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