The collector/artist/hoarder has made a national name for himself with his extensive collection of…stuff
The evidence lies in the attention garnered from a one-man show at The Lab at Belmar back in 2008 (now merged with the Museum of Contemporary Art – Denver), entitled “The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick.” There, Novick, then 39, put on display nearly half of the more than 10,000 items in his collection.
The exhibit – which included a written list of the items on one wall, a photo of each item on another wall, a third wall of cubby holes, and additional bins in the center of the room – was among the best attended shows in the history of the gallery.
Novick’s collection includes Dukes of Hazzard placemats, a jar full of “cereal dust” (the final remnants of various brands of cereal, collected over 10 years), the head of a goose in a jar of formaldehyde, a clown sake set, and one of the most troubling collections of Barbie dolls and accessories around, including a “disabled” Barbie-like doll, complete with wheelchair.
Some people collect beer cans. Others save concert ticket stubs. Still others have every comic book they’ve ever read or purchased. But Andrew Novick has a collection that borders on the absurd in its breadth, depth and shear wackiness.
BIKE CITY: When you save them, do you consciously say to yourself, “I’m going to save this,” and put it in a place and add it to a list and catalog it? How does that work?
ANDREW NOVICK: To date I’ve never had catalogs of anything. It’s just, “oh, this is cool. I’m going to save it.” If I’m lucky, I know where that stuff is and I’ll take those newly acquired matches and put them with the other matches. So I have thematic areas, but a lot of times they just get saved.
BC: You save these things as a tangible way for you to recall an incident, a show, a place you’ve been, a meal you had, or just some novelty piece – when you put all this together and saw it together for the first time, did it make a different kind of sense to you?
AN: Seeing how the curators organized it – they kind of had to decide, or get to the bottom of all this stuff – it was really cool to see it, because it was all my stuff in someone else’s context. It was cool to see because that was the most organized it’s ever been.
BC: So has anything in your exhibit made you recall something you had forgotten about?
AN: Everything is so rich in context, in and of itself; I saved it for a reason. There are things someone gave me 15 years ago and I remember the person who gave it to me a lot of times or the day they gave it to me. I looked through hundreds of concert tickets and it was like a quick recall of all those events. It really does jog a lot of memories.
Novick works as an electrical engineer by day and was once the front man for a punk-ish band, the Warlock Pincers, back in the 1990s. What follows is an interview with the man who collects everything.
BC: You’ve been collecting this stuff for how long?
AN: I would say probably about 25 years or more. It’s not that it was a decision like, “I’m going to start collecting something.” I realize that, looking back at it, I have ticket stubs and concert tickets and movie tickets from the early ’80s. So there wasn’t really a conscious start date.
BC: Do you save with a theme in mind or do you save things for a specific purpose?
AN: I save stuff that I find interesting. Which is almost everything. I find something interesting in lots of things…I could never get rid of anything that looks cool, or I wouldn’t have a problem.
BC: When you save them, do you consciously say to yourself, “I’m going to save this,” and put it in a place and add it to a list and catalog it? How does that work?
AN: To date I’ve never had catalogs of anything. It’s just, “oh, this is cool. I’m going to save it.” If I’m lucky, I know where that stuff is and I’ll take those newly acquired matches and put them with the other matches. So I have thematic areas, but a lot of times they just get saved.
BC: You save these things as a tangible way for you to recall an incident, a show, a place you’ve been, a meal you had, or just some novelty piece – when you put all this together and saw it together for the first time, did it make a different kind of sense to you?
AN: Seeing how the curators organized it – they kind of had to decide, or get to the bottom of all this stuff – it was really cool to see it, because it was all my stuff in someone else’s context. It was cool to see because that was the most organized it’s ever been.
BC: So has anything in your exhibit made you recall something you had forgotten about?
AN: Everything is so rich in context, in and of itself; I saved it for a reason. There are things someone gave me 15 years ago and I remember the person who gave it to me a lot of times or the day they gave it to me. I looked through hundreds of concert tickets and it was like a quick recall of all those events. It really does jog a lot of memories. It’s pretty cool, too, people have come to this exhibition and seen stuff that they gave me. So it is reminiscent for them, too. And they’ve seen a lot of this stuff throughout the years when I got it. So for them it was kind of a retrospective of memories. Check out what Andrew Novick’s up to now: http://www.isaveeverything.com
