Media Release

For immediate release
June 14, 2004

New Banff Centre Press book studies the human urge to collect and display

Launch: Obsession, Compulsion, Collection: On Objects, Display Culture, and Interpretation
Thursday, June 24, 7 p.m., Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre

What causes people to amass ceiling-stacked rooms full of old newspapers, or to collect tattooed human heads, or portraits of historical figures carved into grains of rice? What makes some objects worthy of display and interpretation while others are thrown in the trash? The Banff Centre Press looks at the phenomenon of collecting in its latest title, Obsession, Compulsion, Collection: On Objects, Display Culture, and Interpretation.

A compilation of essays by leading Canadian and international curators and artists edited by Anthony Kiendl, Obsession, Compulsion, Collection explores the role of the art object in a context of visual and display culture. The book analyzes the human impulse to collect and the social context, rhetoric, politics, and science associated with cultural collections. Thought-provoking essays traverse the globe, covering subjects including the ethics of displaying art looted from Jewish families by the Nazis, the process that made anti-commercial Dadaist trash-art a valuable commodity in itself, and the influence of private ownership and donor politics on public art.

This compelling anthology features 22 essays by contributors including Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Bornstein, independent new media curator Sarah Cook, University of Oklahoma professor and artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, California installation and performance artist James Luna, Museum of Jurassic Technology founder David Wilson, and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, professor at the Maori and psychological research unit at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Editor Anthony Kiendl is the director of Visual Arts and the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. He is also the director of the Banff International Curatorial Institute, and in 2002 he served as acting director of the Dunlop Art Gallery at the Regina Public Library, where he had been curator since 1997. His curatorial practice has theorized weakness, pathos, failure, and related sentiments such as nostalgia, as responses to modernism.

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Download print-ready images at:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/communications/images/

For review copies contact:
Jennifer Nault
Managing Editor, Banff Centre Press
403.762.6532
jennifer_nault@banffcentre.ca

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