Relationship of objects and people

Objects and identity

Objects have a very significant place in psychology. From early childhood on, one starts to identify with objects and form bonds. The wide known example of this is the transitional object or comfort object introduced by Donald Winnicott. This object, usually a blanket, becomes a substitute for the early mother-child connection and serves as a comforting item. The child uses the object during its transitional period from the psychic reality to the external reality in which it grasps the separation between itself and the external world.

In adolescence, ownership and accumulation of objects is established. Adolescence is a phase in which one’s identity is shaping and one’s life transitioning. During this period, dependence on personal objects peaks. The reminding and reminiscing aspects of objects are amplified due to the need for affirming one’s life-story and past. Objects help construct a narrative and reassure one’s identity and autobiography by reminding the person of past events and significant people in their lives. These factors support the idea that personal objects become more significant during such transition periods and at old age.*

Contrary to keeping and caring for objects, the act of getting rid of them is also significant in psychology. Although the notion of decluttering is reinforced as an antidote to hoarding, the urge to throw personal objects away is also rooted in the complicated and strong relationship people have with their objects; much like collecting or hoarding. Throwing things away is an attempt at a rejection of the dependency on objects; while keeping them is to accept this dependency and to immerse in it.

Taking personal objects and using them in artwork is also a way of dealing with objects and one’s relationship with them. To transform these objects into artwork and to offer them as display  -even when they are someone else’s things- is the artist’s way of responding to the bond people have with objects.  

Sources

*Habermas, T., & Paha, C. (2002.). Souvenirs and other personal objects: Reminding of past events and significant others in the transition to university. In J. D. Webster & B. K. Haight (Eds.), Critical Advances in Reminiscence Work (p.123-138). New York: Springer.

Objects and characters II

The absence of personal objects

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s work From the Island of the Day Before (2015) brings together both unused school notebooks and used ones in an attempt to comment on the absence of minority rights in Turkey through its results specific context of the education system. The contrast between the clean, new and unused school notebooks with those that have been filled in is obvious and provokes a sentimental perception. The arrangement of their display enhances their contrast. The unused notebooks are large in number and neatly arranged on top of each other in a triangle; mimicking a topography referring to an island according to the artist. The used notebooks are few and displayed behind a glass cabinet, almost like artefacts. They are like museum objects; behind the glass and far in the past. Their power originates from the fact that they have been used, and they contain the clumsy handwritings of elementary school children, making them personal and collectively nostalgic at the same time.

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, From the Island of the Day Before, 2015

A work that uses the power of personal objects for their absence and destruction is Michael Landy’s Breakdown (2001). Landy gathered every material possesion he owned and deconstructed them in a reverse assembly line set up. The dismembered objects were then gotten rid of at a landfill; making the artist the owner of nothing for a little while. The destroyed items included everything he owned, including his birth certificate, car and tooth brush. For the viewer, seeing every object in someone’s life is interesting; but to see it taken apart and destroyed is another level of interesting. The viewers try to empathise; and as the artist stated in an Independent interview, “…made mental inventories of their own stuff.” The work is powerful because it is based on the perception that possessions make a person, an that they are almost inseparable from the person’s identity. Therefore the work displays the destruction of Landy’s ‘identity’ in a process open for people to see. The work clearly has an attitude towards mindless consumerism and the act of buying, but more so it focuses on the relationship between already acquired and accumulated objects and their owners. This bond is one of the hardest to break; because as was the case with the artist during the execution of Breakdown, objects can become meaningful entities hard to give up or throw away.

Michael Landy, Breakdown, 2001

Objects and characters

Constructing a character with objects

Using personal objects in art means the construction of a character in its most intimate ways. Even if the personal objects belong to the artist, there is a construction of the character of the artist; the projection of his/her persona in specific contexts. For example, Hale Tenger’s large scale installation Sandık Odası (1997) turns the exhibition space into the inside of a home, partly based on a past home of hers. It carries the context of 80s Turkey, its political and cultural environment into a personal space. Each object points towards a certain feeling, and is powered by the artist’s memories and curation. The personal objects and memories suggest the collective memory of a culture.

Hale Tenger, Sandık Odası, 1997

Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1996) is another example of character constructing through objects. As the title of the work strongly suggests, Kabakov’s imaginary character holds on to every item he owns, in the effort to hold on to every memory. The objects connect to each other to form a meaningful whole, an archive of a life. Each object is carefully documented with a little note next to it; enhancing the idea that this is indeed an archive. In contrast to Tenger’s Sandık Odası, the space is organized almost like a museum, with displays and explanatory captions. The title of the work suggests the act of hoarding, but the display and organization contradicts this premise. The viewer is forced to assume that each object, however mundane, carries a meaning.

Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, 1996

In Liu Chuang’s Buying Everything On You (2006-present), it is the viewer that constructs, or imagines the character. Chuang offers money to strangers on the street in exchange for everything they have on them at that moment. The result is a display of neatly arranged items on a white surface: wallets, clothes, underwear, phones, keys, receits, shoes, etc. Like Kabakov’s objects, Chuang’s displays are also too neat, like they have been recovered from a crime scene and layed out on the table for registration and examination. The eerie display of these objects enhances the viewer’s urge to ‘investigate’ this absent owner and imagine a character based on the evidence.

Liu Chuang, Buying Everything On You, 2006-present

Collecting

Curating objects: artist as collector

This part will be based on the analogy that the artwork in itself is a curation. Whether it is an installation, a painting, a video, or presented in any other medium, the artwork is a merging of separate, usually juxtaposed parts. Therefore, with each artwork, the artist collects and curates. The artwork is a micro collection in itself. These ‘collected’ parts are abstract; as in they are ideas, or fragments of ideas. However they present themselves as images, depictions or found objects. Artists, especially those working with found objects are fervent collectors.

Collecting personal objects

Objects acquire personal meaning arbitrarily and over time. Not everything monetarily valuable or aesthetic turns into an object of personal meaning. On the contrary, these kinds of objects are harder to become personal because of their inaccessibility. Their collectively accepted value puts them on a figurative pedestal. The monetary value cannot be disregarded and affects the personal and emotional value that the object may hold. For example, generally speaking, a family heirloom china set is not something you use all the time, or take out of its display case often to look at or hold in your hand. The most simple items can have more personal connections with their owner; simply because they are more involved in the daily life of a person and because they are only important to that one person in a unique way.

The artist may also collect personal objects for a fictive character, in which case the collecting is a conscious act; but still contains a personal approach. The fictive character is imagined by the artist to its smallest, most mundane details. Collecting for a fictive narrative is based on intuition but also requires informed choices. The objects need to be plausible as personal souvenirs. If the artwork has multiple found objects, they need to be coherent within themselves and the narrative. Orhan Pamuk’s museum, the Museum of Innocence, is a successful example of this curation of found personal objects. Each display case is an artwork, meticulously curated under a theme. As a whole, each display case is also consistent with each other, linked with a timeline. The objects are collected from thrift stores and were once the personal items of many different people, but together they tell the story of one individual.

Museum of Innocence

Collecting for inspiration

Found objects are not only significant once incorporated into artwork; but also as sources of inspiration for the artist. The objects the artist is surrounded by or exposed to are just as decisive in the creation process as the books he/she reads or events that happen around him/her. An exhibition at the Barbican Gallery during February-May 2015 entitled Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector was dedicated precisely to this interaction between the artist and the object. The personal collections of 14 artists including Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst were displayed in separate installations. For the viewer, this is an extremely insightful experience because these collected objects are almost always directly or indirectly responsible for the shaping of the artwork. These installations of the artists’ collections are reminiscent of curiosity cabinets in their eccentricity and seemingly random connections.

Hanne Darboven's collection, courtesy the Barbican, photo by Rainer Bollinger