Bathroom Toy Pile
“Fatty Jubbo” (aka Chicago artist Greg Jacobsen) recently posted this photo essay and tour of his friend Matt Marsden’s home in Chicago. While I tend to doubt that such an obsessively filled and organized living space like this could handle a visit from our entire class, I’ve been tempted to ask Greg if he could at act as a liaison and see if Matt might accommodate a visitor or three. His collections look truly extraordinary and speak to not just an accumulation of random crap, but a living environment that extends from a rich and playful imagination, or a hyper-detailed mental world made physical through found and manipulated objects.
Sensitive readers might want to note that Greg’s writing is at times rather… colorful.
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/07/matt-marsden–j.html#more
I thought this was an interesting, well-written piece and the photos show a lot of neat stuff. Fatty Jubbo (Greg)’s Matt Marsden- Junk Aesthete deals with some of the messier side of obsessive collecting, with its allusions to rats, pigeon poop, funky smells and dirty diapers. Thanks for the warning, Marc. For me, it resonates with the Jean Baudrillard piece, A Marginal System: Collecting, which introduces us to themes such as “eroticized parts of the body”, “regression to the anal stage”, and “castration anxiety”. And here I thought collecting was such a cerebral activity. Who would’ve thought that there could be so many analogies to physiological viscera.