The Nine Collections of the Seventh Museum

Marcelo Spinelli: Could you talk a bit about the Seventh Museum.? What is the link in the title?

Georgina Starr: The link between it is the Nine Collections of the Seventh Museum.

MS: Which you will be showing in October 1995 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in an exhibition called. "Brilliant!" New Art from London.

GS: That's it. That's a piece I was commissioned to do. It was the first proper commission I had had to make a public art piece and I never really knew why they'd asked me to do it. They'd seen the Getting to Know You piece and I think they probably thought that I would go to this town in Holland, The Hague; it's a political town, and I think they were thinking that I would get to know one of the politicians and reveal all their inner secrets! Because that was the only piece that they had seen, the people who were curating [the exhibition]. And they just invited me, and there was money involved and they said just go and visit the place and propose something, and we will fund it.

So I went along to The Hague which was a really boring city, spent a day there wandering round (like before Mentioning), just thinking what am I doing? What am I supposed to be looking for? Took some photos and couldn't listen to any conversations because I couldn't understand what anyone was saying so that was that one out. I can't repeat myself again! So I just thought, if I'm really going to do this I've got to spend more than a day. I'm not the sort of artist or person who can just think, yes, I'm going to do this in this place. So I asked them if I could stay for two weeks. And I think they were quite shocked that anyone would want to stay in The Hague for two weeks. And so they said yes, we'll get you a hotel, and, are you sure? And I said yes, definitely. And so I stayed in this really strange hotel, like a pension.

It was called Hotel Lahey, and it was run by this quite eccentric woman who was also an artist in her spare time, or craftsperson. It wasn't like a hotel for people to stay on holiday because it isn't really a holiday town. It was people who were living there. People who couldn't afford to get houses, or were out of work, or whatever. They were quite cheap rooms and they had little kitchens and things like that. So most people who were there were permanent hotel people. I was given this room and it was filled with all her stuff. There was a bed on the floor and there were shelves and bookshelves and cupboards. And every cupboard I opened was full, every book shelf was full - the whole place. And she made a little space for me in the cupboard and said you can put your stuff there. And I remember sitting there and being quite depressed thinking, they could at least have got me a decent hotel: this little room of this woman's, the light was really dark in there, and it was in the basement so it was quite damp. But after spending a few days in there, I got to know the woman a little bit. And although she couldn't speak English she was quite interested in the fact that I was an artist and she took me round the house. And the house was amazing.

She made mosaics and she had all her paintings around the house and every room had a different theme; she had a button room with a button floor and button walls - really quite tacky, but it was all fantastic. She'd lived there for forty years and she'd built up this amazing museum, almost to herself. And I just kept thinking this is just far more interesting than actually making a piece for another museum; they had asked me to make a piece for one of the museums in The Hague and I just thought it would be great to turn her place into a museum.

I had ideas of doing things like that, but I thought, well, it's not really fair on her and she obviously wouldn't be too interested in that. So I just spent two weeks there and went through being quite lonely and depressed, and taking photos, and tried to meet some people. I put an advert in a newspaper asking for dining partners because every night I dined alone and I thought, I'm just so bored with this, for the first week. I put an advert in a local paper and said I was an English person visiting The Hague and if people had an interesting story to tell then give me a call. And I left an address, but nobody got in contact for the first few days.

So then I got even more depressed, and that's when I started to make Junior. In the room there was lots and lots of craft things, like material and stuff in tights and buttons and things and the woman who owned the hotel said I could use anything I wanted. I started to make some clothes and I made a few dresses and then I started to construct this little replica of myself, which turned out really, really well. I really enjoyed making her and I made a video of me making this doll which I called Junior. It became like she was this little alter-ego because I couldn't tell the people who were curating the show that I was depressed and I didn't have any ideas and I couldn't think of what to do. So when they called I said yeah, everything is fine and I'm really enjoying it and I've got a few ideas and I'll tell you about them. And then I'd come back to the room and I'd have this conversation with Junior, and she'd be saying, 'it's crap here and I really hate it. Let's just go and...' So we'd have this funny conversation where she'd be saying what I was thinking but I could never say it myself. But I was able to say it through her.

So I videoed us having conversations and we sang songs together and in a way it was like entertaining myself because it was quite a boring place. And there was a beach near by and so, one day when it was sunny, I took Junior to the beach and took some photos there and it was really like entertainment. A combination of entertainment and an empty release of how I really felt. And what else did I do? I wrote some songs and made odd little sculpture-things and wrote some text and took a lot of photos. So at the end of two weeks I had a lot of stuff which I just pinned up in the whole room and took a photograph of it and left. And when I came back to Amsterdam I called them up and said, look, really I've not had many ideas and I don't think I can do this project. And the guy who was curating it said, Oh let's just meet and you can tell me what you've been doing. So he came and I just had this one photo in my studio and he said what's this? And so I said, Oh, it's my hotel room, and he said, well surely there's something you can do with this? And he said and what's this? And what's that? and he was asking about what everything was. And I said, well that's a letter I sent. And this is a photo of me having dinner with a woman.

I eventually got some replies from that advert., so I had dinner with all these women; they were all women. And he was asking lots of questions and I was telling a little story that went with every piece almost. So in that conversation I thought, hey, there's something happening within this room. And a lot of the time he'd ask what that was and I'd make something up because I didn't know what it was, or why it was there. So I'd make things up, and some things were fact and some were fiction. After that conversation, I started to write and I started to give everything a name, and everything in the whole room became quite important; they had a title, or they had a number and name.

MS: Classifying everything.

GS: Yes. Classifying everything. And I realised that things could be split up into different compartments. There were a lot of things that surrounded the doll, the Junior puppet, so I had a Junior collection; and all the costumes I'd made, so I had a costume collection; there were things that were related to me being depressed, so there was a seven sorrows collection with things when I cut my finger and my shoes were rubbing, and all the things connected with depression. In the end I had nine collections. And I was initially going to make a book, so I'd put everything in a book and you'd be able to flick through and there'd be a file at the back. But I thought it was so obvious to use a book and I'd heard about photo-CDs, so my first idea was to put all the images onto a photo-CD so you could see them all. But then somebody said use CD-ROM, so I looked at CD-ROM and it was perfect because I didn't just have photos, I had videos and I had sounds, and I had a lot of text as well that I had written.

So I got some computer programmers who helped me, or they programmed the computer so I could put all the images on, I could have the image of the whole room and you could actually touch on any part of the screen and get that actual image made bigger so you can see every part; there's two hundred and twenty images altogether. All of them have text, and some of them have sound. There's one of my father, a photo of my father, and then you hear him singing a song. Or there is one of me and Junior and you hear us singing a song - there are all these sound things and there are some video clips as well.

MS: But again there is a connection with the other pieces - are you conscious of that?

GS: Yes, I'd quite like to keep it like that at the moment because I think as soon as I start to plan things I never like them. And I think the only way I can actually enjoy what I do is not to plan it. It's much better to be in a situation and, whether you hate it or not, just go through it. Then, O.K., nothing might happen and you might just say it's a bad experience, but a lot of the time the best things I've done, or the most interesting things for me, have been things that came out of something that I was really negative about at the time.

MS: I was thinking you could look at the pieces just from the point of view of looking at the process of collecting or museology, but also if you look at it in the context of your other pieces it really fits into this idea of ordering and structuring; and that the museum is just a metaphor for this obsession in the West for putting order into things.

GS: Yes. It's definitely less to do with the normal museum. I'm not that interested in that; it's definitely, like I said before, about making up your own language and your own categorizing thing and making your own system to fit everything. Things that are really chaotic, it's fantastic to actually put a structure on them; you can give new names to things and give completely new meanings to things that might not have any meaning, or might not be that interesting.