Clocked

‘All collections are political’. That was the American artist Fred Wilson in his exhibition Mining the museum. More contentiously, ‘Possessiveness, when it appears as a symptom, is always a secondary phenomenon of anxiety.’ That was the English psychoanalyst D W Winnicott. These thoughts are here to introduce you to a couple of startling exhibitions on the business of collecting. The first is The Keeper, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, which has just opened in New York at the New Museum. At its center is Ydessa Hendeles’s Teddy Bear project (more Teddys than you could possibly imagine). We once saw it installed alongside another artwork from her collection (not a teddy bear this time), Maurizio Cattelan’s Him, a miniature figure of Hitler at prayer. The New York Times took the opportunity offered by The Keeper to ask its readers what they collect. The responses are here including one guy who collects photographs of men in lines. And this brings us to the second exhibition and one of our favourite collectors, the artist Patrick Pound. He is showing his work Documentary Intersect at the Adam Art Gallery, opening tonight. A highlight of the show is a set of around 30 postcards of the same floral clock that Pound has patiently assembled over the years. Incredibly, each card is in fact a different photograph of the same clock and, even more remarkably, each one shows a different time. Eat your heart out Christian Marclay.

Image Pat Pound installing his exhibition at the Adam art Gallery