The Thing Itself
Profusion
The idea of objects having a social life is a conceit I coined in 1986 in a collection of essays titled The Social Life of Things. Since then, I have continued to be engaged with the idea that persons and things are not radically distinct categories, and that the transactions that surround things are invested with the properties of social relations. Thus, today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom.
Furthermore, any and all things can make the journey from commodity to singularity and back. Slaves, once sold as chattel, can become gradually humanized, personified, and reenchanted by the investiture of humanity. But they can also be recommoditized, turned once again into mere bodies or tools, put back in the marketplace, available for a price, dumped into the world of mere things.
In some way, all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory. All things are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite. Consider the objects of traditional plastic art, such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, buildings, or monuments. Despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, they are only momentary aggregations of material, such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel, or canvas. These underlying materials are ever volatile, which is why museums always insist that we “do not touch.” What is at risk is not just aura or authenticity but the fragility of objecthood itself.
Furthermore, it is not just the materials from which art objects are composed that threaten to break through the illusion of permanence. It is the very action of the artists, the craftsmen, the builders, and the framers that is always waiting to show its hand. The tear in the canvas, the crack in the glass, the chip in the wood, the flaw in the steel are not just signs of homo faber, but of the activity that art both conceals and celebrates. That activity is what allows for the subsequent activity of restoration or conservation to occur. In this sense, restoration and conservation are about more than preservation. They are a testimony to the fact that the very objecthood of art objects requires action in order to resist the historical processes that turn one kind of thing into another kind of thing unless one is committed to the project of maintaining the work of art as such — a permanent object and a repository of permanence. The corrosion of history only supports and intensifies the inherent tendency of things to move on to some new state in their social lives. And this is as true of art objects as it is of things in general.
It may be objected that this approach to art objects is suited only to an older world of art — plastic, representational, material, and bounded (by frames, structures, occasions, and tactile reality). What about the many traditions of action art, performance art, installation art, body art, and so on in which the lines between the object and the event, the event and its technological representation, the representation and its context are all deliberately blurred to produce effects that are calculated to deny the illusion of permanence?
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Notes
A version of this essay will appear shortly in the Mumbai-based journal Art India.