collecting

in the past 10 years i have lived in 11 different apartments. when i first moved to nyc i had one small suitcase that held all my belongings and i kept that same mode of living for about the first 4 years i was there. i lived on peoples living room floors, in cutained off kitchens and once even in a large closet. these small living quarters did not afford me the luxery of accumulating objects. because of this i always thought that i was above collecting the trinkets and decorative objects that most people like to fill their houses with. i even remember helping a very good friend of mine move several times and every time scolding him for having too many trinkets. why accumulate all that stuff if you know you'll have to move it again in a year? now that i am in a place where i know i will be for the next 2 years i have definitely gotten the trinket bug. i imagine what my apartment would look like full of wooden boxes and flowers and pier one accessories. and i wish i had bought more trinkets from my various travels. because if i don't have the objects, how will anyone ever know i was there? when i think about my future 10 years down the line or so, it does always include a vision of a house filled with objects i have accumulated over the years. up until last september i had never owned a bed, couch or any furniture beyond a thin futon cushion. but now that i have aquired furniture i find that it is having a psychological effect on me. i feel encumbered, tied down. what if i need to move tomorrow??? i can't seem to shake my nomadic tendancies even though i am probably the most stable i have been in my entire life in terms of a living situation. for me the gesture of collecting has so many more implications than just status, fetishism and historical relevance. to me it is a commitment. a commitment to the objects- that i will take care of them and protect them from being damaged during an inevitable move. and while i love to fatasize about a house full of trinkets and souveniers, it's probably never going to happen. a good example of this is a spencer tunick print i acquired for free after being in a shoot in manhattan a while back. i had the print in an envelope squished between some old screenprints and other artwork from my undergrad days. i forgot i had it for 4 years until i moved all my supplies here and rediscovered it. i pulled it out and without even hesitating i slapped some masking tape on the back and stuck it to my studio wall. and there it stayed for a couple months until i was broke and decided to sell it on e-bay. even though i obviously have the knowledge of what tape will do to a print and that the print was probably valuable, i just don't have the mindset that it requires to obsess over objects. i guess it's ironic since i'm an artist and hope for people to obsess over mine someday. but a leopard can't change it's spots.