Spoils
Lance Pearce >

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Things, reconfigured.

Long slopes, smooth glides, shining cusps, abrupt halts, his pen weaving and willowing across the empty landscape – Dennis Potter, “Last Pearls”

There are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages – Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?” (1)

Walter Benjamin suggests, in his now seminal essay 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,' that the modern sense of subjectivity and individuality is defined by the mentality of the collector. At some point in the nineteenth century, Benjamin claims, the modern bourgeois subject invented himself (and I use him here very deliberately) by shifting his relationship with objects. The creation of private, interior spaces – drawing rooms, studies – facilitated the emergence of this new subject who from then on defines himself and his position in society by and through the objects with which he surrounds himself. In Benjamin's own words, “for the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past" (2). The modern subject is here conceived of as a subject who designs, and under this new regime objects take on a  significance not in terms of their isolated particularities, but become instead a sort of parti pris, a taking of position related to the objects that one has chosen to collect, and how one has combined them. 

Bruno Latour articulates this change of emphasis nicely when, in discussing the contemporary resonance of the word 'design', he argues that there has been a shift from thinking about objects to thinking about things, such that “matters of fact are turned into matters of concern” (3). The increased emphasis we see today on the designed aspects of our world – from the smart phone, a style magazine, a chillwave mp3 blog, to  increasingly functional and beautiful lived environments – have lead to a rather different understanding of objects and things. Whereas the object stands alone, speaking of things rather than objects invites a far richer understanding of just how many different discourses and affects go into the things that make up our surroundings and constitute these surroundings as an environment.

The significance of this new relation to objects as things lies in the impossibility of separating the object out from its placement within designs of various kinds. Things come into being as a result of concerns – the uses they are to be put to and what they are meant to say about their users – and their life as things continually attracts a variety of newer concerns as the frameworks and assemblages they are involved in change, thus maintaining them as objects upon which concerns are inscribed and from which they are inseparable.

We seem in this sense to be entering new territory, a new world of design. With the importance of design demonstrating that we are no longer modern (since its emphasis lies in reconfiguration, refiguration and reconstruction, rather than the modernist tabula rasa of starting anew), or as Latour has provocatively suggested, we were never actually modern anyway (4), Walter Benjamin's figure of the collector reveals himself to have been acting in a kind of bad faith. At the same time prescient and guilty of a false abstraction, the collector treated objects as if they had significance in and of themselves, as if it was the object itself that mattered. In fact, what the modern subject's self-actualization through objects revealed is that objects are only significant, or matters of concern, in terms of the combinations they are put to use in, and the concerns that they thus mobilise. Such a way of thinking about things as designed objects, always already implicated in some thing or another, speaks to us now more than ever because our lived environments are so clearly designed and likewise subject to a continual process refinement and redesign. An object is no longer something to be apprehended and known, it is a node within an environment within which its placement generates affect and meaning.

The apparent totality of a world conceived as design is enough to raise questions about the place of politics in relation to aesthetic practices. When philosophers speak of the increasingly designed environments in which we live, they mean this in the most literal sense. We are all collectors insofar as we understand people through the things they own and display, but this is no longer exclusively the domain of collectors of rare or foreign objects. Instead the idea of the good life seems to be of surrounding oneself with aesthetically refined objects. An iPhone will improve your life because it allows for the possibility that you can be absorbed into its clean white functionality. It is a fully immersive environment that produces interconnectedness as a form of affect. This is the other side of what Boris Groys speaks of when he writes about the aestheticization of politics (5). While the sense in which people now ‘self-design’ allows us to locate them within a political field, making it clear that this particular individual is this kind of person and not another, it also trivialises this politics since the agency of the self-designing subject often appears indistinguishable from simply having good taste. This taste towards ever more refined things – essentially towards luxury goods – aestheticizes the world, but in such a way that looks very much like that insidious spectre of commodification. We are becoming subjects of design, which is arguably to say that we are ever more subjected to the tyranny of design.

The significance of the object/thing for art today reflects its privileged position as a means of articulating identity, desire, and politics. It seems to be only through things (and not objects) that we can intervene in the webs of significances that constitute the concerns or disputes of these areas. The first epigram above, from a Dennis Potter short story shown to me by Lance Pearce, goes a long way towards offering a framework to understand where to place Pearce's art. In it, Potter vividly describes the act of writing as involving all context and no signification. The emphasis falls on the frames which make meaning possible – the shape of words and letters, the page, the act of movement of writing itself all take place on an “empty landscape.” If a book or a story is a thing as the art-object is a thing, it has a meaningful existence only insofar as its legibility is the result of an elaborate construct of relations, whose precise and yet malleable configuration determines its effect.

Close and careful attention to objects themselves invariably results in an understanding of these objects as things which, channelling Benjamin, Hito Steyerl has suggested are “never just object[s], but fossil[s] in which a constellation of forces are petrified" (6). In moving one's gaze closer to objects, one is invariably struck by the outside forces that work on a thing to make it appear as it does. Pearce's careful and particular attention to certain objects – very often found-objects that appear in strange and unlikely pairings – highlights the manner in which objects, taken from their usual contexts and placed in new ones, disrupt the frames of reference through which we understand the object. Instead, the new configurations that Pearce assembles out of objects that are frequently bureaucratic, institutional and tied very specifically to certain functions, generate significances that are very different to the individual objects in their usual settings. Indeed, in a certain sense these combinations refuse signification, but in doing so are suggestive of the interactions that take place between objects as they continue to be redesigned and reconfigured.

Tim Gentles, 2011