What drives us to accumulate pieces of ephemera that were never intended to have lasting value, wonders Will Wiles
In May I toured the UK fetish archive kept at the library of the Bishopsgate Institute in London. The institute, a venerable cultural beacon in the East End, holds a number of extraordinary special collections devoted to London’s radical history and activism. Although less straightforwardly political than the collections devoted to feminism and protest, the fetish and BDSM archive grew out of the institute’s LGBT+ collections, and now has a distinctive character of its own.
Sexual fetishism, of course, isn’t really an appropriate topic for the RIBA Journal, but that isn’t really what this column is about. While the archive sheds interesting light on the subculture of clubs, organisations and mail-order companies that allowed fetishists to connect with each other in the days before the internet, it is also in large part a collection of specialist smut. What is the purpose of such a hoard? Does it need a purpose?
That’s the really important thing about specialist archives: they don’t necessarily need an immediate purpose, beyond amassing material, cataloguing it, and preserving it. The collection is simply there, and available to researchers. That’s why there are occasional tours, to advertise its existence and availability. The uses researchers might make of it are unknown and immaterial. Archives are an agreement between the present and the future about the importance of the past. It was in that spirit that I signed up for the tour – as a novelist, you never know what might prove useful and (just 20 minutes away from my house) it had plenty of potential.
It is not, in case you were curious, particularly titillating. What mostly struck me was the sympathy between fetishism and collecting as an activity. Indeed, the most affecting items in the Bishopsgate fetish archive are personal collections: for instance, the anonymous donor who kept scrapbooks full of pictures of tight and shiny clothing, clipped from newspapers and magazines over the course of decades. Basic titillation doesn’t really explain what drove him. Fetishism and collecting are both compulsive activities. Their motivations are often unclear, buried deep in the thickets of the psyche.
The previous month I had sifted through an archive of my own: two boxes of ephemera from two decades spent working as an architecture journalist. Flyers, freesheets, one-off magazines, promotional bumf, nicely designed invitations to shows – all that. Why had I kept so much? And why, I asked myself with slight despair, couldn’t I throw more of it away? None of it was useful and little ‘sparked joy’ in the Marie Kondo way. But it was all suffused with the special un-special-ness of ephemera: it was not meant to be kept, so keeping it felt somehow important.
A possible future value, impossible to quantify, lingered around it. One of my best-ever eBay experiences was selling a batch of ancient comic book store newsletters to a fanatical collector – not because I made a lot of money, barely enough for a takeaway, but because of the sense that I had fostered something highly disposable until it had achieved preciousness. The alchemy of the attic.
Specialist archives help redeem these personal collections. I called the Bishopsgate fetish archive extraordinary, which is a plain statement of fact. There are no equivalents, not even in the United States, with the consequence that American collections of this kind now often make their way to east London. I think we can all be proud of that. So it is that confident archives foster individual care for materials that might otherwise be lost, justifying private collections by offering the possibility of a permanent home. The value of an archive extends far beyond the problem of storage.
TOMB EVADER
In my last column I wrote about the architecture of the Dune movies. Reader Sandy McMillan got in touch to point out that the imperial palace in Dune Part 2 is in fact Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Tomb, near Treviso, Italy, completed in 1978, which I completely missed – thank you Sandy!