Our homes are cleared but we still crave tat

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/09/homes-cleared-tat-junk-objects-past

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Apparently we no longer hang on to objects for their sentimental value. At the drop of a hat, or at least a trip to the rubbish dump, we are happy to shed all those artefacts that earlier generations took such pains to keep safe: a carriage clock inherited from a grandfather, a quilt made by a great aunt, a souvenir lovingly carted back from Majorca.

In a new survey, commissioned by a parcel company that clearly has an interest in getting us to hang on to our stuff, nearly half the respondents admitted to being less sentimental than their parents. What’s more, as they got older, they said, they were becoming even more cold-hearted, happy to throw away all those toby jugs, wind-up gramophones and silk shawls brought back by an uncle on national service in Malaysia. Far from keeping fond memories alive, the respondents felt that all this old tat simply made their homes – for which read themselves – look hopelessly old-fashioned.

“Minimalism” is given as the reason. But minimalism, of course, only makes sense in a culture of plenty, where there is an abundance of things that you can choose to reject. To an earlier generation, raised under austerity and rationing, not having stuff didn’t make you seem cool, so much as poor or displaced. It sent a signal that you couldn’t afford the luxury of building a stable family culture by collecting objects that could be pondered at leisure: a framed photograph of your grandparents (the frame was as important as the picture), a pottery fisherman from Great Yarmouth, a pair of earrings smuggled out of Germany.

The great sea change came nearly 20 years ago, with Ikea’s “chuck out your chintz” campaign. Chintz was a cheap, imported glazed cotton that came to stand for stuffiness in all senses – a migraine-inducing abundance of texture, pattern and substance that made everyone’s sofa look the same. The advert showed people in their 30s ecstatically throwing the busily patterned stuff into skips and opting instead for the pleasures of Scandi monochrome. It was a benign, cheering moment, even if not quite the liberation Ikea would have you believe (monochrome soon starts to look as unimaginative as blowsy florals).

At a different and deeply tragic level, as historians and archaeologists have been keen to point out in their reaction to the destruction of the ancient city of Nimrud in Iraq last week, cultural memory is deeply coded in its physical environment. That’s why, although in the west we are so keen to throw away objects that no longer serve our carefully curated sense of self, we are also deeply obsessed with what academics call “material culture”. Objects and things have become the dominant way of understanding and interpreting the past.

You have only to look at the success of A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), which showed that the best way to tell stories was not through timelines, which are almost impossible to grasp no matter how fancy the infographics, but tangible objects. In literature that same year, the big hit was The Hare with the Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal’s account of how Japanese netsuke – little china ornaments that are really a posh equivalent of Staffordshire figurines – provided a focus for remembering and survival for generations of his Viennese-Jewish family who had been buffeted around the world by thepolitical upheavals of the 20th Century.

At its most bathetic but telling level, you see this deep need to handle objects expressed every weekend in the hundreds of vintage shops and markets that crowd every inner city and market town. The higher the surrounding house prices (and the more minimalist the interiors), the more you’ll find these shops selling the flotsam of other people’s life stories. All those pigskin suitcases, Victorian watercolours and watches that may or may not work, exert a hold on us.

We may have been ruthless about clearing our own houses of such personal detritus, but we still feel the need to reach out and touch it whenever we can.