Beuy's hare and the seven boxes

Joseph Beuys had a performance piece I've always considered a favorite: "How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare". In it, Beuys, his head covered in gold leaf, cradled a dead hare in his arms and whispered to it (presumably about art) for three hours. It's striking as a piece of both great beauty and great futility. I thought about that poor leoprid as I cradled the last of my boxes of pictures in my arms while organizing the garage studio over this past weekend.

How, I thought, would I explain my picture collection to either a dead hare or living sane person? Here goes nothing: I've been gathering pictures to use in my art since middle school, sifting through tons of old printed matter for photographs, illustrations, clip art, and interesting typography. The collection started slowly, but got an early boost when I found a huge stack of 1930's magazines in the attic of one of my father's rental houses. It really exploded, though, during the time I was head nighttime buyer at the flagship Half Price Books store in Dallas.

I've always maintained that people are delusional, and my years of buying books proved it (Elle had similar proof driven home to her during the years she bought records from the general public). Someone was always trying to sell us stuff which was in no condition to be re-sold. Normally, my co-workers would just absent-mindedly recycle the paper, but I could never bring myself to condemn an old book to pulp before flipping through it for salvageable pictures. After so many years of this, I found myself sharing living space with seven full boxes, each containing from 4000-5000 hysterical/historical images.

The sources have been all kinds of printed matter from the period of about 1900 to 1960 - magazines, textbooks, catalogs, encyclopedia; medical, technical and scientific books; along with illustrated paper ephemera of all types. It was a time when illustrators could actually draw and photographers really had an eye - and all of it carefully graphic-designed to convey knowledge which is now obsolete, discredited, or politically incorrect - as dead as Beuy's hare.

I recall that Elle asked how many of these images I had, while we were preparing to make good our escape to Austin. After some ciphering, I said, "about 30,000". Last week, however, alone in the garage with those heavy boxes, it seemed like much more, as it has every time we moved them to a new house. I silently asked that lifeless yet art-appreciating bunny for his estimate, and could swear I heard him reply very faintly, but with a certainty which could only come from one who's seen the other side: "More than you'll live to use."