In doing so, she is indicating a particular relationship between herself and the objects which find themselves arranged, manipulated, and re-positioned within her exposition -- a relationship which differs from that of the "collector."
The collector categorizes the objects of his/her obsession into a particular rubric (that of the collection: i.e. stamps, coins, even boxes) and, as such, robs them of their complex and individualistic histories of production and consumption. The collector turns these objects into a fetish, limiting their identity to the relational, in terms of how they can be compared, contrasted, and valued. The collection operates through mimicry and repetition. Three or four coins do not constitute a collection; hundreds do. As Third-Century Roman coins, or whatever the relevant category, they are commensurate, fungible, interchangeable, and eventually trade-able.
They differ only in terms of the particular characteristics as defined by the category: place and date of minting, quality of craftsmanship, wear and tear, etc.
In this process, the complex and overdetermined nature of the objects collected is reduced to a limited number of qualities by which they can be compared. This is the nature of the fetish.
In describing herself as a "collectionist," Mina is seeking to make a break from this fetishistic operation of the collector.
The collectionist, as she conceives it, simultaneously embraces the overdetermined quality of the objects collected, and seeks to liberate them from it. This is accomplished by introducing a third party, the collectionist, into the object-collection equation.
The collectionist brings the object into the collection not according to the pre-defined categories of the collection, but according to qualities which the collectionist him/herself establishes in and through the process of collecting.
As such, the objects' own overdetermined histories come to define the nature of the collection, rather than being erased by the categories of collecting. Moreover, in choosing and organizing such a collection, the collectionist imbues it with a sense of individuality, and re-positions the objects in relationship to this individuality.
Collecting, in this sense, is an act of self-creation for the collectionist.
One is reminded of Utz, Bruce Chatwin's tragicomic figure, whose collection of porcelain figurines provides an alternate, subversive life in an otherwise drab existence in communist Czechoslovakia. The exhibition before us similarly bears the hallmark of Ms. Rubino's life-spirit. It is just about her.
Further, if Ms. Rubino refuses to fetishize her objets trouvés, she simultaneously liberates them from their overdetermined nature in bringing them to the public sphere, in transforming them into objets d'art.
In their displacement from the settings of production and consumption, to the private collection, to the public exhibition, the objects undergo a profound transformation.
If in the collection their individual qualities coalesce into a superordinate identity as determined by the collectionist, in the public space of the exhibition hall they shed this new identity and open themselves up to a multiplicity of possible identifications.
In the frame of the gallery, the objects, regardless of their origins and manipulations, become art, or, more precisely, artistic representations. This is a process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, and hence the work of the unheimlich, the uncanny. The displacement of the domestic objects in Mina's collection -- boxes, bed sheets, jars, toys, letters -- constitutes an uprooting, a déracinement, a de-domestication, as it were. Their miniature form shifts the focus from their mimesis (mimicked repetition) of domestic reality to their parody of it.
Their unusual arrangement and size disturbs the spectators, as they simultaneously associate and disassociate them from their ur-forms.
In this interaction with the exhibition, as mediated by the uncanny, the voyeur re-creates the objects anew, retrospectively postulating their origins and manipulations.
Liberated from their actual overdetermined histories, the objects on display thus gain a new singular unity for the voyeur -- as objets d'art.
What this process indicates is that the exhibited collection necessarily surpasses the intentions of the collectionist.
Mina's exhibit seeks to explore notions of intimacy through a display of collected, individualized objects purportedly originating from the intimate space of domesticity and, in some cases, that of the bedroom. This origin is further intuited through the inclusion of photographs of Ms. Rubino, thus reinforcing the equivalence between the individuality of the collection and the individuality of the collectionist.
Such a juxtaposition posits the viewer as a voyeur, peering through the glass tabletops into the intimate scenes of Miriam Rubino's life.
However, such a vision of intimacy remains forever blurred and incomplete. The voyeur's gaze is mediated by the collectionist's manipulation of the objects present in the latter's own conscious performance of identity.
In other words, Mina is both the subject and object of her self-presentation, of her own mise-en-scène. Moreover, her own relation to her intimacy belies that of ambivalence: her exhibits are disjointed; her photographs are blurred and cropped in an act of self-censorship.
The voyeur's fantasy (phatasme) of penetrating Miriam Rubino's intimate life is thus interrupted and frustrated. Protecting a shattered ego, s/he can only recoil and re-interpret the exhibited scenes in the abstract, in terms of the art world enframed within the gallery.
And as such, Mina's own aim of public self-exploration is likewise already always denied. An intimate public, no matter how small, can never in the end be intimate.
