Currently Reading: Mongo: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha (2004) Bloomsbury
“Journalist Ted Botha became obsessed with mongo (defined as any discarded object that is retrieved) when he moved to New York. Decorating his apartment with the furniture and objects he found on Manhattan’s streets, he soon realized he wasn’t the only person finding things of value in the garbage, and he began meeting all kinds of collectors. Mongo is Botha’s remarkable record of his travels among these varied and eccentric people-an appropriately addictive tribute to this longtime, universal phenomenon.”
Mongo n. 1 [1970s +] (US) an idiot. 2 [1980s +] (Us, New York) any discard object that is retrieved. 3 [1980s +] (US, New York) a scrap-metal scavenger – The Cassell Dictionary of Slang (as published in Botha’s book).
Botha has sought out, met and investigated, interviewed and subsequently written about the mongo collectors of New York. Each chapter is a category or grouping of approaches and purposes of mongo finding, collecting, hoarding, dealing:
> The Pack Rats
> The Survivalists
> The Treasure Hunter
> The Anarchists
> The Visionaires
> The Dealer
> The Voyeur
> The Archaeologists
> The Preservationists
> The Cowboy
Selected phrases and quotes from this book:
p.20: Walter Benjamin once wrote that “for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”
p.144 [on Steven Dixon seeking out and dealing in discarded books]: What is value? For Billy Jarecki it’s something you impose. Value is personal judgement and has little to do with the object’s origin.
p.170 [on the relationship between psychosis and collecting]: The psychology of collecting is a little studied field, and even Freud, who himself collected art, stayed away from it.
p.197 “The difference between [privy] diggers and collectors [is that] we do this to uncover the past. Collectors do it to possess the past.”
p.204 [on the development of painting restoration machine] The Conservator has already been used on a Titian, a Caravaggio, the gates of Paradise at the Duomo, and Giotto’s Crucifix. Before them all, though, it was tested on a naval scene plucked out of the garbage on the Upper East Side of New York.
