We had a workshop to help us write about our object in preparation for the video we were instructed to make. One of the exercises I really enjoyed was writing about an object we remember, getting to unearth and express the memories of a long lost childhood toy felt curiously cathartic.
In the workshop we were also directed to consider both the physical and emotional characteristics and baggage of objects, and use those to give the object a voice. I felt that humanizing an object helps us consider traits inherent to it in a very natural and instinctual way, which leads us to get to a series of conclusions about it in a relatively easy and relaxed manner.
We picked random objects from a box and were prompted to think what voice would they have and how would it speak. The object I took from the box was a rubber glove. Being a soft, floppy, and reasonably thin object, I imagined it having a lazy, dragged down and nasal voice.
Then, with partners, we had to create a dialogue between both our objects, and I feel like the one between mine and Brooke’s object worked really well:
We created a scenario in which they were two stoner friends living in a basement flat, which fit very well with the lazy, slow voice I had given my object and Brooke’s friendlier and lower, yet equally slow whale-shaped plastic object. I thought the exercise was pretty fun, and very helpful in providing possibilities for considering the characteristics of objects in an intuitive and light-hearted manner.
In preparation for my video exploring the object, I conduced further research on satirical and comical objects, and directed them specifically for ashtrays which were one of the objects I was exploring for my project idea.
The ashtrays I ordered online had just arrived, so for the video itself I focused particularly on studying the form and social baggage behind the ashtray.
Having dropped the first idea I had, I became interested in two other ideas for projects that I had been developing simultaneously. One of them, inspired by the extinction rebellion posters, was creating a series of satirical protest posters or t shirts. An idea behind it was questioning the current fashionability of protesting social causes and creating products with very shallow political messages as mere vehicles for creating “cool looking” merchandising.
I went on to doodle some of these ideas but didn’t develop them very far, and they ended up evolving into something else as I went with my drawing impulses:
The other idea I had was exploring the contradicting relations between ornate and pretty smoking paraphernalia and the purposefully repulsive anti-smoking health warnings on tobacco products.
After the V&A visits, having figured that the objects I took interest in had particularly comical and satirical tones, I started thinking up my first ideas for projects. The first one was exploring the mythology of toy guns and questioning the implications of marketing killing machines as toys for children. Furthermore, I was questioning a trend of banning realistic toy gun sales yet still allowing colourful, “child-like” toy guns to be sold, and wondering if that really helps solve the problem or just masks or even aggravates it. Here is the first experiment I made with this idea on Photoshop:
One of my immediate execution ideas was colouring real guns to comment on toy gun legislation and violence and war culture socially ingrained in children in general, so I took a picture of a real gun and colourized it in child friendly colours, then added a googly eye.
I do think it turned out kinda cool for a first test, but this idea soon died out when I started exploring other very different ones.
From the 5 objects I had narrowed down from my initial extensive collection of pictures taken at the V&A, it was now time to select one to be the object I would work closely with for the project. This is the object I selected:
According to the description, it is a slip-cast glazed earthenware produced by James Sadler & Sons Ltd. in Staffordshire, 1947. It is important to note that it was conceived a couple years after the end of World War II. The object’s comical proportions and the absurdity of shaping a ceramic kettle as a war tank drew my attention, as a common household kitchenware item tends to evoke to me the absolute opposite as a tank does. Homeliness and comfort vs war and destruction.
It got me thinking more about imbuing everyday items with satirical political/social messages, which I believe covers one of the quintessential aspects of an artefact: Being telling of their time and context.
On a previous post I mentioned that I visited the V&A 2 and a half times. On the second self directed trip there my phone’s battery died just as I go to one of the final rooms of the ceramics exhibition I was looking at, which had this object. I saw this object and thought it was the one I liked the best so far but had no way of photographing it, and I had forgotten my charger at home that day.
So I ended up going to the museum one third time the next day before class only to take a picture of this one object. While there I couldn’t resist taking a better look at the ceramics exhibition, which I thought was fascinating, as well as the glass (especially contemporary) and architecture ones which I had not seen before. It’s amazing how the extensive collection of interesting pieces in the V&A can just draw you in and have you get lost wandering.
In the end I’m not even sure if this object really was my favourite or if the effort of going back to the V&A just to take a picture of it added to me having chosen it. Not that I mind too much. 😛
Turns out the objects we had selected from the V&A, photographed and printed, along with the physical ones we were asked to bring along with us (I brought a broken toy gun handle and a red flower pin I found on the floor on the street) were going to be used to emulate gallery exhibitions in the RCA.
We all left our objects and pictures on our base room tables and were prompted with picking out others from our colleagues, and then to assemble them into exhibitions in groups, taking into consideration what different ways the objects we picked could interact with the objects our group mates picked, what meeting points were there between them and how we could use them to build narratives to showcase them.
This is what the exhibition I assembled with my group looks like:
And here are some of the pictures of the process before getting to the final result:
We had an exercise in class in which we were shown a sequence of objects and prompted to draw one part or aspect of each that interested us together at a time, gradually adding to one imaginary object montage. These are my two final drawings from the exercise:
I loved the exercise, not only because I think picking apart parts of different objects and references and adding and blending them to create imaginary forms is already a big part of my practice and sketching, but also because it made me consider objects as a collection of individual parts each with their own realities and natures that join to create something else entirely, which helped me deconstruct the objects I had picked from the V&A to visualize them more in depth.
Furthermore, taking note of objects that seem to be build on a similar fashion was one of my interests through the trip in the V&A:
From the extensive list of objects I’ve posted before, we had to pick 5 to bring to the RCA. These were the 5 I picked apart from the others:
As I’ve mentioned, some big interests of mine during the research were humour and political activism. I take interest in satirical objects that tell serious stories through fun and carefree approaches. I also took some interest in studying toys, as I recall enjoying a lot interactive toys that involve building and creating like the one pictured as a child.
One very curious thing happened during the V&A trip was a performance I accidentally got involved in in the photography room. As we entered the room, there was a set of clothes laid out on the floor. The sneakers had flash lights on. On the other end of the room, there was a guy sitting on the floor charging his phone on the wall, not wearing shoes, and he had the flash on his cell phone on as well.
I sat on a bench to rest for a while and made eye contact with him, so he greeted me and we started talking. I asked if the clothes were his (which I wonder if he was waiting for someone to do) and he gave me a dismissive answer and asked if I could help him. I said yes and he asked me to hold him as we walked across the room and he spoke in sorts of reflective aphorisms, doing what seemed to be contemporary ballet dance moves and making these strange sounds as he talked that made it sound like he was speaking backwards.
This went on for quite a while and our interaction was fairly long, he asked other people for help in a similar fashion throughout and went on to interact with the clothes on the floor, sometimes putting some of them on, sometimes removing some of the underclothes that he already had on, which I believe made some of the people he interacted with kind of uncomfortable at points.
He seemed to have been a fairly experienced performer, as he was very disinhibited and his movements and weird sounds he produced were very well executed and quite beautiful, so I really enjoyed the general experience.
A couple things annoyed me a bit throughout, though. There was an apparent lack of importance that the intricacies of the people he interacted with had on the general performance, as his act didn’t change much depending on the people he interacted with, which I think would add a lot more depth to an apparently interaction-based performance. He seemed to be using the people he interacted with as mere vehicles for his movements and narrative, and their varied inputs didn’t seem to matter much in the general act. Maybe this was the point, though, maybe he wanted to reflect on the discomfort set off by his asking for help or something. Who knows.
The other thing that was a bit disconcerting for some strange reason was the girl that was with him, which was seemingly his friend, and had a wide smile of friendly admiration throughout the whole performance as she took pictures. She seemed to know pretty well what was going on and to enjoy it, and this, along with the fact that she always stood fairly close to him but was never interacted with like the other people around him kind of broke the immersion of the performance and made it seem less honest in a way. I’m not sure if this should matter as much as I make it seem here but it did create a strange artificiality throughout the interaction.
My friends took some pictures of the whole thing, here are some of them:
All in all, I thought it was a very interesting performance and wish I knew the guy’s name to check more of his work. I enjoy the appropriation of gallery spaces for independent artistic practice and the whole thing got me thinking about the intricacies of interaction.
After the initial project brief we made a class trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum. The experience was both very inspiring and very overwhelming. The museum is huge and it is very easy to get lost inside by just following objects that catch your attention, and to find yourself going from appreciating huge middle-age marble statues to examining a pink hello kitty toaster.
Our brief for our trip through the museum to respond to the objects we saw as inspiration to create new work. Our goal (which I thought was a very clever way to inspire us to create and get us thinking about where our art/design work can live within modern society and culture) was to reinterpret specific qualities or sets of qualities of objects to create our own products.
More specifically, we had to choose a list of 5 individual objects from the museum (which would later prove very hard to choose from) that we could reinterpret. I really enjoyed that brief and was pretty inspired and eager to start thinking about my work.
I went around the museum trying to capture any objects that piqued my interest at first, but I had to stop myself from stopping at every object to take a picture, so I went on to focus more specifically on objects that I could see sharing some particular qualities with my own work (which were still a lot).
I won’t post every picture I took inspiration in, as I was considering hundreds of different possibilities for doing work with every different object I saw, but these are some of the images that I selected out of them:
A common theme I noticed from the objects I photographed in the museum is my interest in humour. I like how objects that look fun and playful seem out of place in the midst of the mostly sober (in regards to tone) majority of artefacts. Other themes that I took interest on, not necessarily present in these pictures, but definitely in the wider range of pictures I took in the museum, are modern design, bold colours, political activism, religious imagery (which there was a lot), strange creatures, curious juxtapositions, anatomy and human faces.
Also, walking the museum with Ian was a treat, hearing him tell stories and reasoning behind some of his favourite pieces was very inspiring to get me thinking of exploring implications in objects that I wouldn’t think of otherwise.
Caio's Graduate Diploma 