New Generation Thinkers: Hoarding or Collecting?

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vivian Maier left over 150,000 negatives when she died in 2009. Her boxes and boxes of unprinted street photographs were stacked alongside shoulder-high piles of newspapers in her Chicago home. The artist Francis Bacon's studio has been painstakingly recreated in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin complete with paint-spattered furniture and over 7,000 items. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester's research looks at ideas about waste and in this Essay he considers what the difference might be between hoarding and collecting and between the stuff assembled by these artists and his own father's shelves of matchday programmes.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Dr Diarmuid Hester is radical cultural historian of the United States after 1950, and he teaches on sexually dissident literature, art, film, and performance at the University of Cambridge. He has published a critical biography of Dennis Cooper called Wrong and you can find his Essay for Radio 3 about Cooper in the series Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf and his postcard about Derek Jarman's garden in the Free Thinking archives. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio.

Transcript

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0:27.5	out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:38.0	Hello, I'm Deermud Hester, and this edition of BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcast features my essay on hoarding.
0:47.6	Coming up after this.
0:49.3	Hello, I'm Catherine Tickel, and I'm here to tell you about Music Planet, Radio 3's weekly show covering
0:55.2	roots music from around the world. Now I know that's a pretty big category but it gives us
1:00.1	the opportunity to bring you an eclectic and varied range of music. Live sessions from some of the
1:05.9	biggest international names along with the latest emerging talent. We've got classic artists and new releases,
1:12.3	and of course our road trip feature, sampling the music and culture of different locations
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1:21.9	with local experts on the ground as your guide. Whether it's Marleyan blues, Indian classical,
1:27.1	or Colombian champetta, you'll hear it on Music Planet. Find us on BBC Sounds or on Radio 3 Saturdays at 4.
1:36.0	How many times have I returned in my dreams to this place? The house where I spent my youth, or misspent it.
1:48.0	A solid one-story building of ancient grey stone, squatting on a small hill, spread out before it, a wide fertile valley arrayed in shades of green,
1:57.0	the pastures of South East Ireland, smoothly undulating toward the banks of the River
2:02.7	Nor. I feel again the remoteness of the place, its seclusion. Looking out across the plain,
2:12.4	no more than a dozen homes dot the expanse. At night, you can count them easily, twinkling orange lights and the
2:20.5	vast black intervals in between. It's five miles from here to the nearest shop. All around us,
2:28.5	there's nothing but silence. A light breeze sounds like a roar as it blows through the trees.
	...

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