Uninvited Objects

Back to this discussion of "household objects". It's Christmas, and I had been going along quite pleased and surprised that I was getting away, for once, with a sort of Christmas-routine boycott, without even having to announce it or define it as such. The "recession" and all the attendant hubbub about thrift, seems to have veiled my refusal to play the Christmas game this year. I got up this morning and it's all rainy and blustery outside, and not fitting well into any particular cliché about what Christmas day should look like. Unclear on what exactly Bruce and I are going to do with ourselves today (aside from a couple hours of more-serious-than-usual cooking,) I made some tea, checked my email and looked at the New York Times online.

Well, it turned out that we had not made it through completely unscathed; a few foreign objects had insinuated their way into the house and are now our property, our responsibility.

As a maker of objects myself, I am deeply and permanently offended by the abundance of aesthetically (and environmentally) inexcusable objects in the world. I do my best to keep kitschy and faddish objects, and most things made of plastic, out of my midst. Every now and then, someone bestows such an object on me, with good intentions. After an appropriate amount of time has passed, all of these objects enter a box called "stuff people gave me," that I then guiltily, sadly, return to the closet. Even garish or noise-making birthday cards present a moral dilemma to me-- admiration for the person giving me the card makes me display it, even though it is aesthetically reprehensible and corrupts the serenity of a room. I see objects that have been "gifted" to me as being intrusive and beyond my control. Kind of like television.

I rarely read fiction, I tend to be too impatient for it, but I read Ian McEwan's Saturday this week and really liked it. There's a part in the book where the protagonist has moved his elderly mother to a nursing home and is, many months later, sorting through her belongings in the house she left. This reminded me of my last blog entry about the meaning attached to household objects.


"She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts-- without her, her old teacosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no-one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end."


This also reminds me of the strange nature of student "art projects". An object being made by one of my 3D Foundations students might have many, many hours and much mental anguish invested in it. If it were to be dropped and broken, or, God forbid, stolen from the class storage shelves before it was due, this would count as a crisis. However, after an object has been critiqued, its value to its maker seems to drop precipitously. And, no matter how brilliant, once an object has languished on the shelves for two weeks after the semester ends, it officially becomes part of the pile I have to haul out to the dumpster.

When I ran the woodshop at Columbia College, my friend Chris Kerr and I once came up with an idea: we would make a hoop about 25 inches across and mount it on the wall. All 3D design projects must fit inside the hoop, just as a carry-on bag must fit inside the special bag-sizer at the airport. The hoop would in fact be the exact diameter of our 55-gallon trash drums, reducing our labour at the end of each semester.

Throwing away student art projects always reminds me that to teach sculpture is to participate in turning valuable materials into waste, and that sculpture is itself a somewhat environmentally unethical pursuit. However, in the catalogue called "A New Thing Breathing," the British sculptor Tony Cragg absolves sculpture in the following way:

"Sculpture, of all the objects and things that human beings deem necessary to make their lives more liveable belongs for several reasons in a rare and extraordinary class of its own. Rare, because even just looked at quantitatively, very few kilograms of sculpture are made on an average day, while many billions of tons of materials are made into other more 'useful' things. Extraordinary, because although sculpture remains for the greater part useless, unlike designed objects, it is an attempt to make dumb material express human thoughts and emotions. It is the attempt not just to project intelligence into material but also to use material to think with."

Some years have passed since Cragg wrote this, though, and it now seems essential that sculptors be more accountable for their use and disposal of materials. It's an issue that I thus far have not given adequate time and attention, but one that I should, particularly in the context of teaching.

Well, it's Christmas, so I should go and do something more festive than writing gloomy thoughts about how offended I am by ill-advised inanimate objects. I'm secretly saving up all my Christmas spirit for next Christmas, when I'll be in Finland, the Christmas capital of the world.