The Value of Things

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:52:00 +0000

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 2000

Location

Publisher

an August/Birkhauser publication: London and Basel

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

Part beautiful artists book, part critical text The Value of Things is the result of over five years research, facilitated by unprecedented access to the British Museum and Selfridges Department Store.

To live in a modern city, is to live in an environment described by an astonishing array of things. Growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, electronic technology and rubbish are piling up around us. Objects are inserted into, and spill out of every shelf, cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and landfill site. Surrounded by a complex mesh of competing 'product narratives' that dispute ownership, contest interpretation, and disagree on value, these vast accumulations of objects are the means by which we make ourselves and our world knowable.

Events in the previous century which led to this daunting state of accumulation, unfolded as the end-game of a revolution which had begun in the nineteenth century. The giant engines of European industralisation that initiated the material avalanche of the modern age necessitated the evolution of massive institutions to both structure and display the energy of production through things.

The Value of Things sets out to explore the narratives of two institutions which perfectly represent the awesome technologies for sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things. The greatest inventions of modernity, these institutions are the most privileged sites within the social organisation of all objects, images, signs and services: the department store and the public museum.

Although clearly organised around different economic drives, what the department store shares with the museum is the encyclopaedic desire to render the whole world knowable, classified and displayed for the visitor to consume. If the museum inherited its collection and core practices from the previous aristocracy, its driven by a set of values and narratives to protect an image of singularity through souvenirs of the past. In simple contrast, the store holds the promise of a semiotic democracy, played out live amongst the profusion of the present.

But The Value of Things is not merely a task of mourning - it tracks the narrative of the museum and the store through into the newly-diffused territories of the digital age. As we enter the first decade of the new millennium, our traditional play with value has exceeded its previous limits. A principle of value based on the expression of accumulated excess, has far less relevance in electronically connected economies.

While the department store and museum act as a model to structure and narrate previous attitudes towards things, they are also caught in a process of radical transformation - they may even be accelerating towards a strange convergence.

As the store is superseded by out-of-town shopping cities, or its convenience challenged by the point-and-click of e-commerce, the ruthless forces of commerce are subsumed under an image of public service and spectacle. The store becomes a tourist destination dispersed amongst other cultural sites. In turn, as an effect of changes in both public provision and the constitution of its visiting audience, the museum has been forced to aggressively market and license its own collection. Those stored old things, are harnessed as potential new revenue streams via tiers of licensed commercial access. The museum is evolving as a 'brand', competing to control the flow of value through things, as its objects merge with a wider culture of exhibition, our most unique artifacts become seamlessely integrated into the retail present.

224 pages 17 x 23.5cm full colour

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Description

ISBN/ASIN

3 7643 6316 9

ArtWords Link

Lost Property

admin — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:31:16 +0000

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 1996

Location

Publisher

Chance Books & Public Art Development Trust; London

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

A book resulting from a collaboration between us, the London Underground and Public Art Development Trust. It represents a selection of things from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office.

We are easily seduced into acquiring, exchanging and displaying vast quantities of material things. Accumulation, in its broadest sense, is the literal writing-into-being of an individual or culture.

Things are found, polished, displayed and treasured; bought, bound or framed and collected; the object, plucked from the generic soup of a media culture, is momentarily arrested and woven into an intimate personal narrative, "I bought this when I was in Paris". It is this enveloping which marks the thing as a possession and simultaneously allows the narrator to refine and evaluate experience, to evolve a sense of difference or belonging. The thing itself, as commodity, inheritance, gift or souvenir, has become a privileged vehicle for establishing an emotional and intellectual identity. Things authenticate experience.

This much is well known.

The dark shadow within our seamless assembly of possessions and continuous narration of `self`, is loss. The word loss delineates a terrifying space, it is the void over which all exchange and collection precariously take place, but, from which no insurance or story can ever protect. Loss infuses accumulation with fear, everything, even our most precious belongings continuously circulate within its grasp.

Lost Property touches the wound opened between lost property, and the emotional investment implicit in personal possession. There will be no attempt to suture that gap. Comprised of photographs and texts, the book mimics the dispassionate style of a museum catalogue in an effort to re-inscribe the absence all the more emphatically. Inevitably, the book has more to do with the conventions of representation, than recovering a material presence. The things pictured, are still missing from these pages.

A temporary collection bound by this catalogue parodies the conventions established by museum acquisition. Although the collection is a well known paradigm of perfection, the objects here are always already incomplete, misplaced, fallen from narration, and never to return.

Lost Property is a selection from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office; on average, some three hundred items. Designed as a desirable pocket size souvenir by Stephen Coates, Lost Property was released at the moment of spectacular accumulation, Christmas 1995

Description

148 pages, 140 B & W images

ISBN/ASIN

0-9513932-4-3

Book

The Value of Things

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Lost Property

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

Location

Publisher

Designer

Body

Description

ISBN/ASIN

ArtWords Link

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications