Out of time: Collecting with Norman Brosterman

Although them is a surprisingly sizable subculture of serious gleaners, pickers and dealers in the New York area flea market, antiques & auction circuit, them is no one quite like Norman Brosterman, Jack-of-all-tradesman, one-of-a-kind collector, author, independent curator, cultural historian and, last but not least, dealer. This 49 year-old former architect and artist has found a way to combine his personal obsession-collecting-with an unusually adroit cultural intelligence and savvy business instinct.

Over the last 15 years, Brosterman has been making hay out of the following formula: first, he discovers a vein of unrecognized and undervalued social or cultural treasures. Second, he forms a coherent collection, the broader, fresh context of which yields untold, forgotten or repressed narratives with social, historical or artistic resonance. Third, if possible, he exhibits the collection at a museum, accompanied by a book which he researches and authors. Finally, Brosterman sells his collection, preferably for a stratospheric figure to a wealthy institution or individual. But the profit from Brosterman's shrewd collecting skills obviously exceeds the pecuniary rewards. Like what Mark Twain said about not letting your schooling get in the way of your education, one can learn more about a culture by studying its unsorted debris at the flea market than from the official histories told by most museums.

Brosterman's most recent endeavor is Out of lime. Designs for the Twentieth Century Future, a book documenting his collection of 60 fantastic and frequently zany, speculative designs for an imaginary future. Although most of these maquettes by science fiction and other pulp Illustrators were typically thrown away or lost over the years, Brosterman managed to salvage a piece of cultural history and a body of substantial, original art. "99% of all architectural drawings, Illustration art, theater design, industrial design and advertising art," Brosterman estimates, "is thrown in the trash."

To unearth these and other lost treasures, Brosterman spends his days sitting through flea markets and local auctions, comic book and science fiction conventions, antique newspapers and so forth. He even hired a private detective in Vermont to track down ancestors of one of the artists who created these neglected, forgotten or lost designs.

If collecting is sometimes a means by which we recover and make sense of the lost past, this collection represents a different kind of nostalgia: It bears witness instead to "a collective memory of the future." Bringing together past traces of the imaginary potential of the future, Brosterman registers a variety of 20th century hopes and anxieties spurred by automation and the unprecedented speed with which technology evolved. The widespread dissemination of these images was also made possible, as Brosterman notes, by technological advances In the processes of had-tone printing and the manufacturing of cheap pulp paper, both of which were invented around 1884.

During the 20th century, we arrived at the frontier of the future at break-neck speed. Brosterman's collection gives graphic expression to the radical social and cultural rifts that Modernity promised and threatened. Some of these futuristic designs, of course, became familiar sci-fi typologies, the kind most American babyboomers grew up watching In mostly later, television rehashings: streamlined space rockets (Buck Rogers), Flying saucers (Lost In Space), floating cities (The Jetsons) and so on.

But if Brosterman's collection focuses on popular designs appearing in mostly pulp mediums, he steers clear of the more kitschy redeployments. When asked why there are no Buck Rogers or Star Trek designs in his collection Brosterman responded: "Too Pop, not enough culture."

One could say that what Brosterman has assembled is a record of popular imagination. These speculative visual tableaux are drawn or painted, of course, by some of the most significant science fiction illustrators of the last century, notably Alexander Leydenfrost and Chesley Bonestell. As such, these Images reflect mostly the hopeful, utopian myths of technological progress but also the anxiety-laden, dystopian visions of destroyed metropolises and nuclear catastrophe.

Brosterman is also interested, however, in the relationship between these illustrations and actual 20th century designs. In the late 1920s, for example, sci-fi rocket ship imagery frequently mirrored streamlined automobile design. Not surprisingly, Leydenfrost and Bonestell also worked in architecture and industrial design, respectively. Bonestell's remarkable draftsmanship gained him work on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler building; Leydenfrost studied aerodynamics and wind tunnel testing, designing one of the first streamlined, rear-engine, teardrop-shaped automobiles in 1927. Leydenfrost also worked on the General Motors "Futurama" pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair. (Brosterman organized the travelling exhibition and catalogue, Drawing the Future: Design Drawings for the 1939 World's Fair for the Museum of the City of New York in 1996.)