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