All around us is clutter, these objects right at hand because they are functional in that you may need any one of them to help move along the day, but items thought so insignificant unless they are misplaced that you forget how important they are and so we dismiss them as clutter, whether a person surrounded by clutter is the kind of person who organizes the mess or lets it find itself, a person knowing where to reach to find it in its disorganization, such as a book not catalogued, or a hand lotion on the bathroom sink rather than in a medicine chest. Some of the clutter places its historical provenance while others do not. Women had sachets because people smelled bad, but there are still perfumes and room deodorants. But paper clips seem to me to have been of a time in that people needed to clip together single sheets of paper when those could be separated or mislaid, while today you just print off another copy of numerous pages from your computer and the printer staples the copies. Think of all these objects as a museum that offers time and place and general functions and so an entry into life, akin to the artists that make collages of objects atop one another so as to provide the mood of a person or a place. I have in mind Picasso and Braque and let us learn something from them before turning to the clutter of real life.
The earliest collages, such as Picasso’s “Bottle of Vieu Marc, Glass, Guitar, and Newspaper” is what it seems to be, a set of objects that are overlapping, which are important because they do not create a new pattern but avoid making pattern in that these are juxtapositions or overlaps of things that have two or three dimensional spaces and that illuminate the distinctiveness of its elements. The newspaper is flat and has words on it, and so presents a graphic, which is a peculiar kind of thing because words convey meanings and not just shapes but also can be retrieved as only shapes because the other things in the collage do not have them. Then there is the shape of the guitar, familiar as part of the repertoire of shapes used by this particular artist but recognized in the collage as an outline or pattern for a guitar rather than an attempt to offer a three dimensional object, something with more or less realism, and rather a shape to contrast with the also two dimensional newspaper in that the shape has no words but is readily recognized for its object and its name. Then there is a glass, which is cylindrical even if that is supposed in spite of its flat app-earanceand so leaps out as different from the two dimensional things, and then the bottle of wine, which is also cylindrical and also has a name printed on it, so as to think of these objects as moving from more basic to more complex, but that not true because the objects are jumbled together, not provided with perspective, but just jumbled together, ,that giving to collage its particular creation, which is where the pieces just remain juxtaposed rather than ordered or patterned into a larger piece of work. That is why Matisse’s cutouts such as are mistakenly said to be collages because they are made of cut paper when in fact they are works of art made with paper alone, each one of them assembling into a portrait or some other kind of integrated work.
The early Braque is doing the same as the early Picasso: looking at an assemblage of objects each one of which is known for its distinctiveness, as in “Violin and Pipe” where what an observer sees rather than reads into, only how different it is to be a violin, with its fluted and familiar shape and on top of that a pipe, also a familiar object, with its bowl and stem, the reader knowing how there are a multitude of variations on the basic figure of a pipe, and some variation, though not much on what is recognized as a violin, pressing our imagination to know that violas and basse are different in size rather than shape, as if there were a limit in the basic shapes there are that are familiar and that we take comfort in confronting a usual universe. When do we know new shapes? I guess when we meet an alien or when we learned what is now the familiar shape of an i-phone when we had been familiar for a generation or two of the telephone, with its roto dialer and cradled handset.
Now think of actual clutter as being the same thing, which is an assemblage of objects or beings each with their own nature, as indicated in their shapes, and having nothing to do with one another though it is easy enough to impose some order by thinking of them as temporary or as of a time and place rather than them being permanent parts of the metaphysics of being. I have on my desk a box of paper clips because my printer on my desk doesn’t staple, as is the case for most home printers. The paper clips are not scattered on top of other things as would be expected in a collage, but never mind. There is a passport to my left because i use all the time as an identity card because I don’t drive and have not bothered to get a state in lieu of motor vehicle license, and so I am like a soviet citizen who has to carry an internal passport, but I don’t mind because I think government is generally benign so long as you don’t live in Texas or Georgia. I have daybooks that clutter on top of my dask,which are three by five spiral notebooks which contain the lists of movies to see on Netflix and notes o develop into essays and are undated and written in a crabbed style that sometimes can’t be any more legible a few days later or refer to thoughts that now elude me. There are tissues and my cell phone and a kit to test daily sugar levels. There is a printout of my supermarket delivery promised in a few hours time, with all my cost paid and code numbers and time of delivery, a thing I recognize for its own peculiarities, including that it is printed out by the store to make sure there is no mistake, and so a promise or a contract whose design was made by lawyers and business executives, and a practice that will remain only so long as that is the way to deliver things, which was always, since the Egyptians made records on what were the boundaries of their properties next to the nile when it was flooded or maybe only until we record in the cloud our permanent supermarket orders which in fact might already be available or when there won’t anymore be supermarkets because civilization has been abolished because of the ever impending Flood that so many people think is sure to happen.
That supermarket print out list, if you think about it, is very peculiar if you think about it, which is true of any of these items if they are carefully described. The printouts seem ordinary because they are not unusual in their fonts or presentations, as is the case with the newspaper clippings in the Picasso collage, and are also flat, as also in the Picasso collage. But unlike Egyptian records, they are not meant to be permanent, just o last long enough to go over your checklist to see you received all your groceries and then to be discarded , even if the supermarket contains a permanent or at least significant time so as to check inventory or what are the customer’s choices so as to meet the customer’s needs. Moreover, the information recorded are personal in that only people in your household will know these preferences or care about them, as when a wife or husband knows what kind of ice cream to buy when shopping again, or whether a person in the household becomes aware that they like Mallomars or dislike anchoviesThere is a kind of intimacy in people being aware of food tastes, though that intimacy is not as intense as is the case with knowing sexualreferences, but more intense, let us say, than voicing political preferences, those still intimate enough that people do not feel the need to and are suspicious of people who ask to write down what those political preferences are. Most people don’t want to know what are the consumer preferences of others when it comes to small items, what are these idiosyncrasies, while people may flaunt their interest about big tag items, like automobiles, so as to show their taste and acumen in their car purchases.What a strange business there is in supermarket records, if you think of it.
As in Picasso and Braque, each of those things are things of themselves. There is the distinctive shape of a paper clip, something I supposed was invented in the late nineteenth century and so not known in the middle ages or, for that matter, a shape that derived from the conic sections and so thought to be a permanent part of the mental landscape. Then, there is the pamphlet that is a passport, but not quite right as a [amh;let because it is distinctive in being made of fine paper and ink so as to discourage fakes and has an aura about it: a commission instructed by the Secretary of State for you to be honored as particular citizen of the United States and given the courtesies required as such, and so something like a holy book, because it is not just a book but a compression into and within these cardboard binders of a representation of awe and power.
Does that connotation of items sum up my identity? I don’t think so because, deliberately, a collage defies pattern, some purpose or meaning, which I insist people create so as to have an identity. We choose what we are because we make ourselves follow our patterns, to make oneself cohere, to have a direction, when a collage is however which way, a collection remaining that, of interest because of its contradictions and the way each object has its own particular nature. A paper clip has a purpose but one item is a twisted piece of wire that has no feeling, while my passport gives a name and a picture every airline official will respect as being the real thing, placing myself in a welter of other identifications that can be spewed out from a monitor so that I am not on a list of terrorists and have money to use or have used to pay my fare or pay for a dinner at an airport restaurant.
More like a collage, before the Modernists, were some Impressionists which also identified disorder even if in a pleasant way. I am thinking of Georges Saurat in ”A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte ''. Sondheim properly took its weight in his musical “Sunday in the Park With Georges” by looking at each of the persons pictured in the group setting as being alone and having separate lives that intertwined with one another only because of their presence at a park, the painter seeing the mystery of what is a crowd, a place of disjointed people that happen to be in the same place and can make the viewer wonder how theyse people are connected because of sex or dress or occupation. What does it mean to be apparently alike and different when you wander among them as an afternoon passes by? Also collage like is Monet’s “Déjeuner sur l'Herbe'' where a naked woman sits on the lawn while the clothed men eat lunch on a blanket, indicating that all women can be thought of as naked by men, but also that stray thoughts are private and can be about anything at all and so the people are silent only self sustained selves however much din there is in a busy park.
What can be said, both of Picasso’ collage and my desktop clutter, is that each of the separate objects have a functionality. Picasso’s wine bottle is for the purpose of carrying and identifying, on its label, the wine it conveys. Guitar shapes are used to make music, glasses to hold something to drink, and newspapers to convey print that can be read. The same thing is true of my clutter. The passport allows identification and entrance; the paperclip clips paper; the grocery receipt records purchases, and even the old peoples I keep on my desk are mementos and decorative objects. If that is the case, then the opposite is not the elaborated collages such as when Picasso’s “Guernica” is an assemblage of figures of people and animals. They do not have functionality even if they are all used to illustrate the horrors of war. They are symbols rather than functions. The real opposite of a collage or a clutter is the landscape, which is also an assemblage of stones and trees and characteristic shapes and distances, but without or only partly functional but rather a given by nature and its intrusive functions, like a railroad track and train, the way things are that naturally collect themselves in their limited types of things however the non exhaustive variety of the particular scene. Each mountain and tree is on its own, just there without direction unless that is imposed.and so in tension with the other elements. Picasso and Braque were therefore understanding a subject matter radically different from what they had seen before, as when I notice a fact of everyday life, when I think of clutter as a set of objects understood as discrete and essentially different objects, they so obvious that no one bothers to take a collection of them as a subject matter or as an arrangement, but which sociology notices because it takes note of what other people think to be trivial, which means not to be attended with.