Nostalgia: Collage, Collecting and the Paste

NOSTALGIA: COLLAGE, COLLECTING AND THE PASTE Avantgarde traditions emphasize the critical moment of collage: cutting. As we have seen, artists–from dada to the situationists and punk subcultures–cut up the objects of consumer capitalism, shattering established orders and ideas, producing a critique of ideology and desire in radical and disturbing collages and assemblages. Their works emphasize the seams of collage and celebrate the fragments. But collage still has two moments: cutting and pasting, and the desire to gather together, to paste, to make a new whole is sometimes a utopian gesture, but one that is almost always profoundly nostalgic. Like the kabbalah myth of the breaking of the vessels, it is the hope that those fragments could be redeemed, the flood of words, images, and objects that make up our chaotic modern lives could be put together and made whole–that our fragmented selves might also be made whole. Artists Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol, filmmaker Craig Baldwin, performers the Tap eBeatles, collector William Davies King, and writers like Walter Benjamin and Don DeLillo emphasize these moments of gathering. This desire to order and conserve objects, maintains Jean Baudrillard, “is the discourse of subjectivity itself, and objects are a privileged register of that discourse.”1 If we should doubt Baudrillard’s point, we need only open a magazine or walk into a mall, where every object cries out to us that it might bring happiness and wholeness. Whi le few would consciously admit to believing such slick and impossible come ons, this is one of the most powerful forces animating everyday life in 174 Banash consumer culture. To understand its dynamics clearly in both art and everyday life, I want to first turn to that most modern American character, Citizen Kane. The Collector as Kane Directed by Orson Welles for RKO, the 1941 classic follows the rise and fall of Charles Foster Kane, a composite tycoon based loosely on William Randolph Hearst, Harold Fowler McCormick, and Welles himself. Beginning as a rich, idealistic young heir, the narcissist Kane loses all his connectio ns with people and is left only to relate to his obsession with objects. “Rosebud” is both a word and a thing. As Kane’s dying word, it is perhaps the most famous oneliner in American film; the failed journalistic quest to uncover its mysterious reference is the frametale for the whole picture. By the end of the film, only the audience realizes that Rosebud is the name of a small sled, a sentimental childhood plaything, and Kane’s only connection to a world of maternal love and seeming innocence. Critics have constantly derided this device as somewhat hamhanded, and Peter Bogdanovich reports that Welles himself disparaged it, giving sole credit and blame for the device to screenwriter Herbert J. Mankiewicz.2 Pauline Kael claims that “Welles is right, of course, about Rosebud–it is dollarbook Freudianism … about as phony as the blindbeggarforluckbit,”3 but like Bogdanovich and Welles himself, she seems to miss the real stak es of it. The mystery is not that Rosebud as a single object might tell us the secret of Kane’s tragedy, but that Rosebud is part of a melancholy series of objects that define Kane, the trajectory of his life, and the hope consumer cultures invest in commodities. Caught in the spell of alienation cast by unlimited money and power, Kane treats all those around him as objects and looks to objects as if they were people. At his dying moment, he seeks to recapture and legitimate his life through a gathering of objects, of which Rosebud is merely one, a synecdoche for his obsessive and nostalgic desire to collect..

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