Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.
I don't collect things per se, but I do pick up things as I go. Like, in my studio I have an old sewing machine from Germany that my dad gave me, and then something else that I got from a friend in India, and a piece of flooring from one of my shows.
Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through - or why complete strangers would want them.
I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.
I'll never forget that little apple box I stood on because I couldn't reach the microphone. My name was written on it and it's sitting at Diana Ross's house now. She has all my little doodling papers I would draw and write.
I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there's nothing I really collect.
For me, to put together my museum and all my remembrances was a big effort mentally, physically and monetarily.
Everything from a lifetime's worth of collecting things. You know as we go through life, and something stays and ends up on your shelf and lives there until you die? Just those little things.
At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.
Saturdays are set for antique shops. Williamsburg in Brooklyn has some good ones. I get in there and start meddling around with dusty boxes and rickety, worn-in stuff. I like it when I find something with someone else's name on it.
I have stuff from 1979, 1980 in my collection. But I also have things from 2012. So I don't know if it's memorabilia as much as it is holding on to things that I find relevant that most people might not.
I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.
To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I.
But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.
I wrote some weird magical realism stories that are probably on some hard drive somewhere, and if I ever uncover that hard drive, I'll burn it. I tried to do a little bit of writing while I was in Iraq, but it wasn't the really greatest space for creative production.
