him, but he’s always guided his collecting himself. This made it a little harder than it could have been early on, since there was no one to point him toward what was available—the more so since at the time he was based in San Francisco, far from the center of the art market. Fortunately, his focus has been very much on quality rather than quantity. His total number of objects roughly corresponds to the number of years he’s been collecting. He started well and has continued brilliantly. Gordon’s insistence on documentation goes beyond simple assurances of authenticity, although he concedes that this is an element. It stems from the time he spent in New Guinea, where he encountered artists working in the most primitive circumstance but who created great works of art that appeal both to their indigenous context as well as to our twenty-first-century aesthetics. The fact that someone who doesn’t have a formal understanding of mathematics could conceive of and execute something as dimensionally challenging as a malanggan figure is something he finds truly remarkable. As closely as possible, he likes knowing who, when, and where these remarkable artists were, and he is most interested in works that were created in a time when Western contact hadn’t lessened the magic of the art tradition in question. Even though the collection fits so beautifully into its environment, he doesn’t see it in any way as a unified whole but rather an accumulation of somewhat random elements brought to him by circumstance and the whims of market availability. Indeed, beyond any easily definable aesthetic criteria, the primary characteristic the objects share is that every piece can be demonstrated in some way or another to be old, often very old. One of the joys he takes from owning the pieces is in-depth provenance research. His professional work is quite demanding, but in what free time he does have he’s pursued a number of interesting historical threads on various objects. He found that three of his New Guinea objects appear in the 1913 Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910, II. Ethnographie: A. Melanesien (and he is pleased to be the only one ever to have checked out this rare book from the Yale library). Adrienne Kaeppler’s recent publication on the Holophusicon sparked a fascinating thread of research on his Tahitian gorget—the only one known to be in private hands—which we hope to elaborate upon in a future article. In the same vein, Gordon believes that his objects should be available to researchers and the interested public. As such, his pieces show up with some frequency in exhibitions and publications (including this one). He sees himself as their caretaker. He isn’t revealing specific plans
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