C103
Article
The
Problem Of Things
There's
stuff everywhere. What is an artist to do with it?
Mick Wilson takes up the story.
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Koo Jeong-a: The Land of
Ossus, 2002, installation shot;
courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery
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When
we speak of the 'nature' of things or the 'language' of
things, these expressions share in common a polemical rejection
of violent arbitrariness in our dealing with things, especially
the mere stating of opinions, the capriciousness of conjectures
or assertions about things, and the arbitrariness of denials
or the insistence on private opinions.1
Sometimes
one just can't help but be awed by the scholarship of the
Antiques Roadshow. The apparent comprehensive grasp
of an avalanche of minutiae displayed by the experts: which
cabinet-making firm in the 1870s was making use of which
type of hinge; which toy-car manufacturer in the 1920s was
churning out which particular fire-engine model; and which
Georgian silversmith was using that particular flourish
on the arse of a spoon. It must be great to be at home in
a world of things in this way: the way of knowing stuff
about stuff. This relationship with things, which is tinged,
on occasion riddled, with nostalgia, is part of a complex
that weaves together academic scholarship, market savvy
and leisure consumption. It is of course easily recognised
as part of the continuum of consumption that includes the
fine arts. Indeed it directly relates to an earlier historical
moment when these continuities were much more explicit,
when for instance paintings and sculptures were imported
into the British Isles from continental Europe as part of
the furniture and 'classical' antiquities trade. But there's
another dimension to this trade in knowing stuff about stuff.
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Christian Boltanski, Lost
Property, 1994, installation shot; Douglas Hyde
Gallery
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Consider the
famous case of Andy Warhol's all-American cookie jars, a
collection of more than 125 jars, purchased over the years
from garage sales, flea markets and bric-à-brac shops
for a few dollars or so, which in an auction of his apartment's
contents in 1987 achieved inflated prices amounting to $250,000.2
Despite being relatively generic and mass-produced items,
these cookie jars were uniquely those previously purchased
by Andy Warhol, and therefore worth so much more. These
were things touched by the hand of the great artist, or
at least they had had a brush with his wallet. When you
bought one of these things, you bought it in the knowledge
that it was one of Andy's things. All very much in the way
of Duchamp's flirtatious play with ready-mades perhaps.
But then, think of Madonna's fans rifling her garbage bags
to find her discarded things, trophies to be held in the
knowing that Madonna once owned these things. The idea of
personal property here provides more than a sense of contiguity
or a legal relation of owning, it is a guarantee of identity
as in the scholastic sense of the properties of a substance:
this cookie jar belongs to Andy Warhol the way wetness belongs
to water as one of its properties: it is inherent, it is
integral, it is one of the 'identifying marks'. Interestingly,
in their conflation of things and persons, these instances
of consumption would seem to go against what Gadamer posits
as the norm for the relations among things and persons:
The
concept of the thing is marked above all by its counterconcept,
the person. The meaning of this antithesis of thing and
person is found originally in the clear priority of the
person over the thing. The person appears as something to
be respected in its own being. The thing, on the other hand,
is something to be used, something that stands entirely
at our disposal.3
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Koo Jeong-a:
The Land of Ossus, 2002, installation shot;
courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery
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Perhaps, with
Warhol's cookie jars, it may simply be that the thing, as
relic, has become permeated by the originary personhood
of the possessor.
Of course
contemporary artists have done other things with things,
and had other stuff to say about stuff. Michael Landy has
systematically destroyed all his personal property, all
his things, in a great shop-front auto-da-fé: in
terms of the art market this might be the first discovery
of the marketing principle of the 'loss-leader'. (The event
was staged in the old C&A flagship store on Oxford Street
in February 2001.) Boltanski has his lost-property gag,
vast installations of other people's lost things which play
with a pathos that refuses to disclose its full nature.
(Lost Property, presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery
in 1994). Fred Wilson, in his 1992 Mining the Museum
at Baltimore Museum of Art, deftly re-arranged the things
in a museum so as to place some iron manacles beside some
ornamental silverware and so ask that these things speak
of the Georgian trade in slaves, luxury spices, and silver.4
Earlier this year Koo Jeong-a, for the exhibition The
Land of Ousss (sic), placed a whole range of stuff,
indicative of the everyday matter of the Western world,
in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, and prompted a dilemma
I like to call the problem of things.
This dilemma
is the tension between the materiality, the sheer thingness
of the artwork, and the discursive construction of the artwork.
It is a standard assumption of most artist's education that
the thing-in-itself is impossible, it is an unattainable
limit, beyond experience by its very definition. This is
rooted not so much in Kantianism but rather in a relatively
recent regard for all things textual. That is to say, it
is rather a more recent strain of critique, especially rooted
in literary criticism and theory, which privileges the discursive
instability of our experiential grasp of things-in-the-world.
(Again, Duchamp's gestures and provocations, by means of
mass produced objects re-contextualised as artworks, are
paradigmatic of the foregrounding of the social construction
of the art-'thing'.) However, because of the often covert
legacy of modernist formalisms which prioritise 'the truth'
of 'material', there still persists a nostalgia for the
thingly thing. This is perhaps becoming explicit in the
faecal traumas of an artist like Stuart Brisley, which engages
the thingly existence of faecal matter beyond the body that
once contained it. It is present in Koo Jeong-a's work also,
I would suggest, but here the dilemma between textuality
and thing is more subtly and perhaps unsettlingly played
out.
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Koo Jeong-a: The Land of
Ossus, 2002, installation shot;
courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery
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Interspersed
with tins of salmon and glitter and little sticky-back stars,
one also finds a bizarre taxonomy of cat and dog images.
Threaded through the accumulated 'kipple' one finds remainders
of communicative acts now passed into redundancy, as for
example when one stumbles upon a post-it message apologising
for a missed appointment. Throughout the elaborately staged
appearance of clutter, of work still wrapped in packaging
and rolls of tape left as if the process of installation
was still in train, the artist simply gone on a lunch break,
there are to be found traces of communicative utterances
and attempts to categorise and conceptually order the stuff
that appears in experience. There is an attempt to demonstrate
a kind of knowledge about all this stuff. But all the while,
as the stuff in the gallery is listed and described and
interpreted, its thinglyness is in retreat. Then a moment
later, the volume of stuff asserts itself, and these things
appear again as just so much impossible stuff.
It may seem
then that there are many nostalgias at work in the various
quests for things.
Mick Wilson
is a writer, artist and lecturer; he is currently course
coordinator for Fine Art at the Institute of Art, Design
and Technology, Dún Laoghaire.
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