Marie Kondo Tidies the Art World
What if Nevelson and Calder hired her for consultations?
After I published my Postcard about cleaning out my closet, to my great delight a friend sent me two books on the subject. I’ve just finished the first, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It’s a neat, small book with smooth covers, nice to hold.
Kondo’s conversational first-person writing makes it easy to walk with her through her own and her clients’ experiences. It’s a piquant blend of what I think of as Japanese simplicity and American materialism.
By age five she was ready to offer her obsession with tidiness to a cluttered world. Our best teachers are highly focused on just one thing.
To aid you in creating order in your home, she has selected beautiful containers for sale on her website.
Kondo’s promise is inspiring, but I find her most fascinating as a writer.
Her flights of magic realism surprise me at every turn. Objects take offense but they can be placated. People take their places among the objects in their homes. She is a story teller. She sparks my imagination.
Are you ready? What if Kondo had written a novel instead of a how-to book?
In this novel a shy girl (as Marie was) grows up to be a home consultant (she did). But what if Mari (her real nickname) had started out in New York City in the late 1930’s? What a great place to practice organizing people’s possessions in small spaces! It’s the Depression and tidying is unheard of, but Mari goes about creating a method worthy of a capital “M”.
One evening Mari meets the still unknown Louise Nevelson at a gallery opening. Louise looks down at Mari through her black eyelashes (later to be famous) and confides, “Kondo, I keep collecting all this stuff I adore but I can’t figure out how to make art out of it.”
Mari says, “I have only two rules, Louise. Store all items of the same type in the same place and don’t scatter storage space. Your life will change.” Louise asks Mari to come look at her studio on 30th Street and tidy it up.
Details follow (read the book), and Mari designs some storage boxes for Louise’s collections. You can buy them on her website.
Thus Louise Nevelson discovers boxes and the rest is art history. Around that time New York is taking over from Paris as the capital of the art world and Nevelson gets her own show.
Nevelson raves to her friends about Mari Kondo, who from then on is in demand by famous artists. Later Mari uses a pen name to write a best seller about what she finds in their studio wastebaskets and in their private closets.
In the book, Alexander “Sandy” Calder (or perhaps it’s his wife, Louisa) hires Mari to come consult about his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut.
By now Mari knows how to simplify the needs of complex people. When she leaves, Sandy will apply her KonMari Method with the same precision he uses in soldering his mobiles. He will not rebound back into chaos.
Below, Calder has finally found the materials he was looking for and put together an impressive artwork. He seems at peace in his newly organized space.
This imagined book of mine is a page-turner. But it’s really about how “one of the magical effects of tidying is confidence in your decision-making capacity,” and I have the real Marie Kondo to thank for that.
I love your flight of fantasy! I'm sure there is a ripple effect in the ways that we ALL influence one another, whether we realize it or not...indeed that may be the medium of our immorality...