Collector’s passion

Leaving the tribes of Papua New Guinea, of which they are specialists, Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini conducted an investigation in the Parisian world of primitive art collectors. Let’s say at the outset that their book comes to fill a striking void in the anthropology of art and relation to objects. Despite the central place occupied by collectors in the training of public collections and, more broadly, of the taste for primitive art, they have hardly caught the attention of ethnologists. How to explain such a disinterest ? Perhaps above all because many works, from post-modernism and post-colonialism, relating to violence linked to the methods of collection, the commodification of cultural goods or the stereotypes of primitivism, made the collector representing the form of domination linked to Western discourse on otherness. Without prejudging the legitimacy of this perspective, it is however to be seen that it has too often led to attributing predatory and mercantile intentions to collectors. The merit of B. Derlon and Mr. Jeudy-Ballini is to have paid attention, without a priori, to the practices and representations underlying the imagination of primitive art collectors. Their book, nourished by philosophical, historical and anthropological references on the collections, truly gives voice to collectors whose passion for objects is restored with a very special ethnographic flavor.

Primary emotion

Because it is indeed a passion in question: a passion carefully maintained by collectors and which often pushes them to consider their activity as being incompatible with speculative concerns, especially those of financial order. Contrary to the idea that the purchase of works of art reflects a desire for social distinction and remains linked to purely economic motivations, primitive art collectors display an ostensible contempt for money. If it undeniably allows you to acquire and save value parts, it also degrades and perverts the relationship with objects. For the “ TRUE “Collector, money is” the language of others »(P. 231): that of merchants and all those who are not animated by the love of objects. The disinterestedness is thus presented as a prerequisite without which emotion and aesthetic transport cannot take place.

What matters to primitive art collectors is aesthetic emotion. Many of them evoke the singular capacity of objects to arouse sensations and feelings whose emotional range varies considerably in tone and intensity (disorder, amazement, fear, jubilation, comfort, etc.). The quality of a part therefore does not depend exclusively on its intrinsic properties (materials and forms) or its social qualities (financial interest, rarity, prestige) but, rather, on its emotional power. This emotional dimension, present in all collections, most certainly finds its most acute expression in primitive art since collectors sometimes come to consider their objects as almost people, with affects and intentions. It is they, for example, who choose the collector and enter into dialogue with him – not the reverse. The asymmetry relationship between man and artifact is at a reversed: objects have their autonomy and stand at a distance in their otherness, all the greater as they are carrying elsewhere, both spatial and temporal, which largely resists cognitive break -in. The anthropologist Alfred Gell, following Simmel, very rightly notes that the desire and the value of the objects are proportional to the resistance they oppose to us. This unfathomable part allows the primitive art collector to appropriate the object in an imaginary mode, by projecting their own fantasies: those of a society close to the origins, preserved from the corrosive effects of cultural mixing and whose authenticity would in some way be preserved and contained in its artefacts.

The collection as a mode of knowledge

However, it is surprising that these collectors who dedicate their objects a real devotion often know nothing about the companies from which they come, of the meanings relating to their uses or even of the conditions of their production. On this point, the analyzes of B. Derlon and Mr. Jeudy-Ballini allow us to understand that this ignorance is anything but a simple posture. It actually refers to the modalities of an aesthetic experience which opposes the analytical and discursive approaches of things. “” Released from the Aboriginal knowledge and meanings that it conveys, the aesthetic experience plays the cleavage between emotional and cognitive to become in itself a mode of knowledge (P. 100-101). It is therefore intuitively, in the immediacy of the sensitive experience, that the collector includes his object. This aesthetic experience should not be reduced to the only contemplation where, in motionless vision, the object comes to tell its truth. It also refers, more specifically, to a mode of knowledge by habit resulting from the interactions between the parts of a collection and their owner. The real privilege of the collector is indeed to have the daily experience of his collection: he alone inhabits him, to the point of being inhabited by it, thus developing an knowledge that he often seeks to share.

The work presents several cases of collectors thus establishing an intimate relationship with their objects: some conceive as creators, even parents, giving life and meaning to objects as if their acquisition was a renaissance ; Others literally identify with their collection, considering each of the pieces as an extension of their person, to the point that the loss of one of them can be experienced as mutilation. This narcissistic relationship has an obvious heuristic scope. As the authors point out, “ The ultimate meaning that collectors assign to their activity is the object the instrument par excellence of understanding and self -esteem (P. 183). Nor is it devoid of a real feeling of responsibility. The collector’s attitude has his source in the owner’s sense of obligation towards his possessions. On the one hand, he must take care of the things he is only the depositary and who are called upon to pass into other hands. On the other hand, forming a collection is not a neutral operation. It always aims to give meaning to the meeting of objects that constitute it. The addition or withdrawal of an element therefore modifies its perception and overall meaning, making the collection run the risk of being incoherent or incomprehensible. In the case of primitive art, this responsibility is increased by the fact that the collector credits his objects of intentions, sometimes malicious, and whose nuisance power can extend to the whole environment. This concern for unit and readability indicates enough that the collector’s goal is not to have but to transmit. He inscribes his collection in a complex, discontinuous, non -genealogical filiation where, even dispersed, his pieces still keep something from his will.

If the survey of B. Derlon and Mr. Jeudy-Ballini relates exclusively to primitive art, whose collection refers to specific representations (magic dimension of the object, obsession with ancestrality, refusal of hybridization, etc.), each will suit the general scope of their book. By focusing on the way in which collectors intellectually reclaim objects, invest them with their imagination and live with them an intimate relationship, he shows us that the act of collecting consists less in acquiring than gathering what is scattered, by tearing from the world of utents and market value that we want to find access, to the point of going into their possession.