Everything is a short essay that explores curation in relation to a wider circulation of material things. First printed in Curating; the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond, edited by Anna Harding, Art and Design Magazine 1997
Everything
Some Things
Implicit within contemporary institutions of display - stores and shops or museums and galleries being the most common examples - is the idea of curation. Curation, suggests the ability to define an ordered sequence of objects within a wider material economy. We are often encouraged to experience this wider material economy as excessive, chaotic and remorselessly accelerating.
A collection of curated artifacts exibited - that is, a set of things selected as special and sometimes displayed- may be called `permanent`or 'temporary'. 'Permanent' implies sets or sequences of objects being relatively slow moving in their passage through culture; Roman Glassware for instance, in relation to the speed of other material economies, say, stainless steel saucepans. In opposition to this, a temporary collection, represents a set of objects specifically assembled, perhaps momentarily, around a theme, event, fashion or season; Sculptors Drawings from the 20th Century or New Knitwear.
The display of curated artifacts, whether permanent or temporary, defines a material space classification. As such the enclosed collection crystallizes the structure of the singular and the serial, objects are either offered up as unique, or displayed as a coherent set. The collection distils the multiple yet related taxonomic structures evolved to define and manipulate other, more diverse material economies. As a peculiar pattern of accumulation, the collection holds the promise of an imagined closure, and consequently is a well known paradigm for perfection.
Objects which join collections through their display evolve as narrative elements, held in a material form. On an institutional level, objects can become a significant marker within a narrated history of Greek sculpture; the Venus de Milo in the Louvre for example, and specified as singular. Equally my birthday present from Rachel, that strange teapot, now on my mantle-piece, is serially produced. The teapot becomes singular in my narration of it. I use the artifact to indicate a particular event, exchange or friendship, the teapot allows me to order experiences,and later to recount them. Susan Stewart`s engaging book On Longing, uncovers the particular qualities of relationships which adhere to the souvenir. Stewart detects nostalgia -an attempt to suture the felt lack between experience and its representation- at the heart of the manufactured souvenir, and eventually, through her narration, the souvenir collapses down into the drives that haunt the collected object.
Unfortunately, within institutional display, the artifact is condemned to a passive social and material relationship, dominated by the eye and a fashionable sense of order. Display, is ideologically charged, it forces diverse behavior into prescriptive patterns. Consequently, curation craves the authentic, ever more desperate tactics are deployed to mimic legitimate, perhaps more playful, material relations. Recently, amongst other things, galleries through their artists have invited you to take away old clothes Christian Boltanski, read the books they suggest Douglas Gordon, offered to be useful to you Caesare Pietroiusti, planted Marram grass in your grounds (Maria Eichhorn, and hired the gallery out to local community groups for the duration of the exhibition Renee Green. Galleries have opened in failed industrial or thriving retail spaces, they pretend to be restaurants, cafes or soup kitchens, they want to be Museums, or even colonize domestic spaces. Less mobile institutions of display, museums and department stores routinely reach for complex theatrical devices; lighting, sound, smell, or major set-building, in an attempt to contextualize their depicted artifacts. It was Marcel Duchamp who alerted us some time ago to the power -or curse- of the institutions of display, they simultaneously transform everything they contain to the level of the art object -an artifact manufactured almost exclusively for display- which nullifies everything valuable they might embrace. Unable to replicate a material behavior which is -as we shall see- already the symptom of something else, institutional artifacts obey their prescribed syntactic forms, they rarely slide, slip or spill.
Everything Else
As our material culture becomes increasingly abundant, as we evolve into more discerning consumers, any thing, as part of a particular network of exchange is experienced in a subtle relationship to other extremely similar objects. Equally rarefied economies exist for the appreciation of differences in paintings, antique furniture, as well as training shoes.
Increasingly, clothes, tools, art, bibelot, gifts, souvenirs and rubbish are seen as the markers without which social life would disintegrate. All economies of things, are subject to a whole gamut of ideological constraints mediated through often competing ideas of correct and incorrect usage. This is to begin to model the whole material world as an active participant in the configuration of social relations, rather than its passive reflection. Careful attention to material practices has made it possible to question lazy distinctions between art and tool, good and bad, or priceless and rubbish. In turn this exposes the means by which the play of difference and similarity within any defined set of artifacts allows the relativity of values to be extruded into being, and set to work: older, limited, cleaner, unique, smaller, valuable, faster,
If, as many anthropologists and psychoanalysts believe, our intimate notions of self and the complex workings of society are constructed in our articulation of things, we become
synonymous with our patterns of accumulation. From lovers gifts to the GATT trade negotiations, we literally curate ourselves into being. The sociologist Piere Bourdieu has developed the term habitus to describe the learned material practices appropriate to your social aspirations. How a particular interest group -Bourdieu is able to slip between more inflexible class structures- extends its influence over a given material terrain is often the fight for the dominant interpretation of the same thing. Using a close contextual method of interpreting material behaviour, Bourdieu shows how the struggle to accumulate, classify and display artifacts is a competitive process. The aggressive nature of this activity is the contest for symbolic capital, to which Bourdieu attributes all the actual cultural force of financial capital, which is why the conflict is so fierce.
Bourdieu intends the tussle for symbolic capital to extend -of course- through all levels of culture, to what is seen to be the appropriate use and interpretation of every image, text, object, sound and space. What, how, and with what should you cook, for instance. How should you store the utensils, in racks, from hooks, rails, magnetic strips, drawers, shelves or stands. The kinds of fine classification and control that operates around seemingly slight domestic tasks cannot be contained by utility or notions of efficiency alone. Objects associated with activities cannot be lazily contrasted with things more habitually set aside for display.
In the lived space it’s often the location which empowers the thing, as an object of display, as opposed to any quality assigned to the artifact itself. I am thinking now of the mantle-piece, certain kinds of shelving, occasional table tops, window-sills or remaindered space on bookshelves. As much as objects help to define the context you find them in -you would not expect to find a carving knife, kept with the toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, or dental floss (unless its a Hitchcock film)- things, clearly influence the activities carried on around. And yet the variety of situations in which we encounter objects often modifies the quality of attention we extend to them. The same object appears to change its symbolic potential as it moves through an assortment of contexts, that toothbrush may well appear in the Design Museum, a Department Store, in a friends bathroom, a stall in a flea market, or a contemporary art exhibition.
The above are recognized as clearly defined places for encountering things, and in many respects authorize the behavior they contain. In contrast, the lived space fractures and distorts all contexts, this seems to be where acquisition and display is most fluid and radical. Where accumulation evolves into conscious curation, by setting aside artifacts in designated spaces as display, before returning and dissolving into the expected pattern of things. Things that are manufactured as readymade symbolic; paintings or their reproductions, souvenirs, silver or ceramic giftware, birthday or anniversary gifts can be woven into relationships with temporarily symbolic artifacts, beermats, driftwood from the beach or monogrammed towelling robes smuggled from hotels. In the lived environment, things can engage in many of their social forms, as souvenir, art, gift, utensil, or rubbish, almost simultaneously. Any object can move effortlessly between these genres, as circumstances arise; records rarely played, may be fingered and admired by other enthusiast, books bought and arranged, but never read, crystal giftware could prop open the door, or washing up bottles transformed into desk-tidies, anything, could slide into pure display and return again. Perhaps the Institutions of Display are quoted as points of reference in this whirlpool of material practices, but they cannot contain them. More extraordinarily, we instantly recognise and interpret this shocking diversity of behavior, and make judgements accordingly.
Objects that become potential for display are often merely diverted from their prescribed
patterns of use; the driftwood found walking on the beach with a lover, a beermat from that Belgian bar or a towelling robe from an expensive hotel, are not where they belong. The narration, derived from Susan Stewart, weaves the object back into a sense of order. It is this by relation to, and difference from, an expected material path that generates the potential for meaning and value.
Shocking, and endlessly inventive, are the fluid and diverse strategies by which people transform artifacts into lived environments, which both form and reflect their sense of self. There has been an enormous amount of recent work generated by Material Culture studies (1) –a branch of social anthropology- which tries to determine the appropriate uses of things. Once established, the diversions, abuses, and inventions can be compared and interpreted.
Inevitably, the diversity of material behavior offers an infinite lexicon of variables. Attempts at definition tend to degenerate into crude marketing terminology. The subtlety of material culture slips through language, things, resist translation. Clearly, as the institutions of display stifle the spontaneity which objects possess in their encounters in routine material life, the majority of curation, although experienced, goes unacknowledged.
(1) For a fine example see Daniel Miller Appropriating the State on the Council Estate in Reading Things; you can read the introductory essayThe Alibi of Use [0].
Bibliography
Appadurai A. (1986) ed The Social Life of Things Cambridge University Press. Cambridge
Bourdieu P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
Cooke L. & Woolen P. (1995) eds Visual Display; Culture Beyond Appearances Bay Press, Seattle
Cummings N. (1993) ed Reading Things Chance Books, London
Miller D. (1991) Material Culture and Mass Consumption Blakwell, Oxford
Stewart. S. (1993) On Longing Duke University Press
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