generates complex perceptions of specific places or individuals.

Each collection reveals infinite relationships between individual objects; connections that the audience might add to through their own associations and memories. A fascinating cache of collections from people who live nearby or have an association with the station, will be revealed at Stratford station. Images by Alan Kane.

Interview 1

Mick Ward and Gill Crawshaw

Gill: This was the first collection.

Jess: Why did you start collecting them?

Mick: To be honest because it’s quite simple I think. I probably slightly stole the idea off of somebody, they said they collected snowstorms, so I said lets have a look, and he had two! I said that’s not a collection, and then I started one. The reason I like snowstorms is not just because they’re pretty, but also because you can attach a place to them, and a time. This is pretty much all of them, but we had to stop and tighten up a bit on our rules, so we ONLY, have ones with blue backgrounds and place names and snow.

Well, we would only get new ones that have those.

Now you can get different shaped ones, and with glitter in. What was the first one?

That one there, from Flamingo land.

Sadly, I used to go camping there with my parents! This ones quite good because there’s a lot going on, it tilts.

And that one is also where we started collecting as a couple.

Yeah, it was a bit of an identity thing, I think there’s a lot of sadness to collecting, to our friends, particularly our trendy friends, the idea of collecting seemed a bit sad, so we quite like the idea of turning that on its head. Now we ask people if they’re going on holiday to pick one up. We don’t always pick them up ourselves, even though we try to. Occasionally people bring me them back and it’s not the right one and it’s a bit embarrassing.
We’ve got a whole box of Christmas ones, but they only come out at Christmas. We don’t show those.
Unlike some stuff, they have stories attached to them, places you’ve been and friends you’ve seen.

The other thing about our collections is they’re all playable-with. So we don’t do any of that “NRFB”! What’s that? Not removed from boxes! We’re not interested in that.

Well I put these [moveable pens] away because they’re fading, the same with the snowstorms. And while I’m not going to get too, upset, the beauty of these things is in the little pictures and the little moving parts. I don’t know where the best ones are, the Ten Commandments is a good one!

When did you start collecting these?

I don’t know, shortly after the snowstorms – when did we start with those? Fifteen years ago. Yeah, so fifteen/sixteen years ago. I don’t know why I started really, they don’t take up much space, and they’re nice. It’s a same with a few of the things I collect, its things I had as a child.

Have you got a particular favourite?

I haven’t looked at these for ages; a lot of them are from places. There’s a set of Elvis ones which are very nice, like you said the Ten Commandments is a good one. I quite like the American ones, because we got those. There’s a lot from Canada that a friend got.
Here’s my favourite snowstorm, it’s Mary and Jesus, but I think Mary looks like Tommy Cooper, so its like she’s holding the baby out and saying ‘Just like that’!

I’ve stopped collecting things that are collectible, I had a small collection of Monopoly sets, but I’ve given those away now. There’s no point anymore. One of the sad things we do is try and force other people into collecting!

Cupid’s – they’re just so cute! Its not very good light here but there’s nice coloured ones, you can collect loads that are exactly the same and they just look lovely all together!

Actually there’s a lot more of your collections than mine. Well I’m more of a collector!
There’s one or two notable ones. Plastic ones are quite hard to find. My mum gave me a few and that started it off.

Do you still try to add to all your collections?

Yes, some more than others. Snowstorms have slowed down, so have cupids because they are harder to find. I’ve just started a brand new one! But I’ve only got six. We used to go to loads of boot sales but they’re not very good anymore, there’s too much new stuff, and people just put stuff on Ebay.

This is my most recent collection, it’s a small collection. Cocktail sticks!
This one started because they’re small, our house is getting pretty full now, but a cocktail stick, we can always squeeze in another cocktail stick! Somewhere or other! They’re just such lovely objects. There’s a lot of sets.

Unlike some things they work well in their own right, so if you’re having a dinner party you can decide while you’re making a drink, which set you’re going to produce!

The really good one is a full set of playing card cocktail sticks! A full set!
That one’s great for me because I started collecting playing cards, I love to play cards, but I quickly stopped the playing card collection.

There must be a generic word for stuff like this, it must be somewhere between kitsch and crap.

Is there something about the kitsch aesthetic that you particularly like?

I think part of it is about going back to your past, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into it too much!

I don’t know very much about these wooden dolls, they’re Polish but there’s loads of different sorts, the same shape but such randomly different outfits! From historic, to Little Red Riding Hood!

I wouldn’t be interest in joining a society of a club of collectors. What’s to talk about really? People can get very competitive about wanting more or having more. We just have things that we like, hopefully on show somewhere.

We quite like Fred Perry but I don’t know if you can count it as a collection. Got a lot of Fred Perry shirts. Artists do limited editions as well.

These here are my favourite things of all. Whats-his-face wrote a famous book about them… Wayne Hemingway? I collected them before that, like everyone else of my generation. Chumbawumba had a blue ladies album cover, which is this one. I became slightly obsessed with this one, because I won it in a raffle but they wouldn’t give it to me at the time! No, it wasn’t a raffle it was a pub quiz, and me and this other person won it, but because we won it by such a margin they wouldn’t give it to us because it wasn’t fair and they gave it to the second person, and I sulked about it for months.
I paid a fiver up to about twenty quid for these, and now they’re thirty up to hundreds. On the back is really nice because on a lot of them they still say “Boots 2’6.”
This one’s cheating a bit. A friend brought this back from America. It’s his signature that her Mum had in a piano stool, because they new him.
There’s something nice about having lovely ladies on your stairs!

So I said I had a new collection, and I’ve only got six. I’ve started collecting magnets. There’s a whole new world in magnets these days! They’ve upped the game in the magnet world! These are all from the last two or three months, I saw them in a shop in New York.

Hello

This blog is part of the ESA Social Club ‘Multitude’ programme taking place at Patrick Studios, Leeds UK from 7-23 Nov 2008.

We hope you can join us during those dates but if not we will try to share some of the things we have been up to here, and please do comment on what you have seen!

The full programme is posted on our web site: www.esaweb.org.uk

We have also created a flickr group for people to join and share their ‘collections’: www.flickr.com/groups/multitude

Do have a look around at what we are up, and pop back as things change! In the meantime here is some more background info to ‘Multitude’

Thanks Jon

Multitude

East Street Arts (ESA) present their third Social Club: Multitude, a series of contemporary art events inviting artists, writers and audiences to explore our relationship to objects and the emotions that connect us to our future heritage.

Multitude continues ESA’s Social Club events programme and will investigate 21st Century Britain’s consumerist society. With the rise of Capitalism and the West’s ‘disposable income’ culture, we purchase, consume, cast aside, hoard and collect things searching for the ideal, the latest gadget, status symbol, investment and entertainment buzz. It seems individuals and society are defined by what they own, their identities inextricably intertwined with ideas of possession.

Within this abundance of objects, the phenomenon of hoarding, collecting, cataloguing, archiving and re-cycling creates a conveyor belt of clutter. Why do we feel the need to hold on to things, hoard and search out additions to a growing collection? From scientific and anthropological collections in museums to investment collections of contemporary art to sentimental hoarding of objects to keeping things because you can, collecting is often regarded as a malady, a madness that makes humans, human.

These ideas of consumerism, collecting and hoarding will be explored over the course Multitude through a variety of socially engaged art events, exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies.