New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003.
Owls Head is not just a lighthouse or rocky point in midcoast Maine. In Rosamond Purcell’s book, we experience it as a locus of transformation. Owls Head documents this place, the salvage yard of William Buckminster. Purcell, touring the area in 1981 while teaching a photography class in Rockport, recounts her first view of it. “On the road to the Owls Head lighthouse, we came across a colorful pile of lobster buoys, several weathered buildings, and then, high behind the old-growth trees, we saw it: jagged hills of scrap metal looming like glinting crests of water or like dismantled dinosaur parts. In heaps and mounds and prodigious hills the junk surged above us…It was the most covered ground I had ever seen.” With this kind of awe and lyricism, Purcell’s book describes her experiences over the last 20 years mining this uncharted terrain. Exploring this ever-changing and challenging landscape is rewarding for the author, who is an artist, photographer and writer. A cache of found objects inspires her. But even more she values the relationship with Buckminster. Purcell becomes his loyal customer, but most important, a friend. Her portrait gives us a resourceful, thoughtful, independent Yankee with an insatiable appetite for collecting castoffs. She appreciates Buckminster’s nurturance of this trove he calls a “conglomerate.”
What to make of this detritus? Purcell writes, “I had never seen so much stuff to which so much had happened.” Could it be a shrine, a reliquary honoring once-essential technology? Or a mad scientist’s laboratory where, in unfettered experiments, the elements of nature wreak havoc, transforming objects that had been precisely wrought and highly specific into something indefinable and unrecognizable? Maybe it’s a version of Eden where, released from the limits of a lifespan, eternal life seems possible. Or perhaps it’s limbo: obsolete and tired, rusty and rotted has-beens await oblivion. Could it be a science experiment to observe the slow but steady march of time, the inevitability of decay, the triumph of decomposition? Perhaps this is a studio of possibility where nature is a kind of artist. Wasn’t there some vision, some deft touch as the vines weave, molds gild, and insects and rodents sculpt?
Buckminster began this “business of accumulation” in the early 1950s when he decided to stockpile and sell scrap metal. It seemed more a financial decision than a calling. Next, he acquired hundreds of discarded windows. Then he pursued small antiques and rags. The collection never lost its momentum of expansion after that. His wife Helen shared the buying and selling until her death in 1976. Buckminster’s premises are considered variously as an eyesore, a curiosity, a source of secondhand somethings, or even outsider art. Purcell comments, “His strategy as a merchant remains unclear to me.” He allowed browsing by visitors but resented the intrusion, offended by those who disparaged his wares and haggled over price. Purcell, an aficionado of the site, considered it as much a museum as a bazaar. She gradually gained admittance to all the nooks and crannies, and best of all, had Buckminster as a guide. So it was only natural Purcell in turn would guide Buckminster to some of her favorite collections of stuff. The pair toured the state historical collection in Augusta and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The latter is a place especially familiar and meaningful to Purcell; she collaborated with its noted scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, on several books featuring her photographs. Purcell considers herself and Buckminster “curators.” A list of possible names for her studio’s collection, culled from Owls Head, includes: Museum of Obsolete Tools, Museum of Wires, Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball, Museum of Natural Disasters, Museum of Failed Attempts, Museum of Bisected Objects, Museum of Corrosion. During that Massachusetts visit, Purcell shows Buckminster her studio for the first time. The resuscitated items rescued from Owls Head had been given artistic arrangement and interpretive possibilities. (A recent museum exhibition called “Two Rooms” presented Purcell’s recreated studio on display along with her found objects in smaller assemblages, reminiscent of the mid-twentieth century work of surrealist Joseph Cornell). Purcell describes the visit: “I knew that by taking Buckminster to the studio I was inviting him to inspect again his foundlings. Would he insist on taking them back? I needn’t have worried. Even as he crosses the threshold of the studio, he is saying that it is amazing…absolutely amazing. He relaxes, and although he recognizes many of his former wares, he exhibits possessiveness toward none of them. He does not behave as I do when I visit him, wandering and distracted, my desire for certain things masked as civil curiosity. He admires the contents of the room as though he has never seen anything like it before. ‘The garden club ought to see this,’ he says, and then, acknowledging the profound relationship between his place and mine, “I don’t suppose they’d appreciate it…here or in my yard.'”
At the book’s end, Purcell includes intriguing photographs of hers and notes to elaborate points in the text. You don’t have to collect junk or even like it to enjoy this book. It’s not just a story about “stuff.” There’s a subtext here implying that for everything there is both a purpose and intrinsic beauty, however obvious or not. If that’s true about junk, maybe it’s also true about people and their lives. We can learn from Purcell’s passion that contentment comes in unexpected ways; “…in the studio, I spend a lot of time gazing in a peaceful stupor, taking time out from the world of action…impotent before the world of things.” She and Buckminster may be sharing a secret with readers: the comfort of objects is a powerful thing.
Tina Cohen writes from Deerfield MA and Vinalhaven.