For some months now my wife and I have been discussing, off and on, the fact that as we get older we will need to face, eventually, the prospect of moving house. Fond as we are of our present home we have to face the fact that it is not a place in which to grow old. Early in this process we realised that if/when we do move we will not want to take with us all of the things we have accumulated. For both of us there is an issue relating to the fact that the “stuff” we have is far more than the precipitate of our life together. We each come “trailing clouds of glory” from our earlier lives.
While she went to lunch today with an old friend and former work colleague, I turned my attention to the task of sizing up the problem in relation to my own possessions. After an hour I retired, temporarily defeated. I have looked hesitantly and unproductively at two aspects of this problem, and immediately deferred action in both cases. I have to ask myself why that should be.
I suspect that the difficulty of making a decision is similar in both cases. The first thing I looked at was a cupboard full of correspondence going back to the early 1980s. Retreating from that, I began to think about the numerous folders and drawers in which I store past art work. What is the problem? Leaving aside the fact that in each case the pile of material to be addressed has been allowed to accumulate to a deterring level, there are similarities and differences here. Let’s start with the art work.
Shortly after committing myself to art following my retirement from university teaching, I was attending a life-drawing class. Mentioning to the instructor that not much of my output was actually worth keeping, he said, “Oh! Never throw anything away.” I suppose that I shouldn’t blame him for the fact that I heeded this advice. Four large plan-chest drawers, half a dozen portfolios and two large racks of framed work later, however, I have to ask myself whether I should have taken any notice.
Some of my store is worth keeping. Just recently I have put into two exhibitions material that has been sitting around for some time, waiting for the right moment to arrive in which to show it. My “Set Apart” series will be exhibited in Worcester Cathedral later in the winter. Recently, confronting the expense of framing work, I have started to consider any new project in relation to the possibility of recycling old frames. In this process I have come to acknowledge that some old work is, quite honestly, weak. Does that mean I should junk it? Not necessarily.
There is a case to be made for keeping a record of what one has done, and the adequacy of this does not appear to be met by volumes of photographs (which I do keep anyway.) Perhaps I feel that I will always want to be able to tell the story of my artistic journey. Just how much detail might be needed, however, to tell that story adequately? I’m still debating that one.
Thinking about the other task, however, that of sorting correspondence, it occurred to me that there might be another process at work here, that has to do with identity. Both my art-work and my correspondence are bound up intimately with my personal identity, in complex ways. It is not only a matter of what I did, or wrote, but what I was, and by extension what or who I am.
That presents me with a more complex problem and a set of questions that are harder to answer. Why should I need to establish these facts about myself? For whom is this record intended? Neither my old drawings nor my letters are likely to be needed by a future biographer….and not by a criminal investigation. Who might be troubled by their loss? Having asked these questions, even so, I threw nothing away, although the original problem remains.