‘Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / a brotherhood of man.” When John Lennon died, nine years after writing Imagine, the anthem for minimalism, he was living in a 430 sq metre apartment in the Dakota building in New York. He also owned three other apartments in the block, including one for storage, a large part of which was given over to the temperature-controlled care of his and Yoko’s furs.
But it is minimalism that is expensive now. If we look at the places John Pawson, the British architect generally credited as Mr Minimalism, designs for his private and institutional clients, they look distinctly expensive. Rather like Dolly Parton’s brilliant insight that “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, wags could reasonably say it costs a lot to have a house that looks that bare.
On the TV news recently, a single mother was interviewed in what appeared to be a completely bare room. It turned out that she had sold everything to pay the heating bills. There is a lot of recession irony hanging over the middle-class search for simplicity now. This century’s decluttering movement provoked a raft of cautionary documentaries on hoarders – mostly people who kept piles of completely worthless declasse things, such as KFC plates. By contrast, bourgeois declutterers headed for the sunlit uplands of purity, to ever greater triumphs of rejection: until recently, the big question in such circles was: could you scale down your house’s contents to 100 things?
“Less is more” has been a key theme of high-minded design reform since William Morris and the “sweetness and light” architects of the 1860s got going. Then, in the early 00s, along with the massive rise in the auction house prices of all things mid-century modern, Marie Kondo came into our lives. She had the huge advantage of an easily followed programme and a hint of all-purpose Zen feelgood – she had served as an attendant maiden at a Shinto shrine and now rebranded ancient wisdom in memorable ways. By 2019, she had moved to Los Angeles and founded an army of US declutterers.
All these urges for simplicity look increasingly odd in the light of the real shortages and empty supermarket shelves we face. If fashionable mid-mod repro is beginning to signal materialism and the landfill journey ahead, old stuff means recycling – inherited things and skip-rummaging and car-boot finds, all collected and collaged by the owner. (The weasel word for designers, incidentally, has been “eclectic”: if you added a safe bit of “low-rent fun” into your clients’ otherwise blandly expensive scheme, they would hopefully get the credit for originality and wit.)
A growing group of us, though, really like things, lots of them, and want to hang on to them, or at least give them to people we know. That is recycling for real. We think high-profile simplicity is the supermarket spirituality of the rich. Some of us think our things talk to each other when they are put together, the upcycled furniture and the car boot finds. And they give us something to talk about, obsessive observations on the history of taste – how did these plates ended up in the charity shop? (Which means, of course, that you have to have found them yourself.)
This kind of accumulation – knowing, informed clutter – passes all today’s tests: it’s relatively cheap; it keeps things from the knacker’s yard and landfill; and it is interesting, not in an Antiques Roadshow dates-and-makers way, but rather because, on your walls or on your shelves, it tells your own story about the modern world.
The former British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s hugely successful book and radio series A History of the World in 100 Objects dredged massive meanings from a range of things, grand and simple. In the same way, people who did collaging – gluing together the kind of scraps that feature in the houses of those problem hoarders – became increasingly important in 20th-century art. Those scraps, brought together by modern masters, such as Picasso and Georges Braque, are worth £20m or more now. So why not do it yourself?
• Peter York is a management consultant and broadcaster and is president of the Media Society
