Some links to things that we talked about with each of you in class today:

John Oliver on Food Waste

Janine Antoni - Loving Care

Kader Attia

Francis Mallmann

Recovery of Discovery - Cyprien Gaillard

Alan Berliner - Audiofile

Roman Signer

Miranda July - It Chooses You

Fritz Haeg - Rug

Paul Ramirez Jonas - Key to the City

Paul McCarthy - Painter

The Challenge of Consciousness

An interview between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks

Discussion on the physiological, psychological, and metaphysical concepts of consciousness, identity, and present awareness of the world, (at least that's what I got from it).

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Interesting excerpt, out of context, as applied to the idea of consciousness (and therein, I believe, identity) being understood as a physical manifestation:

Parks: But again, should we be thinking of consciousness as a thing, or a process?
Manzotti: Well, if the world that surrounds us is made of things, objects, and physical processes, consciousness is likely to be one of them. People tend to be extremely hesitant when approaching consciousness and to treat it as a special case. But I’m not sure that’s helpful. If it is a real phenomenon, and most people agree that it is, why shouldn’t it be like all other physical phenomena, something made of matter and energy whose activity is explicable by its physical properties?

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Perhaps a bit off the rails from materiality and our current discussions, but I think it's something to consider when approaching the idea of how we, as human beings with consciousness and awareness, perceive material itself.

Over-consumerism (Outdated video, but still interesing)

Buy Nothing Day

Some links to some of the stuff brought up during discussion earlier this week. Hope you are all having a nice break.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat - Oliver Sacks

Tylenol Murders

Museum of Broken Relationships

Maintenance Performance

Dead Malls

Protest

City Reliquary Museum

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Abraham Cruzvillegas - Autoconstrucción
Abraham Cruzvillegas

Dorodango

Comments for reading: "The Force of Things" from Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett

Reading Comments for "Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture"

Video of Claes Oldenburg's "Mouse Museum" here and here

Comments for Linda Weintraub reading "What is Ecology? What is Environmentalism?" "Eco Art Themes" and "Eco Art Aesthetics"

Comments for Reading: Robert Williams Disjecta Reliquiae: The Tate Thames Dig /1999

Artist

Mark Dion born 1961

Title

Tate Thames Dig

Date1999This text discusses two related works, Tate Thames Dig 1999 (T07669) and Tate Thames Dig - Locker 2000 (T07670).
More about Thames dig here

During the summer of 1999, U.S. artist Mark Dion and a team of volunteers drawn from local groups combed the foreshore of the Thames at low tide along two stretches of beach at Millbank and Bankside, near the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and Bankside Power Station, which would become Tate Modern the following year. As with Yard of Jungle 1992 (Museo Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro), where he literally removed and examined a yard of jungle floor, Dion focused on a natural, historical constant. In this case, he turned to the banks of the River Thames, looking for fragments of individual and ephemeral histories. London's location, its growth and its fortunes can be attributed to the Thames. The two sites yielded a wide variety of artefacts and tokens of life as lined Millbank on the north shore of the Thames and Bankside on the south. Working over a number of days, Dion's team collected large quantities of items, including clay pipes, vividly decorated shards of delftware, oyster shells and plastic toys. The finds were then meticulously cleaned and classified in 'archaeologists' tents' on the Tate Gallery's lawn at Millbank during the summer of 1999.

First shown at the Tate Gallery as an Art Now installation between October 1999 and January 2000, the finds for Tate Thames Dig are presented according to location in a double-sided old-fashioned mahogany cabinet, alongside photographs of the beachcombers and tidal flow charts. There are also five 'treasure chests' which contain larger items, but which are not part of this work. Organised loosely according to type (such as bones, glassware, pottery, metal objects), the viewer finds them in seemingly unhistorical and largely uninterpreted arrangements. Antique items sit alongside contemporary items, ephemera and detritus are next to objects of value. Each is a material witness, performing the same function as a historical proof. This lack of distinction is an important aspect of Dion's approach and he resists the reading of history as a necessarily linear progression. The only differentiation is a geographical one, the two sites retaining their individual identities. The lack of historical categorisation suggests a subversion of standard museological practice. Viewers are free to create their own associations, to trace histories across time, not necessarily in a linear direction.

Tate Thames Dig - Locker did not form part of the original Art Now installation and stands as a kind of postscript in relation to the project. The work comprises a field locker filled with items belonging to or used by Dion. Its appearance contrasts with the solidity and solemnity of the double-sided mahogany veneer cabinet. The side panels and door of the locker are constructed from sturdy wire mesh, so that the contents are visible. It has the quality of a theatrical prop cupboard; the assembled objects and articles stand as attributes of the artist-archaeologist-collector. On the top shelf sit various items and a number of books, including S.J. Knudson's Culture in Retrospect: An Introduction to Archaeology. Hanging from pegs are Dion's orange boilersuit and cap, a Tate Modern site jacket, a specimen bag, and the white lab coat that he wore while camped on Millbank lawns. Alongside his boots on the floor, there are two rubbish-filled dustbins, labelled 'site 1 Millbank' and 'site 2 Bankside'. These suggest humorous connections with the Art Now treasure chests and prompt us to question the categories of disposable and valued.

Dion's practice incorporates aspects of archaeology, ecology and detection. His projects focus primarily on current issues surrounding the representation of nature and on the history of the natural sciences. Dion is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the principles of taxonomy which have been used since the eighteenth century to classify and interpret the natural and man-made ephemera of the world. His principles are informed by the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, the contemporary evolutionary theorist, who points out that taxonomic systems do not provide objective criteria but are contingent upon our value systems and thus rooted within our social structures. By re-enacting the processes of scientific research, Dion questions the premises upon which these activities are based. His investigations have led him to construct laboratories and to embark on experiments and expeditions. An essential aspect of his methodology is collaboration with other artists, scientists, community groups, and both art and non-art institutions. His work can take the form of installation, sculpture, performance or film and video. Typically, these present a reworking of the orthodox procedures of collecting, identifying and classifying to suggest a more poetic and open-ended approach to interpretation.

Further reading:Art Now 20: Mark Dion, exhibition leaflet, Tate Gallery, London 1999
Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig: Beachcombing London's Foreshore, exhibition leaflet, Tate Gallery, London 1999

Tina Fiske and Giorgia Bottinelli
February 2002

Comments for Reading: "Design and Handmade" Chap. 5 Sculpture Now

Found art: Cornelia Parker and Jarvis Cocker share their spoils

Found art: Cornelia Parker and Jarvis Cocker share their spoils
By Charlotte Higgins, May 2016
Full article with images here

What is it to be found? The idea presupposes that something has once been lost; if it’s an object, it can long outlive the loser and bring with it, in its re-emergence, the breath of a forgotten time. Late last century, in the drains of the Roman amphitheatre in London, bits of gold jewellery were found. Not much use to the woman who’d mislaid them in some second-century crush. Finding can be an act of love: the rescue of something or someone that has been otherwise overlooked. Or it can be an act of aggression. All archaeology involves an element of disturbance, of destruction. So does the “discovery” of continents and peoples. Some things do not want to be found.

The loss of children is one of the largest of human tragedies, and their finding is one of the oldest and most persistent stories of folklore: Moses; Romulus and Remus. The story is always about how the child’s true identity, usually deliberately suppressed, reasserts itself. Oliver Twist’s plot is partly motored by the malevolent destruction of the tokens – a letter and a locket – that would prove who he really was.

The Foundling Museum, tucked in a corner of a square in Bloomsbury in central London, tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, established by merchant seaman Thomas Coram in 1739 to give a home to London’s poorest children – an act of finding those who had been lost. In the 18th century, the parents of the children who left them there were asked to deposit a token so that they could identify them later, in case they were ever in a position to take them home.

In the museum there is a glass case of these objects: little screws of ribbon, scraps of embroidery, a crushed thimble, coins rubbed smooth on one side and engraved with the child’s name. Some of them were made with tremendous care; some not so much (one is simply, and eloquently, a label marked ALE). These humble things carry enormous weight of meaning, as if they have become surrogates or stand-ins for the children themselves.

This summer, artist Cornelia Parker is curating a group exhibition at the museum, in which more than 60 artists, writers and composers have been asked to respond to the word “found”. Artists were early supporters of the Foundling Hospital – Handel conducted a performance of the Messiah there and became a governor, and Hogarth donated major works, as did Gainsborough and Reynolds. The museum, aside from caring for its collection of important 18th-century paintings and Handel manuscripts, keeps strong the link between artists and the work of the modern charity, Coram, which still works with children. Parker is hoping visitors might think, too, about the modern foundlings of our world: the child refugees who have been severed from home, family and country.

For Parker, like many artists of her generation, improvising with objects found on the street, in skips or charity shops was a habit of mind formed by necessity. Now much of her work involves drawing out the meaning immanent in objects that already exist. These works have a family relationship to Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” – ordinary objects, such as a bicycle wheel or a urinal, which he transformed into, or rather redescribed as, art. One of Parker’s own works in the exhibition is an installation made from an old staircase that used to lead to Jimi Hendrix’s flat in Mayfair – in the same building in which Handel lived in the 18th century, now a museum. “It was all chopped up and ready for the skip,” says Parker, who, with her square-cut bob looks as if she has just wafted over from a soiree at the Woolfs’ (Leonard and Virginia lived in a house that once stood next door to the museum). “I enjoyed composing something, improvising with these bits of wood.”

Another figure whose singular aesthetic was purchased on the cheap from charity shops is musician Jarvis Cocker. One day in 1985, he and Candida Doyle, Pulp’s keyboard player, were wandering through the streets of Bristol when they found a binbag full of copies of Romania Today – an English-language magazine promoting the joys of Ceaușescu’s regime. They divided them up between them. Cocker says the garish images fed into the band’s look. “There was this communist attempt at looking glamorous,” he says. “They’d show a yacht, but with the colours pumped up so bright that they would bleed. There was always something that undermined the image. Or they’d try to use a western advertising approach to promoting petrochemical plants, or lathes.”

He and Doyle would trade birthday cards using cut-outs from the magazines, and they culled images to use on posters, too. “Romania Today had a strange afterlife in the demi-monde of south London,” says Cocker fondly. In the exhibition, an issue of the magazine shows a young woman earnestly regarding a modernist sculpture. It carries an enticing coverline: “A supplement carrying the speech of Nicolae Ceaușescu at the Working Meeting of the Party Active from the Sphere of Ideology and Political and Cultural-Educational Activity.” It’s the artist’s job, very often, to look with new eyes on what others have rejected or found uninteresting. One artist I know described a skill of his as being “good at noticing things”.

There are chance encounters, such as Cocker and Doyle’s, with objects that might change you. Then there are the objects that seem to have found the person, rather than the other way around. Artist Richard Wentworth, a connoisseur of the coincidence, is showing a book called Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, which he picked up from a secondhand bookseller in rural France. Only in reading it did it become clear that the author’s family had been his wife’s landlords when she was growing up in the 1950s. The past can find you out in other ways, too: another piece of Wentworthiana in the exhibition is a still of his grandmother from a TV show on BBC4 in 2015. She had been dead for 40 years, and Wentworth caught her image on screen – a ghostly apparition – completely by chance.

Often the found object seems to be trying to tell you something: you have been drawn to it for reasons that reveal themselves only gradually. Novelist Deborah Levy found herself picking up buttons and beads on the streets after her mother died, one of which she has lent to the exhibition. In the catalogue, she writes: “It is the broken wire thread that drew me to this glass bead. I think I was picking up objects that were once attached to something or someone – and were now severed from their place of origin, like me.”

Author Marina Warner has lent an object she found when clearing out her late mother’s garage. At first, she didn’t know what it was. It resembled “a gigantic tooth” that had been severed from its story, with no one left to remember what it was. She wondered if it might be walrus ivory, but then one day, “I came across its double in the Musée du Quai Branly,” the ethnographic museum in Paris.

It turned out to be a sperm-whale tooth; such objects, known as tabua in Fijian society, circulated as currency, and as items of prestige and power. “My speculation is that my grandfather, who played cricket all over the world, was given it – perhaps as a mark of esteem after a particularly spectacular run,” she says. A born storyteller, she has effectively reattached the object to its lost significance, perhaps accurately, perhaps not – it hardly matters, though whatever the truth behind the object’s arrival in her mother’s garage, it cannot help but bring a whiff of empire with it.

The found object, then, is almost always a symbol: something that has a weightier significance than its ordinary appearance seems to warrant; something that acts as a sign if only it can be decoded. In artist Mike Nelson’s case, this is quite literally so. In a market in London he found himself drawn to a beaten-up road sign that reminded him of a sculpture by John Chamberlain. He bought it for a fiver, and then wondered where on earth was “Craco” – the place it had once pointed to. It turned out that it was a sign to nowhere; a medieval hilltown in Basilicata, southern Italy, that has been empty since the 1980s, evacuated by an already depleted population after a series of floods, landslides and earthquakes. “It set me thinking: maybe it’s my destiny in some way,” he says. Nelson often creates haunted, dystopian installations in places that seem to have been recently abandoned by their inhabitants. In a sense, he could have invented Craco. But Craco came looking for him.

Found is at the Foundling Museum, London, from 27 May to 4 September. Guardian Members save 50% on admission until 30 June. For more, go to theguardian.com/members

A New Exhibition Shows How What We Keep Becomes Who We Are

ARTSY EDITORIAL

BY ISAAC KAPLAN

Full article here

We are all collectors, to some degree, obsessively keeping and arranging the objects of our past and present. Letters, images, and trinkets pile up, in an effort to capture certain memories and realities. Our personal archives may be sparser today now that communications are digital and lives are recorded online, but the impulse to hold on is still there.

The desire to collect and organize, to remember and resurface, is at the heart of the New Museum’s stunning exhibition “The Keeper.” A dazzling array of objects put together by various artists, authors, historians, and hoarders (once again, distinctions by a matter of degree) have themselves been assembled by curator Massimiliano Gioni and his team. Densely packed across three floors and the lobby, the exhibition of over 4,000 things—the most in the museum’s history—tells “the stories of various individuals through the objects they chose to safeguard,” as Gioni writes in the catalogue. But objects are uncertain narrators, and the stories they tell multiply and shift.

Why do we keep some objects and discard others? Unlike an archive—which seeks to be an undiscerning vacuum of content—the collections in “The Keeper” are wholly determined by their makers. The Brazilian artist-collector Arthur Bispo do Rosário began to accumulate pieces after having visions of angels who asked him to assemble objects worthy of redemption on judgement day. In response, the former ensign weaved material into model ships, scrawled prophesies across fabric, and neatly created arrangements of found objects like spoons and plastic dolls—all while in the mental asylum to which he was committed in 1938.

A very different set of criteria governs Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)(2002) by Ydessa Hendeles. The piece is a jaw-dropping two-story installation, consisting of some 3,000 amateur photographs united by the shared presence of a teddy bear in each. The images, which date to the early 20th century but were assembled recently by the artist using eBay, stretch from floor to ceiling. Teddy bears, aged examples of which sit in hardwood display cases in the center of the installation, became a childhood fixture after their incarnation sometime between 1902 and 1904, and their presence in the images provides a strange wormhole to the past. It is a connection that, gazing at the images with hindsight, pointedly accentuates undercurrents of loss. Hendeles, the child of two Holocaust survivors, includes an image of a Nazi holding the stuffed animal.

What the photographs depict is not reality, but a reality these individuals espoused for themselves, mediated by societal norms and personal beliefs. “The collection is a reflection of the values of society at the time the photographs were taken,” Hendeles writes. “It is notable not only for what it includes but for what is absent. Only one photograph of a child with Down Syndrome was discovered, and only one portrait of a child with a cleft palate.” As times change, so too do the stories people want to tell: The artist also had trouble finding images of fathers in Nazi uniforms, though before the war they were plentiful, a source of pride. There is no reason to think our memories today are any less selective.

Indeed, the personal is always political, and family photographs are no exception. To ask why individuals keep some objects and discard others is also to ask why society tells some stories and causes others to vanish. Susan Hiller mined archives from numerous sources to find audio clips of languages either lost or in danger of disappearing for The Last Silent Movie (2007-08,) a film tucked into a corner on the show’s top floor. Mediated by white English subtitles projected onto a pitch dark background, sounds and stories in languages including Comanche and K’ora, are relayed by invisible speakers. “Today you will get to know me through my tounge,” says the speaker of K’ora. It’s a strange paradox, spoken by the last person to know the language: We come to hear a voice right at the moment it is silenced.

The exhibition is intentionally non-hierarchical, eschewing traditional organizational methods preferred by museums like artist, time period, and geography. Even different works that share historical connections are spaced apart. Hendeles’s installation has connections to the Holocaust, but Korbinian Aigner’s gentle drawings of the fruits he cultivated—some after being confined to a German labor camp by the Nazi regime—are an entire floor below. In “The Keeper,” time and history do not flow in a straight line. Rather, the show seems to argue that—even as there are shared connections between groups—time flows differently for different people, that our histories are connected but distinct.

Henrik Olesen takes on the narratives of the past head on, queering them through an installation of homosexual and homosocial photographs, watercolors, texts, prints, and other historical material attached to boards and arranged in categories like “effeminate son,” “sex in America,” and “lesbian visibility.” There are lots of ways to enter and move through and around the work, titled Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870 (2007). Historical descriptions of violent crackdowns on gay and lesbian individuals throughout history are placed next to images of work by gay artists; images of nude Greek statues are placed next to a photo of a nude man with his hands tied behind his back. Olesen is keenly aware that how things are interpreted is in large part due to how they are arranged, and who is doing the arranging.

A slightly more abstract interpretation of a similar idea comes from the collection of rocks amassed by Roger Caillois, who believed that stones are keepers of a cosmic history, the colorful patterns contained by the geodes works of art painted by geology and time. Though Caillois believed these rocks told stories of a history shared with humans, history for a rock and the history of human beings are very different, told in different scales and keys. “The very stone that one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,” as Mr. Ramsay thinks in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Strangely, however, the wall text doesn’t mention Caillois’s racism and affinity for ideas of “primitivism.” Not all conceptions of history are liberating.

Other works on view are testament to how objects find ways to endure beyond their original lifespans. Three quilts that originated from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, hang on the museum’s third floor, woven together by African Americans who have almost exclusively inhabited the region. Adorned abstract color, the quilts, which were not decorative, were often woven in communal get togethers. Living with limited resources, the quilters employed discarded or used fabrics—clothing worn while working in the fields, for example—to craft the pieces. When is a shirt not a shirt? When it becomes a quilt. And yet the personal significance of the materials used to craft the piece endure in some way, adding a kind of memorial quality to the objects.

What is the difference between a series of objects held in stasis and an accumulation of things that together speak of something else? Between an archive and at an atlas? Between a collection and a set of coordinates? In “The Keeper,” the answer is quite little, if anything at all. Though the title is singular, it is not exclusive. We all could be “the” keeper—of what is up to us. Family photographs bound in an album, the stone from a beach we visited, the letter from a loved one—these all point to a reality that is present through the objects, yet inaccessible and constantly changing. Nan Goldin once remarked that, as time passes, photographs stop conjuring a moment. Instead, we begin to form memories of the photograph itself. “The Keeper” is a fantastically rich show primarily because the layers of memory and meaning twist and blend. It is a testament to the fact that collections, archives, and memory are all related, swirling together to hold onto moments in a way akin to a metronome. That is, collections make and lose time even as they endeavor to keep it.

—Isaac Kaplan

The Woman Who Lost Her Sense of ‘Mine’

The Woman Who Lost Her Sense of ‘Mine’ by Melissa Dahl article here

People get attached to their stuff. Two-year-olds, for instance, have very strong opinions about what’s theirs (“MINE!”), and are suspicious about sharing, no matter what nonsense their adult caregivers spew about this caring thing. And although (most) people eventually learn to follow appropriate social norms, that relationship to stuff and things still matters throughout the life span, and even, in a way, beyond it — when you’re gone, after all, your loved ones will likely inherit your most prized possessions. If nothing else, at least your memory will live on through, say, a particularly nice set of dresser drawers you once owned.

People express their self-identity through their belongings, a notion that psychologists and neuroscientists are lately finding empirical evidence to support, though the idea itself is of course not a new one. In 1890, William James, the 19th-century scholar who is considered by many to be the founder of modern psychology, wrote in The Principles of Modern Psychology, “a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.” (Former President Jimmy Carter was a little late to this conclusion, observing in a 1970s speech, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.”)

But this idea — that you imbue your possessions with pieces of yourself, like a benign Voldemort — becomes especially intriguing when you consider a case study published online last week in the journal Cortex (and first spotted by science writer Rolf Degen), about a woman who, at least temporarily, lost her sense of ownership over her belongings. What can a mind that’s lost its sense of that feeling of mine-ness as it relates to stuff and things tell us about our own relationships to our stuff and things?

Here’s an overview of the case study:

The patient: She’s not named in the report, but her neurologists — all from Lisbon, Portugal — do provide some biographical details of the woman at the center of the case study. At the time of the incident, she was 65 years old and widowed, a retired translator who had lived in the same house for more than three decades. She lived alone — well, alone save for the eight cats with which she shared her home. She had recently suffered a stroke, which caused her trouble with speaking and partial facial paralysis. After treatment, however, she was once again able to speak clearly.

The problem: The trouble started after she came home from the hospital after being treated for her stroke. Suddenly, and for seemingly no reason, nothing in her home quite felt like hers. “When I looked at my belongings, I felt they were not mine,” she told her doctors. “As I opened my door, I looked at the painting on the wall, had a perfect recollection of it and knew it was mine. However, I did not feel a sense of belonging as before. Then, I realized I had the same feeling with the sofa, the living room’s furniture, the frames with family portraits, the flowers of the balcony … everything!”

Intriguingly, she told her doctors that she never felt that same sense of detachment toward her own body, or toward the places and the people she knew and loved — and yet the eerie feeling did extend to her cats. She recognized them, and remembered each kitty’s name, but none of the animals quite felt like they belonged to her. “I felt as if I was not emotionally attached to my things anymore,” she said.

The diagnosis: These symptoms don’t really have a name, or a specific diagnosis, at least not yet. But brain scans showed damage to a few particular areas: the left insula, the left anterior cingulate region, and the left supramarginal gyrus. This wouldn’t mean much to anyone if it weren’t for a 2011 neuroimaging study, which found that these areas appear to be associated with a person’s sense of ownership; the researchers, from the University of Aberdeen, found changes in brain activity in this network when their study participants were looking at images of their own things, but not at others’ things. As the authors of that paper note, these brain regions have also been linked with “self-referential encoding and memory” — the formation of a self-concept, in other words.

Some developmental psychologists have theorized that when a 2-year-old insists that anything he’s touched (and many things he hasn’t) is “MINE!,” it’s a first stab at asserting independence, through the beginnings of the formation of self-identity. As psychology writer Christian Jarrett has noted, nearly 25 percent of all day-care squabbles recorded by a team of psychologists in 2008 were about just what belonged to whom — the “child either defended his or her objects from another child, or wanted to take an object from another child.” Children at this age are using their things to build their own understanding of who they are, in other words, and this is something that doesn’t exactly diminish as we grow older. Younger drivers, those between ages 18 and 25, are more likely to personalize their cars in some way, “as if marking out their territory,” Jarrett further observes, and when your self-identity is threatened, research has suggested you may be more likely to try to make yourself feel a bit better by buying fancy stuff. “It’s as if reflecting on our things restores a fragile ego,” he concludes.

This woman’s story helps shed a little more light on the tangled-up relationship humans have with their things, a subject which has led many to conclude, somewhat cynically, that “we are what we own.” Fortunately for her, the strange feeling regarding her stuff only lasted three days; one morning she woke up, and everything she owned felt like hers again, as if she were awakening from some fairy-tale curse meant to teach her a lesson about materialism.