by Eric Fredericksen |
When the question "How shall we live?" can only be answered, "Messily."
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"When I first moved here, it was empty," says Greg, surveying his
jam-packed room. "I thought it was literally a godsend."
Greg first moved into this one-room cabin, a small building behind an
apartment house in Seattle, looking to simplify his life. He'd just spent a
month in a monastery, and wanted to build on that experience. By moving
into a one-room home whose dimensions are about 15' by 15', he hoped to
enforce an existence unhampered by excessive objects. (The $75 a month rent
was another thing in the house's favor, allowing him to avoid regular
employment.)
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But this was before his career as a DJ took off. He now works two or three
nights a week at clubs and two more at a local college radio station. He
plays funk on one night, hip hop on another. On the radio, he plays a lot
of ambient music, along with jazz and contemporary classical. He speaks
wistfully of when he started. "There weren't all these other genres then. I
feel like I have to maintain this."
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"This is my lexicon," he says. "As a
writer, you can't know too many words. A painter can't have too many colors
to paint with."
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"This" is a mound of records (along with quite a few CDs) which covers half
his living space. An unbroken expanse of records, stacked up to six feet
high, extends out at least as far from the wall. Although you can only see
the tops of the stacks in back, he assures me that they're records all the
way down. We sit in a clearing between the records (stacked among them are
two turntables, a mixer, and an amp) and his bed. Behind me, another high
wall of records conceals a bathtub. "Frankly, I'm scared," he says.
Though he's made some efforts to keep his collection down in the past, Greg
doesn't see himself getting rid of it. "This is my lexicon," he says. "As a
writer, you can't know too many words. A painter can't have too many colors
to paint with." |
But large collections can effectively force their owners out of their
homes. Gregory is looking for a larger space, one with more than one room so
he doesn't have to live surrounded by the tools of his trade.
His problem is a common one. Paul, who lives in Brooklyn, has so many books
that "the weight is making the house creak." By his senior year in college,
his dorm room walls were largely lined with floor-to-ceiling cinder block
shelves. Now he's trapping himself in his house, and he already has 17
boxes of books in storage elsewhere. He says he comes from a family of
storers. "My grandmother is being pushed out of her apartment by a huge
number of animal figurines."
And Josh, a San Diego computer nerd, has aisles in his house where once
were rooms, running in between stacks of stereo equipment, vintage
computers and other electronic devices, collections of magazines, and CDs.
Whether these people were collecting for fun or through necessity, each has
the sense that their home has been overcome by their collections.
But they don't have to feel powerless, according to Christine Chaney, a
Seattle designer of exteriors and interiors. Her own one-room
apartment-slash-studio-slash-office is proof. Chaney's smallish loft space
is stuffed full of all kinds of art supplies, bookmaking materials,
drafting paper, clothes, art, books, and found objects to use in her own
art-making. But by capitalizing on the storage possibilities in out-of-the-way places — under desks and tables, over kitchen areas, on high shelves — she's preserved plenty of open space.
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Surveying a photo of Gregory's panoramic expanse of records, Chaney starts
out by registering her approval of large collections: "When it's a passion,
this sort of excess is excusable."
You should bond with your collection, Chaney says. Figure out what makes it
tick as a first step to dealing with it. "No matter how it looks, you have
to organize it; there's nothing worse than having a lot of stuff and not
knowing where any of it is."
She gives the example of artist Joseph Cornell, whose work drew on his
massive collections of magazine photographs, pin-ups, household objects,
shells, sand, mirrors, and all sorts of other detritus. In his garage in
upstate New York, Cornell kept his objects strictly categorized in
mountains of individual shoe boxes, so if he needed, say, a bunch of
thimbles for one piece, he knew exactly where to find them.
CONTINUE WITH PAGE TWO
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