Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Handcuffs
One of the exhibits at the Museum of Broken Relationships in LA. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships Los Angeles
One of the exhibits at the Museum of Broken Relationships in LA. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships Los Angeles

A museum devoted to the wreckage of lost love

This article is more than 7 years old
People who have gone through a breakup or lost a loved one can submit mementos to the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles

In one display case is a pair of sculpted, pink fake breasts, donated by a woman whose husband made her wear them during sex: they were “of course, larger than mine … they turned him on … I left him”. Nearby, a blue frisbee, once of great sentimental value, is accompanied by the words: “Darling, should you ever get a ridiculous idea to walk into a cultural institution like a museum for the first time in your life, you will remember me.” In another glass cabinet, a diamond ring has the short, clever caption: “s(he) be(lie)ve(d)”.

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles exhibits the wreckage of lost love. On show are everyday objects submitted by ordinary people who have gone through a breakup or lost a loved one – the jilted and bitter, the nostalgic, the relieved. It is a collection of personal mementoes that permits a voyeuristic glimpse into a very private realm. The most mundane tokens – a watch, a bottle opener, a Zippo lighter – take on a strong emotional charge.

Next to each item are a few words written by the anonymous donor. They have a compressed power a bit like a short story: “I spent an entire summer making this birthday present, and he left it in my car”; or “You … did not want to sleep with me. I realised how much you loved me only after you died of Aids”. Some are little narratives of failed promise: “We met at a bar in NY; I lived in LA. 3 drinks, 2 poems, 1 walk later, we had sex on his friend’s couch … We saw the northern lights, but they were not as bright and vibrant as we thought they would be.”

The Museum of Broken Relationships was originally conceived in 2006 by two Croatian artists who, having split up, were about to throw out the detritus of their love affair – the small gifts, the photos – but decided that their time together should instead be celebrated. They opened premises in Zagreb in 2010 and now their collection has a second permanent home in LA. What better location than the heart of Hollywood – where dreams are supposed to come true but so often don’t and where shining new stories turn out to be full of tawdry cliches? Equally fitting, it has opened on the Hollywood Boulevard site of an iconic lingerie shop that went bankrupt.

An axe to grind? … An exhibit from the original museum in Zagreb. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships

A few of the “greatest hits” from Zagreb are included in the opening exhibition, though not the axe that a woman used to chop up her partner’s furniture, before neatly arranging the fragments into small heaps for her former lover to take away. Or the jar of “love incense” captioned simply: “Doesn’t work.” Or the “toaster of vindication”, explained by the gleeful words: “I took the toaster. How are you going to toast anything now?”

But the LA museum has more than enough of its own compelling tales: some are rueful, some heart-rending; many offer a glimpse into the unknown interior of relationships. An alliance in Montreal that lasted 18 months is memorialised by a piece of belly button fluff. The text reads: “D’s stomach had a particular arrangement of body hair that made his belly button prone to collecting lint. Occasionally, he’d extract a piece and stick it to my body, sweaty after sex. One day … I met his oddity with my own; I put the lint in a small bag and concealed it away in the drawer of my bedside table.”

Having been sent the fluff, the museum staff had to provide special conservation instructions: “Because the submission is organic in nature, be sure to package it correctly.” There is a handful of pubic hair, too, and a Brazilian Playboy collection a boyfriend stored at his ex’s place and failed to pick up (“I would love to see this on display since it shows how silly a man can get over some nude pics”), though the curators draw the line at body fluids, which have been offered but turned down.

The for-profit Los Angeles museum was first dreamed of last year when a local lawyer, John B Quinn, visited the Zagreb collection on a family holiday and was struck by the complex emotions it generated. He determined that “more people should see this”, and began a process of licensing the name, and finding staff and a location close to home.

Since 2006, the collection put together by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić has been on tour to 33 cities in 21 countries, and has been growing all the time as more pieces are submitted along the way. Earlier this year, an appeal was made to heartbroken Californians: “Unburden the emotional load. Don’t throw away the debris of your romantic exploits – give it to us.”

Submissions poured in, according to the museum’s director Alexis Hyde, from California and all over the world, and a process of sifting began. The items sent usually have not very much physical value, but are “the kind of things that people talk about saving in a fire, that can’t be replaced, things with a lot of emotional heaviness to them,” she says.

For assistant director Amanda Vandenberg, the most successful totems are those that “transport you into a specific experience – that’s what will make the audience identify with a story the most”. What’s more, “in a world where our lives are increasingly digital … we can’t help but treasure these instances of tangible ephemera.”

A four-year relationship based in Austin, Texas, is recollected with a set of used, black emery boards. “My late husband Chad was a creative, spirited soul,” the text says. “He was also very self-destructive. He used to bite and gnaw on his cuticles until they ached and bled, and then would file them down further with emery boards. It was a true compulsion and he would do it everywhere: in public, while watching TV, even while riding in my car. It drove me crazy, and I was always asking him to stop it. Some of his self-destructive habits led indirectly to his early death at 42, and I miss him so much, every day.”

I also like the simplicity of the small heap of dried contact lenses, from Oberlin, Ohio, with the terse memo: “I continued to save them, curled up, on my own bedside table.” And it’s hard not to fall for the big blue dinosaur piñata. “This is the first birthday present my ex-boyfriend gave me. I’ve tried to throw it away multiple times, but it looks so sad sitting next to the trash.”

“You never really know what you’re going to open when you get the package,” Vandenberg has said, in relation to a pair of silicone implants, which in the display case look like transparent Yorkshire puddings. Telling a story of a demanding partner and multiple operations, their donor is resentful but defiant: “I finally decided to have the implants removed to reclaim my own natural body, and to close the door on any leftover influence that ex had on my life. What a beautiful send-off for these two lumps of silicone that caused me so much pain.”

Without the stories, the objects would most often be nothing. As Vištica has pointed out, “We turned the convention of classical museums upside down.” Unlike traditional galleries, where the labels provide a small amount of supporting factual background, in the Museum of Broken Relationships, the “text next to the object carries the excitement, the enjoyment and the emotion”.

The LA museum refrains from teasing out any distinctive national styles of expressing heartbreak, stressing more the universality of having to cope with the end of a relationship, and the sense of connection felt when encountering the objects. Visiting the display is based on “a shared experience”, Quinn tells me. It’s not only schadenfreude but solidarity: “Everyone encounters disappointments. Nobody is alone.” Hyde talks of a “journey as honest and relatable as it is cathartic and promising”. She believes that the display can give a hopeful message to those tangled up in blue: after all, those who have given the relics “have survived and lived to tell the tale. We can too.”

Who hasn’t got keepsakes or legacies of past relationships? (My wife, for whatever reason, has kept a green, three-eyed Toy Story alien given to her by a highly sophisticated former lover; our kids are fond of it.) Who isn’t nostalgic for the intensity of their first love? One label in the LA show reads: “We ran hot for two years, laying naked in bed for twelve hours a day, doting and dwelling on each other’s perfection. It was pure bliss for a 20-year-old.”

The LA curators highlight the exhibition’s therapeutic qualities. In Quinn’s words: “We don’t want visitors leaving the building saddened and depressed.” The final space in the exhibition hits a more uplifting tone, says Hyde. A burnt piece of a letter is captioned: “You helped me heal in more ways than you can possibly know. We desperately need more people with your character and courage.”

There is perhaps less humour and irreverence in the LA exhibits than in the previous shows. I miss the caption on the suspender belt, bought in Sarajevo: “I never put them on. The relationship might have lasted longer if I had.” And the G-string made of sweets, tagged: “After four years, he turned out to be as shabby as his presents.”

An ‘I love you’ teddy bear. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships

But the collection is very effective at including different types of relationship gone wrong. A gaudy religious icon is accompanied by the words: “In a misguided if well-intentioned gesture, I was baptised a Christian by my parents. It took me 15 years to be able to break that forced relationship.” There are a pair of jeans worn by a husband and father very badly injured by a motorbike crash: “He is still here, but I have had to learn how to live with a broken relationship, a one-sided relationship.” Also included is a fake-gold charm bracelet alongside the affecting words of an abandoned daughter, a “souvenir from the best and the worst holiday of my life. Disney World 1977. You stood at the entrance and promised to bring us back there one day. Mum told you not to make promises you can’t keep. I have given up trying to make sense of your rejection of your two little girls.”

There are about 120 exhibits at the museum – enough, the organisers think, for full submersion but not so many that repetition or exhaustion kicks in. The leopard-print carpet and red velvet dressing rooms of the old lingerie store have been replaced with gleaming art-gallery whiteness, the gift shop is fully stocked, and in the days before opening, intrigued passersby were rattling the doors, eager to get in.

About 90,000 people visit the Zagreb collection every year – probably as many as walk down the touristy Hollywood Boulevard each week. On the pavement right outside the LA museum are some of the terrazzo and brass stars of the ever-popular Hollywood Walk of Fame (in this case, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Hanna-Barbera). Most of those strolling past must at some point have been torn apart by love. Or are perhaps on the look-out for a more unusual LA story. So Quinn’s hopes are high. And his own emotional history? He has, he says, “never had a broken relationship in his life”. Lucky him.

The Museum of Broken Relationships is at 6751 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, California.

To donate an object, visit brokenships.la/donate-an-exhibit

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed