idiot savant

Moreno, Gean and Ernesto Oroza. "Generic Objects." E-Flux Journal #18. E-Flux, 2010.

Recently I have come to notice a small pool in the altar of a baptist's church that I attend. Measuring at approximately 2x1 metres, the pool has been built into the existing altar exclusively for the purpose of giving baptisms and remains incognito under a beige lid at all other times.

A slow train of thought then began to unfold: I found it devastatingly hilarious at first that the pool was at extreme discrepancy with its usual leisurely associations!!!!!!! Apart from its unusually compact size, the pool retained all the capacities of a generic one, having been fully equipped with a metal handle and descending steps. Adjacently placed next to the altar, was a door to the changing room for the convenience of its newly blessed participants. I wondered whether this strict insistence on customary tradition of baptism was worthy of such budgetary splurge, especially when the church relies heavily on donations to incur its expenses. The chairs were imported from China and someone was probably charging to arrange those flowers by the altar every week. Then I reached an obvious conclusion of how the economy of profit-driven trade and materialism seemed to have hopelessly staked out every corners of life, to an extent that just the presence of the pool seemed blasphemous and its transcendental aspirations futile. It felt like everyone was working towards everything yet nothing at the same time.

This rather unsettling experience of displacement was echoed in the text 'Generic Objects' by Gene Moreno and Ernesto Oroza. Pondering on new possibilities that the said objects could bear through transgressing from its intended usage, the text contended on the cultural potency that was inherent in this process of transgression. Despite their mass-produced birth, the invisible yet vastly existence of generic objects come embedded with rich network of distributive relationships, by the very lack of character in its function- from factories to shopping malls and office spaces. This is why the perceived effect of discrepancy, in other words when the generic object is at odd ends with its usual functional cycle- is so heavily felt, due to its immediate associations to the circuits of labour and mass production. Compressed within the generic object is a vast overlapping circuits of infrastructural relationships; And within it, a broad array of experimental possibilities remain open, be it for its function or design. Like when someone rolls up advertisement flyers to swat a fly, or when holes are pierced in empty coke cans to make for a temporary bong.

I felt this idea of semantic 'flexibility' as granted by the aesthetic of generic, to be resonant in Walter Benjamin's text 'The Cultural History of Toys'(1). Claiming that the concept of a 'child' is a relatively new one (produced in the 19th century along with the decline of the Church, as craftsmen hired by the former sought to look elsewhere for its foreseeable market and developmental phase between children and adults became demarcated), and hence the concept of toys, new- Benjamin suggested that it is the act of play, not the object of toy itself that produces imagination. (2) And this is why, he adds, that a good toy should be flexible and open ended in its potentials as much as possible- because a toy high in its specificity (as a product of industrilization catering to array of needs would have it) will lead away from a real, authentic 'play' (3).

At work here is a similar logic that Moreno and Oroza contended in 'generic objects': that the blandness of the object will shift its focus from physical attributes to a performative potential. A child does not need to require a true likeness of a stethoscope in playing Doctor; only a rope might do. Perhaps it is rather the 'genericity' of the object than its embedded mass zeitgeist, that lends to train of creativity. Every object, be it an art or a mass produced one, are all due products of its economic or historical backgrounds. But one does not have to resort to its place in infrastructure in rethinking its functions. Reflecting on my experience with the pool, the outlook on Moreno and Oroza's text felt hopeful; that the ability to imagine and making mental connections, can still retain inviolability at least to some degree -however terrifying the rapidly developing forces of technology or globalization may be.

(1) Benjamin, Walter. "The Cultural History of Toys". Selected Writings: 1927-1930. Harvard University Press , 2005.
(2) “Today we may perhaps hope that it will be possible to overcome the basic error – namely, the assumption that the imaginative content of a child’s toys is what determines his playing; whereas in reality the opposite is true. A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman.” p.115

(3) “Because the more appealing toys are, in the ordinary sense of the term, the further they are from genuine playthings; the more they are based on imitation, the further away they lead us from real, living play.” p.116