Graduation Exhibition
I was fortunate to have the nicest juniors to help me set-up and look after my exhibit at the Graduation show (6th to the 10th of Dec 2012) - Aman, Azra and Vivan.
The toughest was putting up the frames manually, which kept us awake and working all night. Finally we decided to put up only 4 frames of the 11.
Book version 1
The website is almost done done done. Final Jury on Saturday. :E
Will never finish at this rate!
Eve of the 16th Submission - the presentation is nowhere close to over! (At Gauri’s Aunt’s house)
Meaning is Self Referential - Baubrillard
Meaning is self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object’s meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing’s prestige relates to another’s mundanity.
From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning — or a “total” understanding of the world — that remains consistently elusive.
Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In his view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a “simulated” version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of “hyperreality.” This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, “dies out.”
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” (2001)
As I am writing an introduction piece to my work, I stumbled upon this well articulated essay that i think provides a few quick insights into the contemporary study of “things”.
In this introduction to a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry, literary critic Bill Brown gave the name “thing theory” to the growing interdisciplinary body of literature devoted to material culture and issues of materiality. Serious interest in things is relatively new in the academy. Jean Baudrillard was right to observe, Brown notes, that “we have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.” Objects are “shamed, obscene, passive,” intelligible only as the “alienated, accursed part of the subject” (8). Entrenched habits of mind and practice lead us to tenderly dote on speaking subjects, hanging on every utterance, while almost wholly disregarding the crucial roles that objects play in our lives. The everyday banality of the chairs on which we sit, the clothes we wear, the windows we gaze through, or the glasses in our hands leads us to forget their existence.
Review 6 - the most dreaded of them all - done :) I am super relieved. Much more work to be done quickly, but mostly thinking it all through and tying the loose ends together.
To take back and reflect on..
- Articulate the more complex narrative that I want this project to convey in the end - the time has finally come to do this exercise because I have most of my content ready and still have a little more time to add and subtract, reflect on things that dont fit.
- Put the entire collection together in the format of the book within the next few days instead of mulling over details for very long - This is necessary
because right now I am still caught up in thinking up of new objects instead of looking at what I already have. I need to take a step back and examine
where I have reached with my (seemingly non-sensical) collection.
- Break the structures I have made inside my head about the format of this book and exhibition. Experiment with form of the book and the ‘found’ images.
Bring some of the dead things to life, wake myself up from the deep slumber I feel like I am in. Is this the effect of working with inanimate things in solitude? I feel like there is lot within me that is trapped inside and I have to let it out now in order to fill my collection with life.
- Re-work my language a lot. Today as I was showing some of my work I felt very detached, like I hadn’t written any of it and I was reading something written by someone else. The words lack the poetry I was imaging they would have.
- I feel extremely dissatisfied with myself. I think I needed to review my work like this in order to push myself to think more about what I am doing.
- My panel suggested I should focus more on the physicality of the objects, how people would interact with them and experience what I felt while collecting and curating the same.
