Free Stuff by Gail Steketee Page B

City was so crammed that he could live in only two of the rooms. According to Stuart Pivar, a frequent shopping companion, Warhol had a plan to sell at least part of his collection, but he was still in the acquiring phase of this plan when he died at age fifty-eight. Whether he would ever have gotten past this phase is questionable. He once gave an antique shop a Mexican ceremonial mask to sell but then retrieved it out of fear that it would in fact be sold.
    One of the most unusual aspects of Warhol's collecting became apparent shortly before his death. During the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol preserved nearly every bit of ephemera that came into his possession. He kept a cardboard box beside his desk, and when the impulse struck him, he cleared everything off his desk and into the box, no exceptions. Valuable prints, cash, and apple cores all went into what he described as his "time capsule." He dated it and stored it along with more than six hundred others. About one hundred of his time capsules have been opened so far. There seems no discrimination regarding what went into each one—an electric bill, silverware from a trip on an airplane, telephone messages, large sums of cash; whatever was in his life at that moment was swept into the box. Warhol's time capsules have become a pop culture archaeologist's dream. They are a record of Warhol's life in all its detail and triviality—as perfect a record as could be had. Material from the time capsules has been displayed in museums around the world. In this way, Warhol has become immortal.
    Warhol was not the first to collect such seemingly unrelated objects in one container. Common in Europe during the sixteenth century were "cabinets of curiosities," or German
Wunderkammers
—jumbled collections of strange, wonderful, rare, and curious objects designed to create a picture, if not a wholly representative one, of the world at the time. Cabinets of curiosities were the precursors of early museums, filled with whatever the collector found interesting. Warhol certainly followed in this tradition, but he found
everything
interesting. His definition of art was all-encompassing, from the Jasper Johns painting he found at a flea market to the plastic trinket he bought at the same time. For Warhol, even the process of collecting seemed to be a form of art. Judging by the interest generated by his time capsules, many share this view.
Hoarding
    Is such a passion for collecting pathological? It hardly matters how much stuff anyone owns as long as it doesn't interfere with his or her health or happiness or that of others. But when it does, the result can be dramatic, as was the case with the Collyer brothers and with Irene. Distress or impairment constitutes the boundary between normal collecting and hoarding. Many of the people we see experience great distress because of their hoarding. Acquiring and saving things has wrecked them financially and socially, driven their families away, and impaired their ability to carry out basic activities of living. In some cases, neighbors' and family members' lives have been impaired as well. Hoarding is not defined by the number of possessions, but by how the acquisition and management of those possessions affects their owner. When hoarding causes distress or impairs one's ability to perform basic functions, it has crossed the line into pathology.
    Defining hoarding this way means that people with smaller living spaces and those without the resources to rent storage space may be at greater risk for developing a hoarding problem. In our experience, however, people with hoarding problems fill the space they are living in regardless of the size or number of storage units they have. We have seen clients who own four or five houses. When they fill one house, they move to another and fill it in short order. Then they move on to the next one. The more space they have available, the more space they fill. Perhaps this is actually the goal—to fill