Have you ever thought that no collection is being put together about us, the people of today, and that as a consequence we will not be represented in the museums of the future? Has anyone preserved samples of toilet paper of the last decade, has anyone deemed necessary to gather the heaps of printer-multiplied flyers handed out in the street, advertising one-star restaurants where you can have a five-star dinner, and free of charge at that, or foolproof methods of losing weight which may also help you fill out if you're underweight, or western-sized salaries offered just for nice looks? Out of carelessness, snobbery, or mere ignorance, we let the future memory of the present time perish. Modern museums were born from the curios collections of the 17th century. In today's Romania, some village museums still exhibit an occasional stuffed parrot, or coconut, or even an old Vogue issue, "inherited from the former schoolmistress." The ancestors' collections, whether they treasured bizarre objects or preserved familiar items turned useless in time, were actually fighting the death of a world. The impulse to gather, even things without any practical value, but holding God knows what contents of affective memory, appears spontaneously as early as childhood; it is usually amplified, guided, and encouraged by parents. Children's collections gradually become the object of constant pursuit, an exercise of concentration, selection, development of the sense of shape and color, of order – briefly, of knowledge. The collections made for, then by children themselves, generate a feeling of individual usefulness and achievement and stimulate communication. I know the story of a collection of key-operated toys started in the late 1970s by an autistic boy. One could still buy then painted iron toys manufactured in the socialist countries. The collection started out with a Hungarian game of racing cars with keys, and continued with Soviet robots and a Romanian motorcyclist. In the 1980s one could still find, in Bucharest book-and-toy-stores, animals and birds, all hopping in the same way, Romanian and Chinese, which one had to accept without a paw or the key, with a peeled-off muzzle, or even with a broken spring, if one craved for them. If one was lucky enough to chance upon a working toy, it could hardly be a new model. The child-collector's obsession then determined him to look for series of the same model, but in different colors. After the 1989 Revolution, when his parents began to travel to the West on business, they launched into a hunt for sophisticated key toys. During coffee breaks at congresses, or instead of socializing professionally at cocktails, they went from store to store after new models. They soon learned that the consumerist society was giving up key toys. Moreover, unless one appreciated the new plastic contraptions, lively colored, working on batteries, whose ON button one only had to press to see them moving endlessly, one was considered slightly primitive, or merely weird. These electric toys bore various, mysterious graphical signs indicating that they had CEU certification, that it was not allowed to put them into your mouth, into water or fire, and especially that, as soon as the child (whose age had to be in accordance with the indications) destroyed them, they had to be disposed of only as non-biodegradable waste. To sum up, after 1990, in civilized Europe there were only very cheap, mass-manufactured, gadget-like key toys left: you wound them up, had fun, and after using them a few times, they broke up and you threw them away. The boy's collection acquired thus the value of a forbidden thing. Each new acquisition was viewed, then carefully stored in closed spaces to prevent dirtying, and shown only on very special occasions. At the same time, the evolution of the key toy collection gradually turned into a palpable proof of globalization, with its pluses and minuses – the plus being the fact that one can find at one's street corner shop the same models as in any European department store, and the minus that one can no longer bring a souvenir toy from one's trips. You can't prove the plane flew you farther than the corner of your street. To be fair, we must admit that, in western countries, there are also chic, expensive boutiques where one can find, at prohibitive prices, key toys from the period of Louis XVIII or Stalin (sic!). But even in their case, if one travels enough, one notices that both the marquise dressed in a hoop skirt with a greyhound at her feet and the Soviet soldier from Stalingrad ignore boundaries, being multiplied on and on. As his collection grew, the boy saw himself compelled to organize it in categories. He started with the categories From Santa Claus, From the Easter Bunny, From Mom, For My Birthday, and so on. They were followed by the categories Rather Red, Rather Yellow, Rather Black, etc. Then he passed on to Animals, Children, Cars, Planes, etc. He tried a geographic classification: Romanian, Russian, Chinese, but when it reached the western ones, it came to a dead-end: all were made in the CEU. Finally, he had to stick to Musical, For Water, For Transport, Broken. Without any chance of further growth, the key toy collection speaks now not only about the recent past or the present, but also about the future…
by Ioana Popescu
