- Venue
- Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange
- Location
- South West England
The art of objects : a review of Exquisite Trove, (House of Fairytales at Newlyn Art Gallery, 23rd July- 2nd October), and the art of everyday, found and historical objects.
There is something about a cache of mysterious objects, that seems to make our childhood minds operate again. There is an excitement that arrives with an unknown object.
Hadrian Piggott
Found objects as art have a long, and interesting history from Surrealism and DaDa to the conceptualism of the 60s. Providing cheap and available material for artists, objects once removed from their original usage, or combined and sited in surprising ways, are magically transformed.
Discarded idiosyncratic, worn, and memory laden, everyday and historical objects are social and cultural artefacts that are psychoanalytic, iconographic, semiotic, symbolic, socio-historical ….and much more. Artists have been quick to see not only powerful personal symbolism, but also institutional and cultural critique in their use. Broodthaer’s conceptual museum Department of Eagles, set up in Brussels in 1968, played with the classification, and categorisation of objects. The Tate Britain’s recent show Classified dealt with similar discourses around what objects can mean,
‘how we see the world is how we understand it. Things are seen in relationship to other things and actions. Connections are made, naming takes place and meaning is formulated. …’
Yet instead of suggesting that objects can be understood according to an order imposed (‘classification’), ‘The meanings and names given to things are not fixed, but instead fluid.'(www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=1&showid=2499, 22/12/09)
A projected joint ‘object’ project between the British Museum, and the BBC was announced last year. An ‘unprecedented partnership’ (Guardian, 26th Nov 2009), this grand collaboration constructed a history of the world using 200 objects collected from 2 million years of history. Curators working in new ‘connected’ ways intend to ‘assemble order, and meaning through ‘core objects’ and present them to diverse audiences in order to understand history’.
The curation of art shows around Britain (and equally museum shows that incorporate art and artists), and the way in which they designate meaning in the choice of everyday objects they display, seemingly play with David Crow’s dictum ‘where there is choice there is meaning’.
Exquisite Trove at Newlyn Art gallery, is a House of Fairytales edition in this vein. HoF is on-going project, which is described as a ‘rolling’ rather than ‘touring’ show, as each incarnation is different. Deborah Curtis and Alice Herrick had asked Hadrian Piggott to contribute as an artist something of importance or particular value to himself. Hadrian saw the possibilities for amalgamating this with already proposed show with Newlyn using artefacts from the West Cornwall museums.
Whilst admitting that he was interested in categories, or classification, Pigott and the other curators clearly wanted to ‘invent’, and ‘confuse easy categorizations’, to make audiences work harder to make their own sense of it. Their intention was to create a magical mayhem for the public that would not dictate meaning but allow imaginative play, and allow for the creation of stories. Each of the HoF shows use a folk museum aesthetic, a pantheon of artists’ names, and a fanfare of events, to encourage such imaginings. Exquisite Trove added to this recipe, with a range of inanimate objects plundered (well, selected and actually rather generously lent), from local museums, in addition to selected artists’ objects.
The process of selection by curators Hadrian Piggott, Alice Herrick, Tim Shaw, Alex Smirnoff, Blair Todd and Cornelia Parker, fitted the idea of freedom from the classification and ordering that for museums is understood to be de rigueur. Piggott described the process as ‘extremely loose. Museums tend not to have this freedom, and so the random juxtaposition of like and unlike items is a rare thing’. When selected objects arrived at Newlyn Art Gallery, they were intentionally jumbled up, ‘coming across items in a haphazard way, led to odd resonances between objects and ideas’. Blair Todd, Alice Herrick, and Hadrian Piggott, made final selections, and juxtaposed the objects in the final exhibition placement.
One of Piggott’s selected objects, a belemnite fossil, he describes as
‘hover[ing] between the imagination of childhood and the knowledge of adulthood’,
and like a metaphor for the show, the selection ‘hovers’ between imagination and knowledge. The intention to jumble randomly, yet also create juxtapositions; the idea of Exquisite Trove being a cache of mysterious, unknown objects, yet also using exact museum labelling techniques; using museum aesthetic cabinets that elevate mundane and non-precious objects to valued objects, that despite the ‘jumbling’ often seem to have a suggested theme, (for example: Cabinet I: artists’ work, including hair, babies, and body parts. Cabinet G: objects from horses and women. Cabinet C: snakes, foxes, pigs, sharks, fishing hooks); the random inclusion of work by well-known artists (local artist Kurt Jackson’s painting looked like it had been accidentally left behind at the gallery from a previous show). These contradictions create tension between the random and choice.
The current obsession with everyday, inanimate objects used either re-establish or explore meaning, runs slap bang into ideas about art and its ‘meaningless, and constant appropriative play in post-modern culture’ (Bourriaud, Altermodern, 2009), because objects bring their own language, histories, and indeterminate meanings evoking both haunting reality, and the imagination. As Octavio Paz says
‘the work of art is a secret sign exchanged between meaning and meaninglessness’, (Paz, O., 1987, p. 54)
This ‘secret sign’ is a personal one. Perhaps it doesn’t matter who chooses, how many people choose, or what they choose, because there is something for everyone in this show? Nonetheless, the most digestible and beautiful juxtapositions are by individual artists, like Dan Lobb’s cabinet, or Melissa Hardie’s Dwellings.
Locally the show has been a huge popular success. Families have enjoyed an imaginative aesthetic experience, fusing fragments and diverse elements in storytelling, and imaginative play. The public have enjoyed the opportunity to explore new thinking through ‘things’. Objects have the power to change assumptions,
‘Humans, then, are not only thinking though things. They also come to be through them’ (2007, Henare, Holbraad, Wastrell)
Virginia Wolff’s story Solid Objects describes the ‘staggering mutability of things’. Our encounter with objects ‘mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape that haunts the brain’. (www.socialfiction.org/solidobjects.html, 23/09/2009)
Haunting and liminal, it is as if objects are an expanded boundary of the self, as
‘past memories, present experiences, and future dreams of each person are inextricably linked to the objects that comprise his or her environment’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1981).
In Exquisite Trove, the manifestation of objects are caught between knowledge and imagination, between possible meaning and meaninglessness. The objects, like this show, that fire our imaginations are bizarre, difficult, and personal.
Bibliography
Bourriard, N., (2009), Altermodern , Tate Publishing
Crow, D, (2003), Visible Signs, AVA publishing
Csikszentmihalyi, M & Halton, E(1981) The Meaning of Things, Cambridge University Press
Henare, A., Hobraad, M., Wastrell S., (eds) (2007), Thinking through things, Theorising artefacts ethnographically, Routledge
Herwitz, 2008) Aesthetics, Routledge:London
Hoskins, Janet, (1998), Biographical Objects, How things tell the stories of People’s lives, Routledge
Miller, Daniel, (2008), The comfort of things, Polity Press
Paz, O., (1987), Convergences, essays on art & Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch Inc.
Turkle S., (2007), Evocative Objects. Thinks we think with, Mass. Inst of Tech.,
Virginia Wolff’s story Solid Objects, www.socialfiction.org/solidobjects.html, (23/09/2009)
Classifiedshow,www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=1&showid=2499, 22/12/09)
