Our practical reason produces tools; homo habilis did it to the point of perfection. Technical design of objects hides the way of production. Handiwork or individuality disappears in favour of malleable materials and finished surfaces. These criteria make the collection of Vladimir Arkhipov even more exotic that is fascinating due to the cultural gap between highly industrial mass production and singular resourcefulness of a craftsman. “Born out of necessity”, that’s how the artist/collector names his thingamajigs which seem to be the most natural and practical things in the world, made for one purpose: to be used. Constructions of different components which had to be put to an unintended use to gain a new sense brought about constellations of rejected pieces whose absurdity could be described by Apollinaire´s picture of Surrealism: The meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. Appearing in a collection they are misappropriated again and the viewer who classifies them as artworks as they have become by the collecting artist is confronted with a specific kind of aesthetics. Being exhibits they change from customary to the extraordinary and even to meaningful things. Readymade gaining appreciation from the artist’s point of view is well known within art. But things within Arkhipov’s collection become archaeological objects and, with the disappearance of esteem, practical reusable things. While archaeology is usually practised vertically in time it is practised horizontally in this case. Some hundreds of kilometres apart from the inventors of thingamajigs, things that are used here as raw material are called waste. That means place and position are essential and significant for the readability and understanding of the find. Interviews with inventors or contemporary witnesses of their use reveal personalities whose abstruse inventions or ingenious ideas follow the imagination about missing things. They are imitated in striking resemblance or they are improvised in a completely alienated manner. The nearer to existing things they are, the more naïve their creators seem to be. On the other hand divergence which does not follow an existing form has the effect of geniality requiring the ability of abstraction. So, many of the collected things show the pleasure of invention and freedom reaching beyond the necessity of the objects making the step from reproduction into production. Should part of the collection be constructs or fictional objects pretending to have a story? Some descriptions might indicate this. And does the collector Arkhipov only find or does he also invent? Where is the border with fiction? Even Duchamp produced ready-mades, which means he faked them. The same is true for Via Lewandowski like many of the Fluxus artists who declared absurd objects to be consumer goods although they never were such things. Arkhipov won’t answer these questions about this possibility. After all, the finds lack a signature and he presents them as an expandable archive. What then assigns them to art? Unlike Kabakow’s work the inventor’s texts don’t seem to talk about art. So, what’s left are the fact of collecting and the character of non-art of the things. Should, considering the omnipresence of art, only things are art that don’t pretend to be? Art would actually have gone down to a naïve level which since the Renaissance at the latest has been unthinkable, as there is creating without regarding a recipient or buyer or other artworks at all. So Arkhipov is supposed to have a matter such as preserving memory through his archive and fascination of the viewer. But the external motive is only catalysing an internal movement. Like van Gogh who describes his stimulation in his diary: This morning I went to visit the place where street cleaners deliver waste. Oh my God! How beautiful this was! Tomorrow they will bring me some interesting things from this scrapheap, e. g. street lamps which are broken (…) and dented. This would be something for a H. C. Andersen fairytale, this heap of buckets, kettles, food boxes, tins, wires, streetlamps, pipes and stovepipes all thrown away by people. I think that’s what I will have in mind in my dreams tonight, for the artist this is paradise (Arthur Köpcke)