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

BAD IDEAS NEVER DIE

Trodd, Tamara. “Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism and the Sculptural Film.” Art History 31.3 (2008): 368-386.

In this article, Tamara Trodd discusses the place of Tacita Dean's filmic works as framed within the history of modern art and moving image, in particular its subgenre the ‘sculptural model’. Located against this backdrop, Trodd suggests that Dean's visions however demonstrate a unique ‘lack of fit’- for the her films serve to appropriate, yet simultaneously negate elements of its own genealogical legacy.

The said model has held a differing utility within its relatively young history, initially as a literal signifier of 1920s utopian zeitgeist to a metaphor in subvering narrative driven tendencies of 1960s gallery films. So in tracing Dean's works within this particular branch of Modernism, Trodd suggests that her contemporary endeavors uses this recurring currency rather subversively, such as in Disappearance at Sea (1996): a disparate array of references and narratives are treated almost like readymades in themselves, anachronistically overlapping each other, forming a distorted sense of filmic space and time. This complex interplay of anachronism present in both its theme and medium, as Trodd notes, is what cumulates to its 'lack of fit' with its historical predecessors. In persisting to a state of ambivalence through its refusal to occupy identifiable space and time, the work alludes to a wide body of evocations- diversely ranging from unfinished ambitions of Modernist art, Smithsonian 'absence' and to her interest in the tragic tale of Donald Crowhurst.

A debate ensued in the discussion group, regarding the dangers of 'pigeonholing' in a (mis)reading of an artwork. Some felt the structuralist inclinations apparent in the text felt too archaic and too 'wanky' for describing Dean's works, especially given that the obvious cinematic overtones in Disappearance at Sea were only mentioned in passing. Yet I felt like there was more to the text than prescribing to an outdated mode of reading here. Trodd was not suggesting structuralist film to be a dominant context in viewing Dean's work. Rather, by delineating anachronism as a key concept in Dean's works, she was illustrating the utility of this historicist impulse as a way of negotiating Dean's own artistic legacy among this particular strand of Modernism.(1)

Modern art so often gestures back to art history in sourcing its inspiration(2). Chris Cutrone notes this to be the "potentially emancipatory" character of repetition, this mode of consciousness serving as a way of "re experiencing" history(3). As a result of this 'looking back', the work functions like a palimpsest, as a residual culmination of its historical precursors. Anachronism, as a conceptual barometer in Dean's works operates as a rhetorical force in uniquely animating the past in this sense, through the volatile dialectics of continual displacement.

Works of Ruth Buchanan show that such endeavours however do not necessarily have to be so funureal. Employing the same logic of reordering the past through lateral manouevres, her project 'Lying Freely' included staging meetings between three well known (dead) female writers, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame and Agatha Christie. Taking note of their personal struggles, such as facing writer's block and mental disorders, Buchanan gave a conceptual response to the idea of maintaining private autonomy as an author in the eye of the public. In 'Nothing Is Closed', Buchanan staged guided tour in the Rietveld Schroeder House(4), in which the audience were instructed to wear protective clothing and not make physical contact with the house, whereas Buchanan was free to. With her 'haptic choreography' (5) verging between complete seriousness and subtle absurdity, 'Nothing is Closed' threaded different historical registers to come alive again in a unique, present fabric of meaning.

(1) "While Dean makes films which engage with the work of remembering the past, her work emerges from an engagement not so much with obsolescence per se as with the anachronistic tout court."
(2) J. M. Bernstein, Lydia Goehr, Gregg Horowitz and Chris Cutrone. "The relevance of critical theory to art today". The Platypus Affiliated Society, 11th January 2011. Web. 17th April 2011.
(3) Ibid.

(4) The choice of location seems relevant because the formerly private house (now a museum) was initially designed to have minimal presence of walls- with the intention of creating a connection from inside to outside.

(5) "Lying Freely". Casco Projects.