In the closing moments of his 1931 essay on book collecting, “Unpacking my Library,” Walter Benjamin is roused by the evening’s darkness. “I do know that night is coming for the type [of collector] I am discussing here … But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight” (492). Once this darkness is summoned within the essay it is hard to dispel. Benjamin, whose talk is framed by the task of unpacking his books onto his apartment’s empty shelves, soon remembers himself after his digressions and reveries: “now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight” (493).

There’s something cunning about this last line. It’s as if Benjamin, still stocking and ordering his books, had waited up for the owl of Minerva—as if, in private ritual, he had tried to coincide his collection’s journey from crate to shelf with wisdom’s nocturnal flight. One also gets the impression that this coincidence, between present act and the flashing insight of historical process, is what he wanted the reader to perceive too. And just as soon as this quiet arrangement is illuminated by his words’ turn to darkness’s reflective wisdom, he retreats: “So I have erected before you one of his [the collector’s] dwellings, with books as the building stones; and now he is going to disappear inside as is only fitting” (492).

“Unpacking my Library”—one of Benjamin’s cozier essays—is a touchstone for researchers and critics interested in the social meaning of libraries, archives, and other cultural collections. It’s also more concerned with redeeming something within the liberal subject than with mapping any radical counterpart. For instance, while the subtitle states that the essay is “a talk about collecting,” it’s more accurate to call it a talk on the practices of the individual collector. Ultimately, Benjmain’s discussion frames the individual’s personal collection as a sanctuary for rare and delightful things from the hazards of the market and, more disappointingly, the utility of a public collection. This framing esteems a certain nobility to the collected object (as a stationary form of property distinct from a circulating commodity), but it also lends the recluse item, housed as it is within a private dwelling, a gloss of aura. There’s little thought about what a collection for the public does or could look like, or what cultural institutions really do.

Two recent academic studies take up the twentieth-century history of institutional collecting in the U.S. context, examining, in greater depth, its conservative and radical dimensions. In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (2024), Laura E. Helton celebrates the collective labor that Black collectors and librarians achieved between 1910 and 1950. This truly expansive, experimental, and politically engaged work reformulated the scope and tenor of Black history, laying the foundations of Black study in and out of the academy. Eunsong Kim’s The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (2024), meanwhile, profiles the hushed conservative foundations of galleries, museums, and archives of the twentieth century. The Politics of Collecting then tracks how this institutional conservatism (by which I mean its loyalty to settler colonialism and racial capitalism) is rendered as radical through modernist aesthetics. Following the late-night wisdom of “Unpacking my Library,” Helton’s and Kim’s discussions reconstruct the histories hidden within a collection’s composition, thus illuminating the social meaning a collection builds. Unlike Benjamin’s piece, their work documents the exclusions that these cultural institutions likewise contain. Such documenting allows them to record, in both positive and negative form, what a collection in common would hold.




Eunsong Kim’s The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property is an invigorating and challenging book that casts a heavy shadow over any celebration of the museum, gallery, or archive space. It also forces scholars of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics to confront the supposed radicality of the immaterial, the new, or the conceptual artform. These two targets—the cultural collection and the modernist-conceptual artwork—are tied in Kim’s text, since their politics stem from an identical source. At the heart of The Politics of Collecting is the term, coined by legal scholar and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris, “whiteness as property.” What Kim, following Harris, means by this is that whiteness—as the dominant ideology of U.S. history and racial capitalism—has been developed through property rights and relations. Whiteness flourishes when the legal claims of property are enforced, and it flourishes when the leisure class maintains (and increases) their stronghold on wealth, land, labour, and other resources. In the U.S., these property relations have been fortified through the appropriation of indigenous lands, enslavement, official and unofficial segregation, and anti-labor campaigns. The Politics of Collecting argues that U.S. institutions for the arts operate largely as adjuncts to the winners of this whole process, and that the culturally dominant forms of modernist or “immaterial” art unfailingly side with capitalism’s managers and financiers over its workers and dispossessed subjects. All this is routinely shielded from view—by artists, institutional stakeholders, publicity statements, critics, and academics.

The Politics of Collecting’s theoretical approach is rooted in Harris’s reading of whiteness and property, as well as the Black radical tradition’s critique of racial capitalism and Marxism. It uses these frameworks to launch a ruthless analysis of contemporary aesthetics (with a focus on gallery art and poetry), where the meaning of the art-object is inseparable from the details of its production, the identity of the artist, and the terms of its collection or canonization. As is evident from this overview, there are a great number of components to the book’s complex and wide-ranging argument (The Politics of Collecting’s history is also fragmentary—it doesn’t aim to provide a comprehensive survey of the U.S. art collection, instead choosing to focus on a handful of important case studies). Because of these interlinked abstractions, the study’s core objectives are, at times, clouded by convoluted discussions and abstract expression (especially in its first half) and some conceptual flattening. [1] However, the book is an unmistakably radical and profound contribution to cultural criticism. It’s at its strongest when Kim explores the details of her historical case studies and unravels the political consequences of each affair. It’s easier to grasp the central thesis and deep implications of The Politics of Collecting by focusing on two of its key episodes. First, there is the making of Henry Clay Frick’s philanthropic legacy via the establishment of the Frick collection, as detailed in the first chapter; second, there is Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade. Indeed, Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) resurfaces throughout The Politics of Collecting as an ongoing private insult to collective injury.

The first key episode: In her chapter focusing on the formation of the Frick collection, Kim starts with the 1892 Homestead Strike, where white union steelworkers faced off against magnates Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie and lost. While the Homestead Strike is a crucial event in U.S. labor history, Kim’s telling complicates the standard, progressive account which places Carnegie, Frick, their Pinkerton agents, and the National Guard on one end, and the devastated union steel workers on the other. [2] After first noting that the steel factories are located on unceded land of “the Seneca tribe and the Iroquois and Lenape peoples” (33), Kim foregrounds the fact that Black workers were “de facto segregated” from the striking steelworkers and their unions throughout the contestation (and, when deployed as strike-breakers, were the sole targets of rioting by the striking workers and local community) (43). This meant that even “the successful horizon of the Homestead Strike,” from the perspective of labor, was already defined by anti-Blackness (46). Having outlined this underexplored “baseline of dispossession,” the chapter then studies how Carnegie and Frick pursued their philanthropic projects in the wake of the Homestead Strike, paying particular attention to the Frick Collection’s acquisition records (46). What is most arresting about the correspondences and receipts in these records is that “one painting [in the Frick Collection] would have met the bargaining demands at Homestead for a year” (58). This indicates that “the care afforded to the acquisition of the objects in the Frick Collection is a care that the workers at Carnegie Steel Company and U.S. Steel—white union workers, segregated Black workers, as well as the land and its rivers—were, and have remained, without” (60).

The Frick Collection’s obscured, violent pre-history stands as a template in The Politics of Collecting for how U.S. cultural collections emerge downstream of wealth produced through classed laboring conditions, segregation, and the enforcement of property rights. Though there are important differences between personal collections, public collections, and research institutions (and differenced between collections of artworks, books, and historical documents), The Politics of Collecting aims at illuminating the principles that unite contemporary institutions across these diverse categories. In later chapters, The Politics of Collecting continues its study of institutional histories by exploring how Duchamp and his patrons the Arensbergs (who, like Frick, derived the wealth from the steel industry) secured a wing for his work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1950s, how the Archive for New Poetry at UC San Diego obtained an overwhelmingly white collection of “new” poets’ papers in the 1970s, and how Harvard maintained control of its rights over Louis Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of enslaved Africans in the digital era. Though there are different foci and themes to each of these subsequent investigations, Kim’s “rogue counting” of these behind-the-scenes histories echoes her earlier account of the interlocking dominations and exclusions that helped establish the Frick collection (134).

The second key episode: In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submits a urinal to an open avant-garde exhibition in New York, signing it “R. Mutt.” It is not shown. Duchamp comes forward as the artist of Fountain; he has “made” the readymade. The artist is celebrated for his radical, liberatory innovation—for expanding what art can be and what an artist does—and he and his work are canonized. Art criticism enshrined Fountain as the starting point for readymade and found object art, conceptual art, post-studio practice, institutional critique as well as other kinds of modernist and postmodernist practices. For Kim, this whole affair was an expropriative practice laced with pernicious myths, self-congratulatory obfuscations, and reactionary consequences. In The Politics of Collecting, Fountain was not a rupture. Rather, it “further cement[ed] the exceptionality of the artist, the exceptionality of the collection, and the innovation of modern art. […] Art remains a form of exclusionary property, removed from the signifier of craft and making” (107). That is, the claim of ownership came from a white man, already an artist, and the labor he performed was akin to what a member of the new managerial class would undertake in any production plant. In Kim’s view, then, Fountain is the aestheticization of the manager’s rising status and the white subject’s license to claim (or expropriate) common objects as his property. Duchamp’s license to claim an object as his art piece is more evident when one considers, as Kim following Noah Purifoy does, that this urinal should have a charged meaning given that it was obtained and displayed in the U.S.’s Jim Crow era.

Kim’s reading of Duchamp is disarmingly simple and direct, and this approach is consistent with her larger argument. For Kim, the politics of the so-called conceptual work of art is always attached to the circumstances of its production and acquisition; artworks may exceed their origin, but they never transcend them. The book’s readings frequently decenter the art object (to the extent that, in the chapter on the Archive for New Poetry, Kim’s analysis brushes aside any consideration of any poems by the language poets, equivocating on the meaning their experimental poetic forms produce, preferring instead to focus on how their papers were acquired). There is little indulgence of an artwork’s ambiguity or irony here. However, The Politics of Collecting’s direct approach is a needed corrective to current modes of criticism. Throughout the book, Kim consistently illustrates how artists and critics (especially if white) will contort themselves in ascribing the conceptual, the immaterial, or the “new” artform with radical politics, without stopping to think of the material history and interests at play. The Politics of Collecting scrutinizes such claims of radicality by examining the provenance of artworks: Where and how was it resourced? Whose hands made it? On what grounds is artistic ownership claimed? Who purchased it and who owns it now? How precisely was it collected and/or canonized?

It is on these grounds that, in a later chapter, Kim provides a damning assessment of Santiago Sierra, a successful contemporary performance and installation artist who couches his work in the language of anti-capitalism. In several performance works, Sierra pays workers and/or vulnerable people a low wage for the humiliating use of their body in the exhibition space. While Sierra’s shock tactics and radical language are convincing to some Marxist art critics, Kim challenges the exploitative logic behind his operation, thereby updating her critique of Duchamp to the neoliberal present:

[Sierra] articulates a reading that acknowledges that labor and power are racialized, but this critique leads him to reproduce its dynamics. Echoing Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s admission that the only reason hand workers do not perform “mind-work” is that they lack social standing, Sierra admits that his managerial reach does not extend beyond poor, racialized persons. […] [I]n reality, his subcontract is without incentive for those with more power. What might the contract have to be for the dominators—for those in positions to say no—to be defined, identified, staged, and exhibited? This would be an exchange in which Sierra the manager would have to negotiate with someone like him. (202)

Observe Kim’s speculative suggestion towards the end here. It’s as explosive as it is genuinely creative—and just one of many such questions throughout The Politics of Collecting that challenges the orthodoxies of the contemporary art world and aesthetic theory. I’m tempted to say that it’s specifically through the form of the question, as a tentative demand for something else or otherwise, that Kim most effectively pushes the “unthought” of contemporary art into view (11).

Finally, it’s worth noting the alternatives that Kim positions in her study for aesthetic practices. These artists and poets— like Noah Purify, Amiri Bakara, Wanda Coleman, Divya Mehra, and Wafaa Bilaal— do not necessarily restore art to traditional craftsmanship or forms. Rather, their works typically highlight the social contradictions and institutional hypocrisies of their own placement within the collection. Their pieces are reflective critiques which are fired by the injurious histories of racial capitalism and the (im)practicalities of the gallery and archive compared to the “metaphoric defiances” of works by the likes of Duchamp or Sierra (212). In each positive example given, something of the artist is actually risked and some exclusionary principle of the collection is exposed.

As for an alternative to the museum collection or the archive, no such positive vision is provided in The Politics of Collection. The aim of the book is not to reform the management of these spaces but to gauge the effects of their financial and ideological capture. Still, Kim concludes with a short, poetic tribute to the unintelligible aesthetic marks of “those inoperative”— “the absence of those who never invented or conquered anything” — that may someday become legible (213-4). While these concluding remarks on absence are shadowy and elliptical, one can intimate that the “aesthetic commons” Kim has in mind wouldn’t concern itself with the space of cultural institutions or the business of art at all (213). It would be something like what Kristin Ross calls communal luxury, [3] an expansive practice that allows historical memory, sensual play, and mutual responsibility to swell within a transformed labor and decolonized world. The traces of the exploited and dispossessed are currently forgotten but not gone. In the closing moments, Kim poses another unthought question: “How can we but remember?” (213). First, forget property.




While Kim’s The Politics of Collecting starkly portrays the whiteness of dominant U.S. cultural institutions, Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History reveals the work that Black people accomplished inside, outside, and beneath this system in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to Kim’s radical efforts to critique the conservativeness of the U.S. cultural collection, then, Helton— perhaps no less radically— unveils what alternative collections were built despite the immense weight of whiteness. Rather than seeing these two texts at odds with each other, the two are better understood as complements.

The types of collections that Helton focuses on are largely different from Kim’s. In six chapters, Scattered and Fugitive Things studies the personal print collections, library branches, catalogs, archives, and exhibitions that built “Black archives.” Importantly, these Black archives, for Helton, are “not simply archives of blackness” but are “those imagined by and for Black communities” (5). Furthermore, these experiments in Black archiving are not considered as merely “counterarchives” in Scattered and Fugitive Things—the objective of these Black pioneers was more than to simply contest the racist image of the Black person, but to build a Black history unindebted to and in excess of the Euro-American (16). In this sense, the historical persons Helton studies, and Helton’s own work, are a part of the tradition of Black study as recently outlined by Joshua Myers: “a rich form of inquiry that possesses an urgency, an authenticity, a grounding that affirms that there is in fact a beyond—that there is more to Black thought than mere critique” (13). Indeed, one of the core claims of Scattered and Fugitive Things is that the numerous experiments in creating Black archives in the 1910s-1950s created a series of networks of Black thought and history, from which the formation of Black studies in the 1960s onwards depended. Much of this steady, often unglamourous and laborious, work, Helton notes, was undertaken by Black women.

Scattered and Fugitive Things is a delightful and neatly organized study, offering an impressive consistency in theme and scope. Each of its six chapters concentrates on the work of one historical Black figure, situating these characters within their milieu and outlining their tangible and intangible legacies. The first three chapters focus on two figures based in Harlem, the bibliophile Artur Schomburg and scrapbooker Alexander Gumby, and one in Roanoke, Virginia, the Gainsboro librarian Virginia Lee. Schomburg’s personal book collection of “Negroana” is the most conventional and concrete instance of an archive within the study, and the successful sale of Schomburg’s collection to the New York Public Library in the 1920s introduces an “instituting imaginary” within Black thought that is evident throughout the rest of the study (55). Meanwhile, providing an account of Gumby’s more ephemeral scrapbooks (now preserved at Columbia University) allows Helton to explore the more creative and idiosyncratic forms required for curating Black life and history. While the style and afterlife of Schomburg’s and Gumby’s collections differ greatly, Helton’s analysis underscores the similar challenges the two men faced. They both had to experiment in evaluating and acquiring material for their collections, and both encountered numerous difficulties in preserving their personal collections, making the jump from “collecting” to “archive-building” (34). Finally, Lee’s story is remarkable. As librarian for a colored branch in the segregated South, Lee secretly acquired and lent books relevant to her local Black community—literally continuing her operation underground in the library’s basement when asked by her white superiors to stop. Helton writes: “Small collections like Lee’s—at once secret and public, replicable and rare—are key to any theory of Black archives, which must encompass not only the iconic collections in New York, Washington, or Chicago but also the proliferation of sites that prioritized local access to Black texts, even when it was perilous to do so” (84).

The second half of Scattered and Fugitive Things continues this concern over access while also further focusing on the work of Black women from the 1920s onwards. Helton dedicates her fourth chapter to Dorothy Porter, an “unauthorized guest editor” of the Dewey Decimal System ​(117), and another to Vivian Harsh, who “built a Black Studies movement in public space” at the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library in Chicago (151). Neither Porter nor Harsh founded Black collections or archives as such, but their diligence, ingenuity, and generosity drastically organized and expanded them. In doing so, Helton argues, these women fostered important networks of Black thought and collective struggle; this tradition challenged both the racism of the country and the parochial, national framing of Blackness. Scattered and Fugitive Things’s final chapter concentrates on Lawrence D. Reddick, who replaced Schomburg as the head of the NYPL’s Schomburg collection in 1939. Helton tracks how Reddick, 36 years Schomburg’s junior, attempted to collect the wartime letters of Black WWII soldiers and their loved ones, which otherwise would have been left scattered and forgotten. This final chapter identifies a general shift in Black collections over the course of the study’s forty years: “If the founding generation of Black bibliophiles had decisively shown, after decades of struggle, that Negro History could fill a library, a new crop of collectors now harnessed that confidence to build archives expressive of their own sensibility about what histories the future needed” (158).

While Kim’s critique is advanced through the form of the upending question, the force of Helton’s celebratory text is made through a subtle art of arrangement, the force of Helton’s celebratory text is likewise made through her subtle art of arrangement. That is, one of the distinctive strengths of Scattered and Fugitive Things is Helton’s generous use of rich quotation. She often lets a well-placed quote make the argument for her (or at least make it seem so). For example, this 1943 letter from a Black soldier stationed in Alabama, in search of more Zora Neale Hurston to read, writes this:

“The next day after finishing ‘Dust Tracks—’ I went to the library in search of anything else of hers. Not a thing could I find. However, the library was not only barren of Hurston books; it was barren of books by most of the well known Negro writers. This seems to be a strange lack—a library for Negroes conspicuously lacking in books by Negroes.” (84)

The text is scattered with such vivid and insightful statements from a staggering array of sources (the acknowledgements section lists visits to thirteen archives across the U.S.). Ironically, this quotation regarding a “strange lack” proves one of Scattered and Fugitive Things’ main claims: that, despite the many marked absences, there was and is an abundance of material of Black history available. Indeed, what the histories of the six figures in the study illustrate is that there was always more material for Black archives than first thought, and that Black thought is transformed when this material is effectively collected and organized.

Helton’s study dovetails with Kim’s in the closing sections. While on the one hand, the Black collectors and librarians of Scattered and Fugitive Things contested the received notion that “the Negro has no history,” they also had to contend with the increasing white interest in Black culture, which produced a different kind of violence (9). By the 1960s, Black art and history experienced its own form of gentrification, becoming acquired by prestigious universities, libraries, and centers, further pricing out Black collectors and limiting community access. Helton notes a further historical irony too. While some Black collections like Schomburg’s slowly developed a collection of Black protest and rebellion, by the 1960s the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had created a very different archive of Black activism. Indeed, this anti-Black archive entangled itself with the book’s figures—the FBI used Porter’s “collection as a space of surveillance” and had a file on Reddick’s political activism (177). Such moments foreground the exclusionary and disciplinary drive of institutions that constantly haunt the book’s theory of Black archives, from inside and out.

Still, Scattered and Fugitive Things echoes the resistant tone of The Politics of Collecting’s conclusion. “By creating spaces for collective inquiry, the twentieth century’s Black collectors changed the questions people could dream of asking, then and now” (184). Helton, like Kim, sees the unexpected question as a political effect of a radically re-arranged history. For both authors, then, political formations and aesthetic forms are primed by the material history of the collection; they can transform when those material conditions change. Where the two authors differ is on the potential social value of current collections, and our present ability to even recognize what has come before. Nevertheless, both Kim and Helton provide profound insight into reading and recovering the history hidden on the collection’s wings.






Notes

Works Cited

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Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Collecting.” Translated by Harry Zohn.  Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2 1931-1935. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 486–493.

Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.

Joshua Myers, Of Black Study. London: Pluto Press, 2023.

Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015.