Kate Clinton: Talking Points Series 2 humour

Email sent in explanation of work shown at 'This is the Front Room'

I was going to place a text next to series of tea cards, the ones people collect. They are a way of thinking about distribution of images, I also like the fact the part of the collection is from tea or smoking (in the case of the similar smoking card collectors items) and that both these activities facilitate conversation, but that tea is the particularly feminine version of these activities. (But collecting is seen as a boys game!)

The idea is also to think about the way in which we collect images and objects in a way that makes them meaningful-this is the start of the project-and the beginning of deconstructing our assumed roles alongside particular objects. 

The tea cards display a variety of images from different "collection titles" and these relate to cultural icons-people, objects which meditate death, objects which mediate the supernatural and objects which are so large that are only comprehensible in these objectified terms

Proposal: Work for the show "This is the Front Room" July 2009

Talking Points: a proposal for a research project/

How can we create an ethnography of objects, in an art context, by looking at the role they play as talking points-as social things-as mediators of our own socialization?

 

I want this piece to become an object, for you to talk to it and through it talk to me and I will through this object talk to you. Today is the introduction, the introduction of the Talking point; the social life of an object. Here I will discuss with you the possibilities of objects to socialise among us, their ability to give us endless creative and conversational possibilities. How can we intervene, can we place objects in new contexts to elicit specific conversations? The work today begins to explore the sites of objects, the ways we organise our objects and the mode of distribution of the object. How can an object teach us, how can an object express the person who has created or appropriated it, or the person that gazes on it?

We will explore, education and accessibility, over-consumption, fear or environment (for example) through the animate/inanimate object, things people laugh about, ritual objects (created or appropriated for the purpose), the feminist object, the racialised object, the global object, the religious object, the political object, the ethical object, the public object or the private object, the celebratory object or the object of commiseration and even the psychological object. We can explore for example whether humour changes the politics of the object does it move the object to centre from the periphery as the elephant in the room?

 Michael Taussig, asks why do ethnographers never talk about the heat (or the weather), meaning what about the physical environment surrounding the subject of study and how this affects them.

 

…let me first admit to a more narrowly aesthetic if only slightly less cosmic complaint connected to heat: that having made many visits in my adult life to what are called the Tropics, I am perplexed as to the absence of heat in movies and stories set in that Torrid Zone.

Michael Taussig/My Cocaine Museum, 2004

 

Maurice Bloch talks of ritual practice and the extreme formality of communication and language that these situations encourage

 

The acceptance of the code implies compulsion. Communication has stopped being dialectic and has become a matter of repeating correctly. This treatment of dance, like the treatment of song above, seems to go against the generally accepted view of art as a kind of supercommunication, a supreme occasion for creativity. By contrast I am arguing that art is, in fact, an inferior form of communication.

Symbols, Song, dance and features of articulation: Is religion an extreme form of traditional authority? / Maurice Bloch, 1998

 

Alfred Gell states

 

Human beings are bred and reared under controlled conditions which are technically managed, so as to produce precisely those individuals for whom social provision has been made…

Technology and Magic/ Alfred Gell, 1988

And speaks of the “Enchantment of Technology”; asserting that

it is technology which sustains magic even as magic inspires fresh technical efforts… The flattering images of commodities purveyed in advertising conincide exactly with the equally flattering images with which magic invests it’s objects. (1988:9)

           

 

Below: An extract taken from email sent to The Elephant in the Corner, 20/05/2009

My thoughts were to at the least write an essay for the show on the subject of "Talking points" and at the most create a project either that would be performed/executed in the show, or which would document a series of interventions and actions taken and a record of the outcome-very anthropological-or maybe just to propose how this may happen. The problem with doing it at the gallery- as you discover when I actually tell you what I am talking about-is that it would work well at a PV for example-but not so well if the gallery was empty.

Anyway the idea would be to intervene and explore the social-conversational potential of objects. This may take the form of an essay offering people the opportunity to see the works in the gallery, and any other, or in fact any object as a talking point-I guess as a prop. Also asking people to think about the idea of taboo subjects, are these objects mediating awkward or difficult conversations-or are the objects-"elephants in the room" of which they are just too uncomfortable to talk about, so they are ignored.

In order to make it more performative, I guess I could include my own "Talking points" in the gallery, manipulating the possible things that they will talk about such as feminism, political situations or even nostalgic remembrances. The problem with this in the art context is that they will then always have that added layer of meaning for people, people may not feel comfortable just discussing a phallus as just that, or a picture of out prime minister as again just that, triggering more art related discussions - 'why this...' types conversations rather than accepting the objects as they are and allowing themselves to explore them as arbitrary, yet meaningful objects.

The other thing here is whether I would make 'abstract' objects, or arbitrary juxtapositions, or carefully crafted specific object, or if I would just use found images and props.

The idea for me as well is that as an anthropologist you are liminal, you are on the threshold of being part of a community and an outsider, but the most important things which keeps you luminal is the fact that you are not allowed to participate or intervene or you will invalidate your data (many would argue), so I think this kind of intervention is a rebellion for me also.

The final way this could be enacted would be to place objects in situations where I am present, outside the gallery context either on the next table or even in the room, or on the same table-perhaps in a pub, and see what ideas this may generate, or if people even notice or engage with the objects. I guess essentially this would look at the social potential of objects.