Objects, Consumption, and Desire

March 07, 2006

Gell again.

I am still really annoyed by last week's discussion on Gell and whether objects have agency.

I thought we spent a lot of time lost in the cul de sac of the debate as it emanated from or around anthropology, and also just figuring on what he said in that thick jargon. I was ranting about this to a friend of mine.

It's my usual exasperation about much of academic writing--smart people wasting their time by limiting their discussion to the four people who take the time to read the impenetrable stuff they write. Of course Gell has interesting ideas, but clarity is a beautiful thing.

Clear readable writing--the opposite writing style--is one reason why I thank and praise the clear writers we've read so far in this class--Howard Becker and Harvey Molotch. And my friend told me that she had lost a book I sent her (entitled, Don't Think of an Elephant--it's entirely worth reading) and then suddenly she said, the book reappeared ....

I have this experience often that objects in plain sight vanish, or I can't find things for a week. Like they're playing games, I wrote her.

She replied,

Regarding the book playing games, is that not what is known as
synchronicity? I'm more interested in whether you think books are
inanimate. A fork is, but is a book?

Love, Sarah

I answered:

From my knowledge of the laws of physics (scant), I know that everything has electrons in motion, everything is moving, and most of what we think of as an object is vast amounts of empty space.

The fact that it seems congealed into an object (a diamond, a book, a paper clip) is an illusion based on the limits of our perception (touch, sight tend to make things seem more coherent than they
are)...

Agency? Yes. I remember Danika talking to me about my search for a new home. She had just come back from a Feng Shui lecture (does this have more credence because her dad is Chinese? yes) and having her say to me ( i wrote this down)

Chairs are like people--Do they like being where they are?
Ask them.
Ask house: do you like being here?
Ask neighbor's house: you like this?

You think this is crazy but have you tried it?
Everything is a living thing.
Everything has energy.
You want your house to nurture you, not to show other people
You get sidetracked by particular features, listen to the general feeling

location
good chi
wholesome ofrm
smooth flow
friendly and loving, warm and full and abundant.

For me, despite the sociological theorists, the world has not become "disenchanted." Part of the enchantment is the belief that humans are not the only sentient creatures. I'm not sure a fork has less agency than a book, but I appreciate her asking the question.

Posted by Andrea Siegel at 07:04 AM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2006

A life of their own

Alfred Gell illustrates a necessity for an anthropology of art that is not based in a difference of aesthetics between art- and non-art objects, and thus engages in a redefinition of what constitutes the art object itself. Gell rejects the ideas that the art object is distinguished simply because one decides it is a certain kind of object, or because they have specific meanings and value systems intrinsic to their composition. Rather, Gell argues that “the nature of the art object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is embedded,” and that an anthropology of art is a theoretical study of these social relations. This seems to me to become directly related to an argument over the functionality of an art-work – not in terms of the purposes it serves or the roles it takes on, but actually linked to the “active-ness” of an object. That an art object has agency is a powerful idea, allowing for an object to enact change in the social world in which it exists.

Dormant’s writings on the Somerset House illustrate the ways in which 18th century British paintings of the Royal Academy and their relationship to space in time (in terms of their presentation, locations for viewing, etc.), could arguably have changed the way in which future British painters painted, thus changing not only the way art objects were constructed but also the effects an art object would have on it’s environment. Within the Great Room, where these objects were displayed, the art objects are hung in such a manner as to focus one’s point of view, or perception, not solely on the objects, but on the other viewers as well. Thus, both the objects and the viewers actively engage with each other in a performative exchange, both enlivening each other, both defining each other through their “actions.”

Similarly, in Donald Norman’s writing, we see the active effects of an object on its users. Norman’s discussion of the non-art object explicates the idea that the design of an object garners credibility and usability over time, and if the design proves lasting, it is because its users have come to accept its active functionalities. These objects, then, produce a sense of normality that is not innate to the object’s properties. Through invested usage over a lengthy amount of time, its users come to understand its function as normal – the light switch on the wall is for a person of “normal” height; the back of a chair is for a “normal” person’s posture; the size of the toilet seat is for a “normal” person’s size. The repeatable usage of the object in relation to its sociality comes to define the social beings that use the object, changing and establishing the way we comprehend, value, and give life to the objects we have created.

Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

Understanding the object...

The readings of Norman and Gell offer new insights in the object-social world relationship. Whereas Norman blames the designer for not designing objects of every day life the way they fit the best to the users, Gell strengthens the idea of things as social agents to a point that he quasi animates the object.

Considering the examples, both authors give, I can see a connection between Apple computers, Norman is talking of as examples of user-friendly design, and Gells “Toyolly” named car. The relation between user and designed object or ‘patient’ and ‘primary/ secondary agent’ is emphasized to put the status of the object itself in question. If we think of art objects as well as designed objects, they both criticize the idea of an object as a completed “Werk” created by the genius of an artist. Instead, Norman recalls what design is proposed to do, namely fulfilling the wishes of the consumer under difficult economic conditions. Therewith, he understands successful design not as a superficial (aesthetic) modification of the appearance of an object, but as a mergence of form and function (with focus on the utility).

Gell attacks the Western theory of art for reducing objects, ‘ethnographic’ art objects, to merely aesthetic qualities, so that they fit in pattern of Western art criticism. He rejects semiotics as inappropriate to approach the power of the art object, because understanding objects as ‘sign-vehicles’ with meaning would reduce the importance of the material world of objects (and the context in which they are made). But what he proposes instead, somehow confuses me. Emphasizing the traditional lines and conventions, in which art objects are embedded and by which artists are influenced, might be another way to reduce the importance of the artist (and reminds me of Becker’s artworld), but naming an object as an index to stress the social relation between art object and recipient, isn’t that at the end just another entry to symbolic meaning? What is left if we reduce art object, recipient and index to pure causation? Function?
My impression from this reading is that on the purpose of assessing the limits of theoretical discourses, Gell attempts to make his concept of agency and transformation fit to every object. Like he finds it problematic to adapt western aesthetic ideology to objects of the Malangan, I find it problematic to transfer his system back to Modern Art objects.

Posted by Teresa Reiber at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

Object as Agents in a Spatiotemporal Framework

I have never realized how simplified our perspectives towards the temporality and spatiality of objects are. I am considering: works of art are in fact great pieces of Western or indigenous past; the things I buy for myself today are for the ‘here and now’; and when I see the “NYU baby” creeper in the bookstore I can’t help but think, “ok, this is just way out somewhere in the future.” In all these examples I am the ‘agent’ and the object the ‘patient’ to use Gell’s terminology. However, if we explore the temporal and spatial dimension of objects, as did Gell, Dorment, Donald and Clunas for this week, we’ll see how objects can also become agents in social relations and how they determine each other’s design, form or function in a temporal continuity or spatial arrangement.

Gell’s analysis offers at least two different perspectives on how to approach the temporality of objects. He starts with the Husserlian diagram of time-consciousness and argues that “as our temporal perspective on an objects shift, the event undergoes a series of modifications from the standpoint of the cognitive subject.” (238) In other words, first Gell, after Husserl, points out how our perspectives on objects change in time. Then he continues arguing that the event / object “is seen through various thicknesses of future and past time, which alters its appearance, its temporal patination, so to speak.” (238). Gell’s attention here shifts from our temporal perspective to the temporal relation between objects and he demonstrates how artworks of different times retent / portent each other. (In McCracken’s article on the ‘patina’, we find the fusion of these two approaches; McCracken demonstrates how families’ relation to certain objects changes within time, and at the same time he introduces the term ‘patina’ for those physical (?) attributes of objects, which mark temporalities.)

What I find crucial in Gell’s analysis is the exploration of how works of art of the present both comment on the past and determine future works. Since for Gell the condition of agency is to initiate “causal sequences of particular type” (16), it is easy to understand how artworks in dialogue with each other, or artworks retenting / portending each other, become the agents who / which construct the “causal sequences” in the evolution of art.

In “The Design of Everyday Things” Donald Norman describes the same phenomenon, only in the world of ordinary objects and design. Norman demonstrates how designers, under the pressure of market competition, create objects which portend future improvements and modifications. In other words, commodities of the present already advertise the next generation of products, thereby constantly establishing the causal sequence which Gell conceptualizes as the condition of agency. (By the way, talking about temporalities, Norman’s article was quite an amazing time-travel! His anticipations in relation to future computers illustrate, too, how both our perspective and the objects themselves change in the course of time.)

Craig Clunas and Richard Dorment both focus on the spatial / geographical dimension of objects. While Clunas reminds the researchers of commodities and consumption to broaden their perspective / horizon and look beyond the Western tradition, Dorment in “The Great Room of Art” demonstrates how the physical conditions in an eighteen century exhibition space determined the features of paintings to be hanged there and also how, in the competition for appreciation, the exhibited paintings influence each other. The social relations between eighteen century paintings and between paintings and audience takes us back again to Gell’s idea of “casual sequences,” and what we find in the end is that the painters (as creators), the audience (as recipients) and the artworks are all simultaneously ‘agents’ and ‘patients’ in the eighteen century art world.

The methodology Becker offered for our research was to map the social world of the analyzed object. While Becker’s primary focus was the object’s relation to human agents, the authors of the articles for this week broaden the idea of the social world by incorporating also the object’s relation to other objects into their analyses. I hope that a methodology deduced from Becker, Gell and Dorment will help me find contexts in which the focus of my research, the money clip, could also be considered as an agent and to highlight “causal sequences” it may induce.

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 01:52 PM | Comments (1)

Art that "changes the world"

The most interesting thing to take away from Gell’s piece is that objects have some sort of agency, or at least, simply shouldn’t be read simply as ‘symbols’. His attempt to create an anthropological definition of ‘art’ encompassing more than just the ‘art worlds’ of Western societies (as Clunas calls for) is illustrative of the difficulties of this approach, as the limiting nature of his thesis shows.

For one, I am not convinced by his claim that aesthetic properties cannot be studied anthropologically using a different approach (is an anthropology of aesthetics really impossible?), and secondly his dismissal of other ‘art’ objects (as evidenced by the short discussion of Canaletto) that seemingly contradict his definitions of ‘art’ makes me question the robustness of his general project.

I also have a problem with what I read as being Gell’s central thesis: “I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.” For one, the paragraph on Canaletto (p. 242), where Gell admits that the oeuvre of such an artist does not fit into his model, calls into question the overall usefulness of his model. By dismissing this sort of issue (“I am far from claiming that the model just advanced would be particularly useful in all art-historical contexts”), it remains unclear just what share of ‘art’ Gell ignores. Can Canaletto’s work be more adequately described in a semiotic manner? It seems that Morphy’s definition of art (p. 5) handles this sort of work better than Gell’s.

This reminds me of a common dichotomy in literature on Western classical music between ‘consolidators’ and ‘innovators’ (I may be mis-remembering the terms – ‘consolidator’ doesn’t sound right). Basically consolidators take existing forms and norms and work within them to create more ‘perfect’ works within those frameworks. Bach is probably the best example of this type (his actual compositions were seen as ‘old-fashioned’ when he was writing them, and were only really popularized posthumously by Mendelssohn). On the other end are the innovators, such as Beethoven, who broke away from conventions to create new ones. This conception ties well into Dorment’s article, where Gainsborough is seen as an innovator, questioning the conventions that other artists were working within, while those other painters were the consolidators. There was innovation going on there, too, but it took place within that sort of limited framework.

Gell’s discussion of art as a distributed object (either over an artist’s lifetime or, in the case of the Maori meetinghouses, over a longer period) parallels this discussion. However, his attempt to ascribe personhood to objects (for me, anyway) goes too far in ignoring what are very real issues involving symbolism and aesthetics.

Posted by Mark Treskon at 01:19 PM | Comments (1)

Body and Objects as mnemonic devices

I loved this week’s readings. There were a lot of interesting details I was planning to write about, like the transformation of entertainment, exhibition, the place of individuals in museums, the importance of the place (my art history professor used to say that “the site is the context), or, as Duchamp said, that it is us who have given the name “art” to religious “instruments”, that is, “what’s art got to do with it?”

However, after reading Gell’s book, especially the conclusion, I have to focus on something that I have been thinking about for a while: The importance of the body as an object –as a “secondary agent”- in creating a continuum in time. I was reading an ethnography work by Luic Wacquant on the African American boxers training in a gym in a “ghetto” in Chicago. I was thinking how important their body is for these people to basically keep on living. A bodily capital in the true sense of the term, that was keeping them from the streets, helping them to live with their memories and giving them hope for a future “in continuum”-albeit most of the time they were wrong with their expectations.

The body brings past, present and the future when the body is dead as well. It might even be true that most of the time the body, at least as a metaphor, becomes more important in this sense. I am thinking about the public funerals for the presidents, or the importance of martyrdom and the public memorials for the “fallen soldiers”, for instance. At the smae time, in the case of memorials and cemeteries (maybe as another kind of memorials), objects do seem to have agency. Take the Vietnam War Memorial: People have been leaving objects on the site, as “traces” or “indexes” of their loved ones, that is, “the events or performances which brought them physically into being”(Gell, citing Husserl, 241). These objects have meaning before they are brought to the Wall, and at the base of the Wall they gain new, additional meanings. The dead, in a way, could be an example of “distributed personhood” (Gell, 21). Since there is an absence of the body, the ‘offerings’, as “something invested with their own social agency” (Ibid, 18), as “objectified memories” (231) help the dead and relatives of the dead to distribute their agency in time and space. The objects carrying the memories, like the Malangan carvings, mediate and transmits agency between past and present (Ibid, 226).

Yet, this is only one way of interpreting the offerings. The cemeteries and the offerings might be future-oriented as much as past-oriented. Gell explains that the Maori meeting house, the index for the “agency of the ancestor”, as the ancestor’s body, is not a corpse or a memorial to the departed (256). Similarly, the offerings for the dead either tucked inside the coffin or left on the grave site reveal the aim to keep the dead from returning. In traditional African American graves, for instance, these offerings are broken before they are left on the grave site, in order to “break the chain”, that is, to protect the living.

The living, on the other hand, “carries the memories” via the objects they carry with themselves. Objects become very important in differentiating and protecting themselves against the erasure of the individual in the mass. I am also curious as to what we can say about people stopping on the streets during “memorial siren” for the martyrs of national wars. I am thinking especially about a photograph taken in Israel: tens of people left their cars and stood on the street just like monuments themselves. Talking about Israel, can we say that Kibbutzim, memorial forests and lands, are objects as mnemonic devices as well?
Aren’t these examples showing the continuum of time that Gell talks about?

Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 01:05 PM | Comments (2)

Cigarettes, prison, and agency

after reading the gell and the klein pieces i couldnt help but think of the role cigarettes play in prisons and the agency they have as objects. they are the principle form of currency, where monetary exchanges are not allowed. having exchange value somehow gives them agency in that they cause prisoners to do all sorts of things to get them, trade them, and eventually smoke them. sexual favors are exchanged for cigarettes, violent assaults are committed over cigarettes, or to get cigarettes. they trade them for drugs, as well as for inocuous items like soap and toothpaste. but as an exchange item they have a curious quality, as klein pointed out, in that using them, smoking them, destroys them. it kind of gives the term "burning money" new perspective. they therefore confer power and status in that by smoking cigarettes, prisoners are destroying an object of great exchange value without exchanging it for anything which has some practical use value. then again the use value of the cigarette is in reducing stress, which is ever present in a prison environment. anyways, i feel a bit scatterbrained with this comment but i couldnt help but think about cigarettes in this way.

Posted by Robert Weide at 12:54 PM | Comments (1)

Tradition: The Institutionalized Institute of Original Thought

Alfred Gell, in his work Anthropology of Art, does a great job of laying out an argument for an anthropology of art. He does this by going beyond traditional thoughts of aesthetic as a judgment for art and brings in ideas of social relationships and social agency. Art is not created by or for institutional influence but as a by-product of social life. Anthropology of art accounts for the production and circulation of art objects as a function of its relational context with social interaction. The main idea that ties his theory together is that objects are able to have agency, in that; they are able to initiate a causal sequence. He takes special care not to say that they have minds of their own, but does point out that people have relationships with objects such as cars or meeting houses and that these objects have influence on our lives.

As people interact with each other and when objects interact with each other, in social situations, a 4th dimension is created. It is the ‘current of creative energy that gushes forth through matter’. When we look back at the indexes of our social relationships we near something that resembles tradition, an extended memory of agents from the past. To build on Douglas; the objects as agents, help us make sense of our world more so than objects given no agency.
Dorments piece illustrates Gells point that both people and objects can have influence in social situation. The pictures on the walls both influence the visitors and the other pictures around them. The structure of the gallery with “the line” has a great amount of influence, so much as to stop works from being hung. The gallery at the Royal Academy, had a strict policy of where works could be hung, due to the importance of this institution artists painted in accordance with these rules. “The line” was tradition because artists knew that they must act a certain way to be shown in the gallery. This tradition allowed for continuity in the space itself, but caused change in British painting style. This ‘artworld’ would not seem to fit into Gell’s definition of an anthropology of art, because these paintings were being produced with institutional influence, the Royal Academy.
I read the Clunas article as an exercise in time-consciousness using academic papers about consumption in three volumes called “Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteen”. It shows how academics writing off one another and approaching the topic of consumption from different perspectives can result in a tradition of thinking. In this case a traditionally Western idea of consumption. I think Gell would argue with Clunas that this discussion needs to become holistic in its thinking by examining more than just Western practices of consumption.

Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 12:34 PM | Comments (1)

Bathrooms at MOMA, etc.

"The Design Challenge"

Near the door to the main floor ladies room at the new MOMA is a wall of not clear (consistently foggy) glass that gives the person washing her hands privacy from the outside world. I love this. The handle on the toilet stall door–so straightforward–I turn it 90 degrees and it goes into a long groove in the wall. Happiness. Simplicity.

The toilet insults me, assuming I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to flush. Instead it flushes whenever it damn pleases, which includes interrupting my meditation.

The sink wells are tiny and round, leaving the counters splashed with water. Whoops. Bet they look good dry.

Each of the faucets has a dashing white cloth tied to its neck clearly a leak problem, not a desire to give the faucet a debonair
scarf--but so styling is the temporary correction that I forgive all.

"The Great Room of Art"

The art at the museum looks surprisingly gorgeous. I think it was Peter S(can’tspellhisname)al the reviewer at the New Yorker said that Monet’s Water Lilies look like a big dirty band aid on the wall.

The painting actually looks gorgeous. However, he’s indicating something important: many of the walls are the wrong shade of white, and make the art look yellowed. Many of the collages have yellowed newspaper. The walls should be kinder to the art.

I found myself smiling often as I walked through the permanent collections. Cezanne’s fruit, Picasso’s people, Kurt Schwitter’s (sp?) collages, Rousseau’s lion with the sleeping man (and the small black-haired girl, maybe six, sprawled on the floor beneath the painting–she was drawing a lion on paper on the floor) looked so good, they don’t glow exactly, but they gave me a joy unexpected.

Posted by Andrea Siegel at 09:48 AM | Comments (2)

Biographical objects

A Great Room painting, an academic publication, the qwerty keypad, and a Kula necklace. If we start with Gell's call to treat things as agents, and not as mere symbols to read in the language of indegenous aesthetics, we must uncover the role of such objects in social processes. By sketching the biographical career of objects, Gell's anthropological theory of art sounds to me more sociological (if we assume that sociology isn't just about big institutions but too is the study of social relations), and it sounds more like Becker than he lets on.

If we sketched the biographical career of a computer keypad (Norman), a Great Room painting (Dorment), or an academic text (Clunas), a few themes emerge:

1. Objects have agency that in part is exercised as inertia. There is a certain path-dependence to an object, art or technical, such that once it sticks and people become familiar with it, it's not going anywhere. Congratulations, qwerty keypad!

2. Conventions and economic pressures create an isomorphism of style. Somerset House's practical limitations result in a style of British art that holds until an innovator comes along wth a justifiably new way of doing things. So the distribution system and its constraints affect an object's production (echo Becker). Similarly, art production is confined by the rules of a market game that the artist is either forced to play or inevitably loses. This notion of ubiquitous market pressure and "consumers get what they want" comes out in the Dorment and Norman, and is a nice contrast to the critical approaches of Ewen and Ewen from weeks back. "Selling out," it seems from this week, is just a necessary outcome of market capitalism. Deal with it.

3. Of course, any unidirectional lay of blame for design is oversimplistic, for as Norman shows, a product comes out the way it does when several factors jointly produce it: aesthetics, economics, usability, manufacturability, and safety. Form naturally should meet function in an object - when we step aside and let the design processes evolve without the fetters of competitive market forces.

4. Methodologically, we could trace the biography of an academic work by cross-referencing bibliographies and show, like Clunas sort of does, that ideas and theories don't just come around only because they are right or superior, but because they happen to be the right theory at the right time.
It's fun to do this with Talcott Parsons.

5. Art objects, as well as Clunas' academic text, cannot be looked at as aesthetic symbols alone, but rather we should treat them like little files that belong in a big filing cabinet of other objects, social contexts, and social relations. In this respect, no one object is ever novel, but always exists in relation to ones before and after it. The object is part of the duree, it is made in reference to its peers, predecessors and successors. So there is no such thing as pure innovation. Shucks.

6. Lastly, and this is a purely self-serving comment, Gell backs me up that a person, like oh, say, Twiggy, is indeed an art object. Anything could be, and as a look, or an image, she has secondary agency and is "made" by artists, consumers, producers, distributors.

That said, my new object is the false eyelash. More on that later...

Posted by Ashley Mears at 09:26 AM | Comments (1)

production: after de-centering we're re-centering

Gell offers an interesting perspective for analyzing individual and collective consciousness through objects. It turns out that his writing shouts for comparison with Bourdieu’s habitus and Becker’s production of an art world. Last time we talked about Becker’s de-centering of production of objects while Gell seems to be re-centering the process.

It seems that Gell’s book addresses objects as an entry point for studying social relations in which they are embedded. Objects are seen as externalized collective consciousness, “there is isomorphy of structure between the cognitive processes we know (from inside) as ‘consciousness’ and the spatio-temporal structure of distributed objects in the artefactual realm.” (222) This conclusion is built on the following argument: 1) social individual is a sum of her relations 2) internally she is a replication of what she is externally, therefore, what she is externally is a replication of what she is internally 3) what we are externally, and as ‘distributed agents’, is a “spread of biographical events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of material objects.” (222)
The above mentioned gives the impression of Bourdieu materializing. For both Gell and Bourdieu human is made up of experiences in a network of social relations. However, while Bourdieu’s experiences got inscribed in human body and became a part of unconscious operating, Gell embodied the past experiences and memories in objects that have been or are constituting human as an agent. Along with the difference of emphasis body vs objects there it is important to notice that Bourdieu places biography in unconsciousness while Gell in memories. The first is more determinate and while the second allows indeterminacy and manipulation. I don’t like the emphasis on unconscious because it is difficult to understand how people can be socially mobile, adjust to different cultures (e.g. stories of a few Russian soldiers left behind in Afghanistan during the war for independence getting married and adapting to local culture), etc. It seems that things are more about learning rather than being ingrained and beyond our control. Even if things would become unconscious what about repressing negative experiences or if I remember Freud right the need of an authoritative father figure for a boy towards which he needs to rebel when the time comes if he is to become ‘the man.’ Now, memories have the beautiful feature of being forgettable. We can forget events and redraw history the way we like it, we can learn new things and abandon what we’ve learnt before because we know the new thing is better or more appropriate. Gell would say that things become transformed, modified. I don’t want to be unfair to Bourdieu and perhaps somebody could say that the things that could be learnt should be seen as part of the cultural capital or something. I don’t know enough about Bourdieu’s distinction between habitus and cultural capital to make any serious arguments about it.
The tricky part is comparing Gell and Becker production of objects. The first one tells us that an art object is an index from which we abduct agency; we attribute intent to the artist who is behind it. Because of this attribution of intentive agency we can make connections between different pieces of work through time into an oeuvre of an artist or heritage of an ethnic group. By doing this we get a structure of objects that is isomorphic to individual or collective consciousness. I had trouble connecting Gell’s embedding of Duchamp’s oeuvre in the particular networks and intellectual currents of the artist’s time as well as production of Maori meeting houses in tribal competition. This sounded more like Becker although from what I have read Gell center’s the production in an artist or a collective of artists while Becker de-centers the production of objects. Shouldn’t Gell come up with some sort of networks of production in which to embed his distributed objects (themselves represented as networks)? Is Gell’s re-centering of production conservative or one can do it either Gell’s way or Becker’s depending on what one wants? I don’t know, yet. In relation to this: What was the difference between Aniko’s description of a performance and Harvey’s interpretation of what would Becker say about it? To me it seemed that Aniko’s choice of elements required for production was narrower than Harvey’s but not any worse. What is the point of adding more actors and materials needed for production of a performance or an object? What do we get from it and what is the rationale for drawing a boundary to an analysis that would not make it sound as completely arbitrary?

Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 12:39 AM | Comments (1)

February 25, 2006

Who are objects for?

There are many possible answers: designers, artists, manufacturers, consumers, viewers or observers. It would seem that ultimately objects must be of use to their consumers, but as Norman points out so clearly conceptual design can often trump practical usage, leading to a variety of design “errors” that make objects difficult to use.

Who are objects for? There are many possible answers: designers, artists, manufacturers, consumers, viewers or observers. It would seem that ultimately objects must be of use to their consumers, but as Norman points out so clearly conceptual design can often trump practical usage, leading to a variety of design “errors” that make objects difficult to use.
The question of usage (including the viewing of objects created as “art”) emphasizes the ways in which objects shape humans’ physical world. Human bodies are physically affected by objects; they make adjustments in order to use them properly, sometimes most uncomfortably. Having adjusted, it is harder to change. (I wonder if, in the days when secretaries did the bulk of typing required for commerce, any designers proposing to change the qwerty keyboard asked a group of them what they thought.) I most often think about this phenomenon in my own usage of objects in relation to my height and in relation to being left-handed: as a result of these two traits, in which I differ from the majority of the population, I find a number of objects difficult to manage. Hence I pay attention to how I adjust myself or which objects I prefer, when I have a choice, because they allow me to compensate in some way or are designed with features that facilitate my usage given my traits. However, as Norman notes, “There is no such thing as the average person. This poses a particular problem for the designer, who usually must come up with a single design for everyone; the task is difficult when all sorts of people are expected to use the item.” (p. 161) Objects send messages to consumers about what the “norm” is and they may feel not “normal” as a result, in subtle ways, small calibrations of physical discomfort and adjustment that they may not consciously realize they are absorbing. Thinking about this disjuncture in design between conceptualization and usability came to mind at the start of the Clunas essay, when he comments on the “turn toward the history of consumption and away from the history of production.” (p. 1.) The history of design is influenced by both of these strands and I wonder how best to describe the interplay between all three. What can such a description offer academics as well as designers in terms of working with objects?

Observing or “seeing” an object is one form of usage. When observing an object that comes from another time and/or place, such as a work of art or an artifact that might be on display in a museum, the contemporary viewer might lose sight of factors pertaining to the object’s original context and creation that significantly alter how the object is perceived or “used” to illustrate something about where and when it comes from. In the Dorment article I was struck by the awareness created by paying attention to the way that the paintings discussed were originally hung and considering that they may have eventually been designed to function within that particular set of display practices. If objects are viewed outside of these practices are they in some way or dimension not being seen? Clunas’ critique of the pieces in the series he refers to as “Culture and Consumption” speaks to these questions.

Figuring out how to determine what information an object does yield about its usage and, as well, the tricky assumptions that might be made by studying an object for clues without considering (or being able to consider) its context seems to be a significant issue for anthropology and especially for its sub-field of archeology. (I imagine that similar questions arise in the field of criminology – something that Rob might be able to speak to in greater detail.) In what ways are objects “reliable” sources of encoded information? In what ways do those studying objects need to be aware of possible misreading? As a museum educator I often wondered about the curatorial information I inherited and whether it was as true or accurate as asserted, given these issues. I had them in mind as I started reading the selections from Gell and was thrown off by an early comment of his used to illustrate his distinction of anthropology as a social science, not a humanity. He notes “It may be interesting to know why, for example, the Yoruba evaluate one carving as aesthetically superior to another (R.F. Thompson 1973), but that does not tell us much about why the Yoruba carve to begin with.” (p. 3.) Having not read Thompson, I still wonder if the aesthetic hierarchy could not be a way into understanding why the Yoruba carve after all. My hunch is that it should be possible to follow the practice and eventually come to its genesis. What might such research look like and how might it inform our research for our own projects? To speak of objects in terms of “agency” or even “prosthesis” seems limiting to me because the terms do not capture the ways in which objects can be composed of multiple layers of history, design, usage, iconic status, etc. I wonder what other terms might be useful to consider in seeking to describe the power that objects have to represent social interactions and processes.

Also, is there a significant difference between an object (and later artifact) designed to be used in some fashion from an artwork designed to be displayed and viewed? How would that be described? It seems to me that at least the nature of the intended physical interaction with consumers is different. In the professional world of museums this distinction sometimes divides by distinctions made between types of museums: art museums vs. history museums vs. science museums. Some museums do contain both art and artifacts; some objects may be considered in both categories. It may be that objects are hard for sociologists to think about because they themselves offer only material evidence; the social relationships that constituted the object are not in obvious action. In educational programs museums get around this problem through the use of narrative; the phrase “every object tells a story” comes to mind. But often the stories we know affect what objects can tell us.

Perhaps an overarching message is that studying objects requires the study of the human processes, physical, cognitive, emotional, artistic, etc. that go into constructing them and manipulating them in the physical world. Is this too simplistic or redundant? It may be, but it seems that this truism works both for those seeking to design new objects (whether they are new creations or “evolved” versions of existing objects) or to study objects that have become objectified – more useful to be viewed than used.

Posted by Leah Strigler at 09:13 PM | Comments (1)

De-Animating Objects

Ever since I first read Latour, I have struggled with the idea that objects have agency. Although I have read some compelling arguments that it could be fruitful to look at objects this way, something about it doesn’t sit well with me. To my mind, objects are inanimate, lifeless, passive, until a human agent (or possible even another animal) manipulates them. It is true that objects, in their solidity, may constrain action and agency, but why should we impute agency to them? They are material constraints but they don’t act. Agency to me implies intention. So while it may be interesting to draw analogies or metaphors that impute objects with agency, in the end, it is misleading.

Two of this week’s readings are guilty of using metaphors to anthropomorphize or biologize objects. Less guilty is Norman’s “The Design Challenge” who speaks repeatedly of the “natural evolution” of an object. This organic metaphor culled from evolutionary theory evokes the image of an object unfolding naturally into some end form. Absent from this metaphor is an analysis of the “work” that people put into the design. Objects do not just unfold, but are acted upon, manipulated, altered by human agents. At every stage of this process, decisions are made – decisions that can be arbitrary or at least otherwise. Designers do not discover design improvements; they create them. Objects do not have a biology or an ideal form to which they strive. The idea of natural evolution, while perhaps romantic, is disingenuous. There is nothing natural about its evolution.

Aside from Norman’s use of this unfortunate metaphor, the rest of his analysis does not hinge on it. Indeed, the stories of designs that he recounts are saturated with human agency manipulating objects. Alfred Gell, on the other hand, goes much further in attributing agency to inanimate objects. He has an extended discussion of this very issue, in which he hems and haws, but ultimately retains the idea of artifacts as “social agents”. He is “concerned with ‘social agents’ who may be persons, animals, divinities, in fact anything at all” (Gell, 1998: 22).He claims to not want to “promulgate a form of material-cultural mystcisim” but his constant appeal to biologic, agentic metaphors does just this. The Malangan carving gets skin that it shares with the New Irelanders. A person’s personhood is dispersed through material objects. The Maori meeting house has memory. By the end of the paper, I found myself rolling my eyes at his outlandish attempts to eliminate the barriers between the living person or group and the object.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing here. Maybe there is some penetrating insight I’m not seeing. If anyone can explain it to me I’d be willing to listen. But for my money, organic metaphors and imputing inanimate objects with agency, while creative, miss the point. It is much more important to analyze how human agents negotiate the material world, than to make the materials of that world into humans. I’m calling for the de-animating of objects.

Posted by Owen Whooley at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)

February 24, 2006

what would graffiti be without spray paint?

as i had mentioned at the beginning of the class i would like to do my project on spray paint as a cultural object in the graffiti subculture. it is ab object that has first and foremost a strong utility value, however the different brands and sub brands and the colors offered at different times and by different brands have a great deal of meaning and cultural significance for graffiti writers.

Posted by Robert Weide at 09:44 PM | Comments (1)

More......or less

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopened in 2004, there was lot of talk in the Danish Media about “Danish Design Taking over MoMA”, as one of the national newspapers put it. The story went that the Royal Danish General Consulate in New York had picked up on the fact that the museum was running short of funding in relation to its extensive renovation, and therefore they had initiated the “the Danish Design Project” which aimed at providing the redesigned museum with Danish Design in all its “public” spaces. MoMA had accepted the proposal, and the Danish government, various Danish corporations and furniture manufacturers as well as anonymous donors sponsored the whole thing. The reason why I choose to bring it up here, is that “form and function”, or more specifically Sullivan’s famous dictum “form follows function” has been and still is very central to the concept of “Danish (modern) Design”. As it is put in a press release from the Royal Danish General Consulate:

“It is Honesty, openness, and usefulness are key words in the Danish approach to the design of everyday objects, with beauty never the goal in and of itself, but rather the result of a thorough investigation into the best way to solve a specific human need”.

Apart from emphasizing the genuine interest in the end user, the press release also focuses on simplicity, namely how Danish Design is characterized by the wish to “simplify without oversimplifying”, thus bringing a more “demanding simplicity” to the design world.

When reading the articles about this project in the Danish newspapers, it seemed that everyone involved in the project was being quite overt about it being a marketing stunt. No doubt they had good things to say about Danish design, but it was the idea of Danish Design in MoMA and the exchange-value in that for the Danish furniture manufacturers that was on the agenda.

When I moved to New York a while after that, I was quite surprised to find that even though the Danish Design was very present at MoMA, it was only present as “Danish Design” in so far that the one looking at it or using it knew that it was designed by Danes. There were no pamphlets or signs that informed the visitors that the furniture and accessories in the museum were Danish, and hardly anyone working at “ground level” (i.e. the museum store, information, etc) seemed to know either.

In relation to the press releases published by the Royal General Consulate, MoMA as well as Fritz Hansen, a Danish Furniture Manufacturer, there was something a little silly about it all. They all waxed poetically about Danish Design, linking it to the collection of the museum and the museums’s mission statement about being in the forefront of everything – in short it was so deliciously tautological, everyone concluding that Danish Design was good because it was now in MoMA, and MoMA was good because they could recognize the quality of Danish design.

Now, “Bourdieusianly” indoctrinated as I find myself to be from time to time (mostly when I am having a bad day), I more or less landed on Danish Design being a load full of BS, the “quality” of which only exists for the ones with the proper cultural disposition allowing them to recognize it in the museum in the first place, and secondly, to the ones able to make sense of it in relation to the museum’s collection and the history of design. Seriously, at the end of the day, there are so many other simple things you can sit down on when taking inn the width of a Monet….tsk tsk…“Less isn’t more”, “less is a whore” compromising its principles for it’s pimp, a.k.a. the Danish Government!

And now to the readings. What could one imagine they would say about all this? Donald Norman is of course dealing with technology in design, but nevertheless he argues that there exists such a thing as genuinely good design. The remote control device which he promotes as an example of “overcoming complexity through organization” or “modularization” is actually designed and manufactured by the Danish company “Bang and Olufson” – which furthermore is seen as one of the heirs to the Danish Design movement established in the 1940s and 1950s. So in short, provided that designers do not feel the pressure of time and money, they can develop sustainable design with the end user in mind. The idea of Danish Design being characterized by sensitivity to simplicity and function could well have some validity outside a bloated press release.

Richard Dorment, on the other hand, would say that “the form”, “the Art” or “the design” of the furniture does not follow function in a narrow sense. It’s not about the individual end user being the one taken into consideration when determining its function. Rather he would say that “Danish Design” was developed in relation to or actually followed the conditions under which it was seen. “Beeing seen” rather than “used” seems crucial. Form follows the degree to which someone wants something to be exposed or put on display in a specific social milieu…I think that is what he is saying anyway.

And then there is Alfred Gell, who with his Anthropology of Art agues that “the form” or more specifically “the Art” follows agency and intention, and perhaps that “form/art” only makes sense in the context of specific social relations. You need to address “the form” within the actual time and space in which it is seen as an actual material manifestation. So are Dorment and Gell on the same wavelength here, or is it just because I want them to be?

And finally Graig Clunas whose article I DO find very interesting. Nevertheless I feel somewhat perplexed about his presence in relation to “Form and Function” because he seems to be all over the place. At the risk of making a fool of myself, I wonder if he can be used as an example of approaching the “the form and function” of academic writing? Look forward to see what the rest of you make of him in relation to Monday’s class – or something else!

Posted by Sarah Carlson at 03:28 PM | Comments (1)