I think looking back as far as about 37 when I was a kid with a cheep, chintzy camera that I had, I really was documenting my home town. In color. Kodachrome slide stuff. So I think it’s just a continuation of that and I don’t think … I think of these things as a collection, like I used to collect sand, I used to collect stamps, coins, rocks … when I had different interests that was supportive or generated the interest I don’t know what. I just think of this as another form of collecting. I know that when I went to Champaign from Chicago I had a hell of a job getting started again, and I suddenly realized that I shouldn’t be bringing back [?] posts and doors and rocks I should stop that. And after about two months I started photographing, bringing back photographs. Otherwise, bringing back the objects was a substitute for it.
Art Sinsanbaugh interviewed by Ralph Gibson (1978) for the book Landscape (1980)
I find the contrast between Art Sinsabaugh’s take on collecting and Sam Wagstaff’s to be really interesting, especially given the parallel disavowal of art. For Wagstaff, collecting photographs was fetishistic in a private sense—a search for erotic pleasure. For Sinsabaugh, it is an extension of seizing the real world and real world objects in a simpler pleasure of possession. Photographs are documentary, but in the sense that you get to take bits of the world home like a souvenir. I seem to recall that Susan Sontag used a line something like “to photograph is to collect the world.”
In “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian” Walter Benjamin locates three motifs in Fuchs activities which are “destructive to traditional conceptions of art.” The first two motifs are constantly in tension, “historical representation” and “appreciation”:
Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that the idealist view of art was itself entirely unhinged. This cannot happen until the disjecta membra which idealism contains—as “historical representation” on the one hand and “appreciation” on the other—are merged and thereby surpassed. This effort, however, is left to a mode of historical science which fashions its objects not out of a tangle of mere facticities but out of the numbered group of threads representing the woof of the past with fed into the warp of the present. (It would be a mistake to equate this woof with mere causal connection. Rather it is thoroughly dialectical. For centuries, threads can become lost, only to be picked up again by the present course of history in a disjointed and inconspicuous way.) The historical object removed from pure facticity does not need any “appreciation.” It does not offer vague analogies to actuality, but constitutes itself in the precise dialectical problem [Aufgabe] which actuality is obliged to resolve. (Selected Writings v. 3 p, 269)
Fuchs collected caricatures. The third destructive motif identified by Benjamin was that of iconography, which in the form of mass art prevents the excesses of the formalism wrought by the materiality of art as historical fact—in short, the reproducible rather than precious nature of objects leads to a new form of evidence freed from previous constraints.
Sinsanbaugh’s comments echo the work of William Christenberry’s found objects and Walker Evans’s affinity for collecting road signs and postcards. But Sinsanbaugh was unique in the depth of his documentation of his collecting endeavors, saving every receipt and correspondence regarding his work so that future generations might understand how it all cohered at that moment in time. I am seriously impressed by Sinsanbaugh’s unique solution to the dialectical problem of relating to the Midwestern landscape; especially his insistence on learning from the landscape rather than imposing his own preconceived notions on it, especially when it comes to technical manipulation:
Gibson: Was there any special burning and dodging that you had to do with this?
Sinsabaugh: No, none.
Gibson: You don’t do much of that, do you?
Sinsabaug: Only as a last resort. Not to improve anything. If the light was that way, I want to accept it that way so I learn something otherwise I’m always, always … this is a big point with me … otherwise I’m always burning and dodging in, or dodging out… to meet my past experiences, to keep me in the same … I never get ahead, I never really explore any further… you think wow, look at that thing I never realized that could happen… I want to accept it for a while, and look at it.
In the end, Benjamin’s observations are probably more relevant to consideration of Wagstaff than Sinsabaugh, who strikes me more as an explorer than “artist.” I empathize with Sinsabaugh’s resistance to the “arty-farty” and findly remember rushing down to the B. Dalton bookseller in 1980 pick up my copy of Landscape. I feel like I learned a lot from it, perspective-wise. I looked at that book for a long time. I suspect my “class” has a lot bearing on my greater sympathy for Sinsabaugh over Wagstaff. The difference in economic status between the two (Sinsabaugh was a relatively poor professor) leads to a different brand of “historical materialism.” Benjamin observes of Fuchs:
Just as his historical materialism derives more things from the conscious economic interest of the individual than from the class interest unconsciously at work within the individual, so his focus on art brings the creative impulse closer to conscious sexual intention than to the image-creating unconscious. (280)
Wagstaff, by class and inclination, stakes out a different sort of “collecting the world.”
