Art Heals: Clutter

I have a yin yang relationship to clutter. I have moved house, (and often countries) 14 times, and each time as I pack I dream of a Zen existence in which I possess nothing but one exquisite vase and a closet of all white garments. But once I was settled again, I moved from room to room looking at the 10,000 books and walls of artwork and cabinets full of dishes for every dinner party color scheme and drawers of craft fair jewelry and…you get the idea. These are not clutter, these are collections. But where you stand depends on where you sit, and right now I am sitting in a three room apartment and my stand on clutter is well, evolving. When we first moved here from a largish house (two floors and more rooms than I could serially enter in a week), we pledged to live, if not my Zen ideal, at least lean and mean. One thing in, one thing out, was to be our mantra. We had donated most of the books, given some of the artwork to appreciative new homes (I did go and personally vet each one before approving placement), and sold the majority of the dishes (anticipating fewer dinner parties and more restaurant dinners). I kept the jewelry. But inevitably, stasis is followed by mutability. For my part, I had a spacious office to go to, and it became a repository for the detritus necessary for my creativity. Upon having to leave this sanctuary due to Covid, I took with me the most precious bits (meaning most of it) and crammed it into previously undiscovered spaces in that three room apartment. (Under the bed.) And secondly, I have a partner in isolation, who believes in existentialism, to wit, that society (me) should not restrict an individual’s (his) choices and thus the development of his potential. This manifests in very very neat piles of papers on every flat surface. So, clutter creep. The quarantine conditions didn’t help. My previously curated kitchen counters took on the look of the stock room at Safeway, despite my valiant attempts to display the Pringles cans in an artistic tower. Cleaning products, toilet paper, masks, latex gloves—the more things I had to corral, the more things I needed to corral them. My things got things. Corona clutter was invading my organized world, and I resented it, but felt helpless to do anything about it. But time went by, as time tends to do, even in the age of corona. Strangely, the piles around me started to look cosy, and comforting. Was I nesting, knowing I had enough—enough of whatever mysterious amount of stuff was sufficient to make me feel safe? Joseph Ferrari, who studies the psychological impact of clutter at DePaul University in Chicago, describes home as a foundation for identity, “an extension of our selves, a living archive of memory.” We function differently in our homes now. The little collections on our tables, the art on our walls, the food in our fridges, all of it now acts as a remembrance of things past, and surety for the future. We spend a lot of time in our spaces now, so we really look at them, and what we see can give us comfort. So go ahead and curate your Zoom background as you invite strangers into your home but remember that all of it is a reflection of your lived experience. Be proud of your clutter. After all, you are the one who brought it in. My favorite kind of clutter by Adnan Charara.