Relations Between Art and Consumer Object Livia Marin Firmani
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RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: TROPE OF ESTRANGEMENT Relations between Art and Consumer Object Livia Marin Firmani Goldsmiths College University of London PhD Thesis 2012 I declare that the work presented in the thesis is my own Livia Marin Firmani 1 Acknowledgments Thanks to my mother for her tenacious support; to Alan for innumerable discussions and proof reading sessions; to Margarita for her insightful comments; to Fundación Andes for their financial contribution, generously offered to this project; to the Government of Chile for granting me the possibility to carry out this thesis; and to Michael Newman, my fifth supervisor, for helping me finally to find the way through this long route. 2 Abstract This research explores the relationship between objects and subjects and asks to what extent objects are constituted through an act of subjective interpretation, and by which they enter into a circulation of meaning; or to what extent objects, as things, escape a full determination by this act of interpretation. Through the analysis of a variety of artistic practices (including my own artistic trajectory) and drawing on different philosophical traditions, I will argue that the object can neither be reduced to interpretation nor can it be theorized as ‘outside’ language. Conversely, I claim that, although linguistically mediated, the relation between object and subject is characterized by a space of ‘undecidability,’ which arises as a consequence of a partiality in the nature of the encounter between them. It is the nature of this partiality that I will address in this thesis. 3 Table of contents Abstract.........................................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 1: THE WORK OF ART AND THE EVERYDAY...................................................14 Something escapes....................................................................................................................14 Palimpsest, from omission to hybridisation..............................................................................21 My Home and the anonymity of the everyday .........................................................................29 Work and context......................................................................................................................45 CHAPTER 2: APPROACHING THE EVERYDAY................................................................56 The artist in the guise of participant observer...........................................................................56 Unique and variable ..................................................................................................................68 Magnitude: remainder and excess.............................................................................................72 Erasing differences: identity and anonymity........................................................................78 Estranged labour (the hand-made and the mass-produced) ................................................80 Final Comments....................................................................................................................85 CHAPTER 3: PARTIAL PERSPECTIVES ...........................................................................87 The individual as partial subject ...............................................................................................87 Daily practices and the practice of art ......................................................................................98 Aspects of Use.....................................................................................................................106 Between Object and Thing (Distance and Imagination).........................................................114 CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................126 List of Illustrations...................................................................................................134 Livia Marin: Selection of works (1999 – 2012)..................................................................134 Other woks discussed in the thesis .....................................................................................134 Bibliography .............................................................................................................136 4 INTRODUCTION As a practice based research, the aim of this thesis is to find a way to specify the grounds of my own and like art practices that involve the consumer object. The central preoccupation of my practice and the one that situates the field of enquiry for this thesis is based on an observation of the relation between object and subject. In this context, this thesis asks to what extent the relation that one establishes with mass- produced objects is determined in advance, and to what extent, as objects enter the realm of things in its later consumption, they are misaligned from the implicit imperatives of the market, fashion, prestige, etc., and find a rather indeterminate status in the context of a lifeworld. I offer this question to reflect on the position of the artwork and its reception in a contemporary context. For I aim to situate my work through this question and to give rise to thoughts about the position of the artwork as an object within a market-driven world. Conversely, I want to contrast the way the consumerist object, denatured of its spectacular ‘aura,’ becomes intimate to the individual once adopted to the everyday life of its owner. It is within these crosscurrents of proximity and distance; symbolic and utilitarian significance; identity and alienation that I aim to situate my work to question how this has a resonance with the spectator. Just to give a broad account of my work: it employs techniques and strategies that are characteristic of Sculpture, Installation and Process Art, and, more specifically, it employs everyday objects as its raw material in order to enquire into the nature of how we, western subjects, relate to material objects in an era dominated by mass-production, standardization and global circulation. In this thesis I theorize the subject/object relation through the paradoxical figure of an encounter whereby the very act of the encounter initiates an escape. I put this in relation to the formal procedures and actual modes of making that characterize my art practice. Thus, I observe everyday situations where intended and unintended omission mediates the subject/object relation and through my artistic practice, I seek to estrange such situations so that that which is overlooked in daily relations may find a place of 5 encounter in the context of the artwork. In this thesis I deal with the possibilities and impossibilities of such encounter. While the study of the subject/object relation is generally directed either to one or other side of this dualism, I want to propose a conceptual and aesthetic approximation to the problem by centring attention precisely on their relation: that is, on the nature of the distance between object and subject. I do this through a number of different philosophical traditions (Blanchot, Foucault, Marx, de Certeau, Gombrich, Kant, Heidegger), which I read in relation to actual works of art (Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Allan McCollum, Richard Wentworth, Felix Gonzalez- Torres). I make one further proviso: that in the contemporary stage of late Capitalism to which we have arrived, the relationships of purchase and consumption are no longer solely determined by need and want, but are situated in a continuum with relationships of status, prestige and identity. And it is these relationships that my work primarily addresses. I argue that since the determination of the (consumer) object is established at the level of relations (social relations, relations of power, etc.), it is precisely in the relation between the object and its addressee where art practices are able to intervene. It is as a response to this historical moment when late capitalism determines a differing set of relationships to the market that my practice addresses and for which this thesis will offer a conceptual framework. This is the contribution I see this thesis as offering to the realm of art practice and that I hope is manifest in my own work. In relation to the conceptual field of enquiry, this thesis proposes, from the position of the practicing artist, that the relation between object and subject may only ever be partial, and that in this partiality resides an important aesthetic potential. The partiality of this encounter accounts for a space that is not yet determined, it is open for new modes of relations. Within this schema I argue that art has no privileged position for explication as such, more than any other discipline. However, it may have the possibility of bringing to acknowledgement this undetermined space. In this regard, I will argue that the task of art is not to cancel such partiality as already occurs determined by the encodings of the consumer object, but rather to provide the means for our awareness of it. Through an analysis of my work I identify a central strategy as a trope of estrangement by which to expose established orders and systems of regulation that determine relations between subject and object. I argue that through this strategy of estrangement a new perspective or point of view can be