“That’s all I need: an ordered life”
—Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Grey Gardens
Early last year, I experienced my first real hoarding crisis. In the past I’d had the luxury of space, the hoarder’s essential: a room at my parents’ house still full of my junk, and a flat (with accommodating flatmates) that I was slowly filling with ads for psychics, scratch cards and crisp packets. But that spring I was finally asked to clear out my childhood bedroom since, understandably, my parents wanted to use it for something else. It was not a simple task. Emptying the room required multiple trips characterised by indecision and exhaustion. Each thing I picked up seemed too precious to throw out, and I’d waste hours hesitating over student newspapers and kinder egg toys. Around the same time, I was sorting through photos I had rescued from my dad’s bin, square Instamatics he had discarded after discovering that they’d been spoiled by damp. The contrast felt acute. My dad had thrown away the photographic record of his youth, while I was struggling to part with old theatre tickets. Before hoarding became the subject of news stories, synonymous with toilet rolls and tinned food, I had been thinking about it as a question of attachment: why do some people find it so easy to throw things away, while others hold on to even the humblest rubbish?
Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up had just arrived on Netflix, and on the days that I returned home, my mum would yell up the stairs: see what sparks joy! In the show, Kondo visits despairing families in their overflowing homes across America and helps them to sort and discard their things following this principle. Grateful participants patiently hold a box, dress or bread knife in their hands to see if it triggers an echo of excitement within them, and if not, they throw it out. Under Kondo’s watchful eye, they progress through categories using this method, from clothes to books, papers through miscellaneous (which tackles those unruly kitchen and bathroom cupboards), until finally participants are ready to tackle ‘the sentimental’. This is where I was stuck. Regardless of their original functions, all my things seemed to fall into this category. At least Kondo’s system acknowledges the difficulty: the sentimental is placed last because it is the hardest to tackle, and she warns her clients that they must be well-trained in recognising joy before they confront their photographs, personal knick-knacks or collections of baseball cards. Not only was I ill-prepared in this manner, but I also couldn’t connect with the principle. If my things didn’t all spark joy exactly, they at least possessed a metonymic quality that I found irresistible.
This is how sentimentality works, of course: objects become so weighted with significance that they are no longer simply themselves. ‘Sentimental’ may be the English translation for Kondo’s hardest category, but the definition of this word involves many complex feelings: sadness, tenderness, nostalgia. Of these it is nostalgia – etymologically, a longing for home – that belongs to the things we hold onto. Nostalgia accrues to objects over time: it turns them into portals to past places, allows whole worlds to kaleidoscopically fold out of them until it’s impossible to see their true dimensions. Looking at Kondo’s clients, it’s easy to see how you might end up keeping old shirts because they remind you of a dead husband, or nutcrackers because they represent the happiness of Christmases gone by. Our objects have the power to take us elsewhere – even if it’s just further into ourselves. In one episode, Kondo says to Wendy (hoarder of nutcrackers) and her husband Ron (keeper of baseball cards): “I’m so moved because over these past weeks you’ve not only confronted your possessions, you’ve also confronted yourselves.” There’s a sense, for a moment, that they are the same thing. Without this confrontation, we may lose ourselves and lose sight of reality, becoming engulfed by the past, drowned by stuff, or both. This is why clear-eyed gurus and desperate mothers urge us to tidy our homes, throw things out, and redraw the lines between categories.
The New Yorker calls nostalgia one of the ‘pathologies’ of Grey Gardens (1975), a documentary by Albert and David Maysles that has become a cult classic for its largely plotless depiction of mother and daughter duo Big Edie and Little Edie as they rattle around their crumbling home in East Hampton. Even serene Marie Kondo, I imagine, would be daunted by the piles of stuff here, as much as by the women themselves. Big Edie spends most of the film in bed, sharing the narrow mattress with newspapers, tissue boxes, baskets, cats and the occasional biscuit tin or radio. Little Edie wraps her head in silk scarves, performs dances and introduces the filmmakers to odd corners of the house, pointing to faded posters, cluttered drawers and dusty shelves of shells and toys. Their conversations and monologues are dominated by an obsession with the past, and they bicker about their glory days, former beauty, old suitors and ancient ambitions. “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present,” says Little Edie in one of the film’s opening scenes, and as we watch, it soon becomes clear this has at least something to do with the women’s hoarding. Indeed, memories are kept as close as the objects that conjure them, and there’s no special treatment of those photographs, old records or painted portraits. Like the past itself, they are absorbed into everyday life. Big Edie rifles through framed pictures stacked on her lap alongside the bed’s other detritus, her own portrait watching from where it’s propped on the floor behind boxes and old linen. Photos of the two women when they were younger – Big Edie wearing a tiara on her wedding day, Little Edie as a child in a drop-waist white dress – spill from ragged albums. Old vinyl records of Big Edie singing are scratched. The sheen of squalor (the film’s other apparent pathology) extends even to these relics.
In this way, there’s a sense that the past hasn’t really ended. Little Edie often brings up her life in New York, where she might have made it as a dancer, and chafes at opportunities missed as though they were still options. When she bemoans missing her school reunion, Big Edie is unmoved: “Everything’s good that you didn’t do. At the time, you didn’t want it.” “I couldn’t leave,” replies Little Edie, and again, this time petulantly “I couldn’t leave”. Her childlike helplessness extends to objects: “I was never able to ever clean out these desk drawers and throw the stuff away,” she says to the filmmakers, “Would you believe that?” But it’s easy to believe: to do so might force an uncomfortable confrontation with herself and the past that breaks the easy spell of nostalgia. The women are comfortable in the ever-present past, repeating the same conversations and performing the same actions, all the while hemmed in by the same impenetrable wall of stuff. The more time we spend in the house (it could be days, weeks or months – the film doesn’t specify), the more we get the impression not just of objects having piled up, but of effort and years having accumulated to no end.
What is really happening when we gather things up and hold on to them? This is just one of the questions that occupy Agnès Varda in her documentary, The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) which follows people who collect things that others consider rubbish. One of these gleaners is Hervé, or VR99, an artist who picks up furniture and old household objects from the street: “I need to accumulate,” he says. The camera cuts to show the drawers, crates and planks of wood piled against the walls and windows of the small shed. “Does it protect you as well?” Varda asks. “From what?” “From emptiness,” she continues, “because it’s full here.” It’s not desire that motivates the hoarder, Varda is suggesting, but fear. Fear of nothing (a more accurate translation than ‘emptiness’), which is what you have if you let go of something. For those of us who invest our objects with the past, the fear may be acute: losing a thing is the same as losing memory itself. It makes sense for the Edies to keep their memorabilia so close. “I’m moving towards nothing now, or rather, towards lessness,” is the artist’s response to Varda in the shed. He plans on using these things in his art, and he struggles to get round Varda’s ‘nothing’ in his own phrasing. But the double meaning is unavoidable – even when Varda says, “you’re still a long way away!” and the younger man smiles wryly. And really, aren’t we all heading there? The spectre of death, which exists in the film through Varda’s interest in her own aging, is also why even she is attracted by the timelessness offered by objects. On her windowsill is a rummaged clock with no hands: it’s “my kind of thing. You don’t see the time passing.” She’s only half-serious. By this point in the film, we know that passing is what time does: that if we don’t see it, it can only mean we’re not moving with it. If we become too attached to our things and the past, what is lost might be life itself.
The Gleaners and I and Grey Gardens were my dad’s recommendations in the face of my continued hesitation. They were, I think, intended to caution rather than console. Who’d want to end up like the women in Grey Gardens? If hoarding was a fearful activity, whose practice shored up a wilful ignorance of death, and led, ultimately, to a half-life of nostalgia and stagnation then I needed to stop doing it. It seemed that this was what the participants on Tidying Up had all, in some way, realised too. Was the answer then back with Marie Kondo? Her show seems to suggest that through ‘tidying up’, our lives can be kickstarted. It is a seductive idea, and it’s clear from the participants’ tearful gratitude at the end of each episode that it works in some way. But I’m suspicious of this promise of a fresh start. What happens when the cameras stop rolling, and life continues? If anything, Kondo’s approach seems to signal a dead end: for it to truly work, once her clients have decluttered, they must maintain the new order. Rather than curing the way that hoarding calcifies lives, what this amounts to is just another type of petrification. In organising their sentimental items into ‘treasure boxes’ and themed collections, participants are encouraged to transform a complicated, living relationship with the past into a sort of personal museum or archive. In this sense, the nutcrackers in plastic boxes and the baseball cards put neatly away seem as bleak as the stacked frames in Grey Gardens, or the impulse of the artist who “need[s] to accumulate”. It reminds me of the ‘fever’ of Derrida’s ‘Archive Fever’, what Carolyn Steedman describes as “the feverish desire […] for the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it, as to have it, or just for it to be there.” [my emphasis].i In other words, it’s no longer about the objects at all, but about possessions.
Whereas the women in Grey Gardens are living ghosts in their own archive, Kondo’s clients have neatly drawn a line. The past is over, and all things ordered: Kondo’s system doesn’t ignore death so much as prepare for it early. It solves at least one problem then, since building a collection imagines a future point in time when we will return to it: “The grammatical tense of the archive is thus the future perfect, “when it will have been”.”ii For Kondo’s clients, this time is engineered to arrive now. Their affairs are in order, and so long as they don’t accumulate any more (mementoes, memories) they can congratulate themselves on having reached the end and admire their carefully packaged past. It’s neat, because any hoarder, whether an East Hampton aristocrat or woman in her childhood bedroom, is confronted by the fact that at some point, the future time left in which to revisit the objects of the past will be insufficient for the task. I felt my life leaking away as I opened another fat envelope stuffed with bus timetables and leaflets; death would surely come before I finished sorting my things.
Before I packed my life away into boxes, or threw it all out, I wanted to find another way of looking at it all. I wanted to know how to let go, but also how I might not let go and not feel like a failure. Beyond fear, or nostalgia, or even order, both The Gleaners and I and Grey Gardens offer other ways to relate to our things. Big Edie’s refusal to treasure her memorabilia could be one possible response to the deadening pomp of the archive. At one point, the mother and daughter rip an album’s cover as they tussle for it, but Big Edie isn’t bothered. At another, one of the cats takes a piss behind her huge oil portrait. “Isn’t that awful?” says Little Edie, “No,” her mother replies, “I’m glad someone’s doing what they want”. Having a light relationship to the objects of the past is the secret to feeling free to act in the future. Just enjoy it while it lasts, Big Edie seems to say, don’t worry about it. Nostalgia wilts. An old woman herself, Varda is similarly irreverent in The Gleaners and I. As she drives around the country she plays a game on the motorway, filming her own hand as she makes a circle with thumb and fingers – into this frame comes one truck, then another. She closes her hand around them like the shutter of a camera. Why? “I’d like to capture them. To retain things passing? No, just to play.” She is familiar with the hoarder’s urge to press pause and lightly refuses it – but not the images themselves. This is the sort of collecting that demands life, that needs living people to remember where in the tottering pile X is kept, to shrug off damage, or to add an image to a mental gallery. If nothingness and order both represent a kind of death, these women suggest that riotous accumulation may just be life. But the key is to see our objects as they are – just things, not memories or life itself – and to use them or abuse them without being too serious about it. After all, life goes on.
The passage of time is inescapable in The Gleaners and I, which follows Varda as she encounters those who collect things that others have discarded: the leftover grapes and potatoes after a harvest, old cookers abandoned on the street, vegetables after a market, dolls from a skip. These sorts of collections are time-sensitive, contextual: they depend on the weather, on whether you get to the object first. It’s impossible to forget that time moves onwards, and the objects themselves are evidence: “For me and my poor memory,” says Varda, “returning from a journey it’s what I’ve gleaned that tells me where I’ve been.” Rather than keeping us still, collections in this film are a sign that we’re constantly moving. This is not, however, about simply buying more stuff to own. Both Varda’s film and Grey Gardens resist the endless forward movement of capitalist accumulation, the drive that underpins Kondo’s show, where the unspoken need behind throwing out is to make way for buying more. Instead, The Gleaners and I looks at cycles of reuse between strangers, at the things we pick up along our way and what we do with them. For some of the gleaners Varda features, collecting really is life – it means food on the table, or the chance to make a bit of money off refurbished white goods. Others are artists and collect their objects with an audience larger than themselves in mind. “When does play end and art begin?” asks Varda, and her question contains the tantalising possibility that perhaps any of us, with our typologies of newspapers, or displays of jugs, might be engaged in something more noble than simply hoarding. One of the featured artists, Louis Pons, gives another view. Standing in front of his collages made from scrap metal, he says: “The aim of art is to tidy up one’s inner and exterior worlds.” It doesn’t sound so different from Kondo’s advice. But rather than turning things you love into things you have, this turns things you have into things others might love. Crucially, it also offers a way out of the relationship that isn’t so much letting go as releasing things back to the world. You can claim ownership, but no longer need to actually own.
Even as it offers a way of reimagining our relationship to objects, art still involves an element of selection. Pons says, of the things he has gathered: “People think it’s a pile of junk. I see it as a pile of possibilities.” He picks from the pile in the same way as the editors assembling Grey Gardens, The Gleaners and I, or even Tidying Up select from hours of footage. If there is anything to be learned about how to keep and let go from these films, then it might be in this nearly invisible process. It took Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, the editors behind Grey Gardens, two years to edit eighty hours of footage into an hour and forty. “There was literally no story,” recalled Meyer, “Nothing happened.”iii Her job was to make one by cutting away and reassembling. Without selection, we have no narrative – nothing is special, no things stand out. With it, you recognise what you’ve got: you determine the value. There’s a scene in The Gleaners and I where Varda forgets to turn her camera off. As the camera drops to her side, the lens cap is inadvertently filmed dancing about to a background of mad jazz. Varda kept that shot in the film’s final cut, and it is a glorious moment – playful and intentional. But something must have been lost to accommodate it. Drawing lessons from an editorial approach means acknowledging the finite nature of space and time, and that keeping something often means losing something else.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all the things we hoard should be turned into art. The process rather reminds us that what we keep or let go is a choice, and we decide how it defines us. By following gleaners who collect what others have thrown away, Varda shows that value depends on how you look at a thing and who’s doing the looking. Horrified critics accused the Maysles brothers of manipulating women they considered mentally unwell. Kondo hasn’t received such criticism yet, but the producers of the show must know what great television the subject makes for “viewers who feel themselves to be morally, psychologically, and physically superior to the exploited hoarders.”iv At the end of The Gleaners and I, Varda reminds us of perspective one last time: “I like filming rot, leftovers, waste, mould and rubbish. But I never forget those who shop in the leftovers and rubbish when the market is over.” There are differences here, but they are not ones of moral worth. Reserve your judgement. Letting go of the idea that collecting, hoarding, or mess are inherently bad feels like the first step we should make after switching off the films. “That’s all I need – an ordered life,” Little Edie wails, but in the end she didn’t need it; she and Big Edie were happy with their depiction on screen. Which brings us back to Ron and Wendy, congratulated by Kondo for confronting themselves. Maybe they really did, and they’re happier for it now (they certainly got an Instagram following). But we can all look at our objects, consider the way they fill our lives and what those lives are; and we don’t need to tidy up to do it.
By the summer I had still not completed my own task, but I had finished sorting my dad’s Instamatic photos. I put on a small exhibition, blowing the images up big so that the water damage bloomed across walls; the colours were bubbled, and faces smudged. I asked my dad why he’d thrown them away: “to move on” he said, though he agreed they were beautiful. Not junk after all. I’d moved on from worrying about my own hoarding; my failure to tidy no longer felt like a terrible judgment on myself. Some boxes I just chucked in the loft (because who has time to sort through everything?), and other things I added to my shelves to get dusty, to be handled, broken or given away. I even kept some things that sparked joy, boxes filled with pebbles, Pokémon cards and soy sauce bottles in the shape of fish. With the odd collections part of my life again, sentimentality no longer seemed apt; they were just things I liked to have around, that showed me where I’d been but didn’t drag me back there. I thought of Agnès Varda filming her own hands: not trying to retain things passing, just playing.
Louisa Dunnigan is an editor who also makes prints and books as @lcpress
i Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester University Press, 2001) p.2 ii Ibid, p.7 iii Barbara Herman, ‘On ‘Grey Gardens,’ Albert Maysles And Editing One Of The Greatest Documentaries Ever Made: Interview, Muffie Meyer’, IB Times, Nov 2015. iv Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
