NO MORE FOUND OBJECTS
ZM
ITEM 1: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A black snooker ball screwed into a chunky silver bike chain, resting on an Ikea blue tarp.
ITEM 2: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A marble slab the size of a small fridge with a slim fit white linen dress shirt, flat against the floor, poking out the bottom.
ITEM 3: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. Lottery tickets scattered under perspex, over the floor. We tramp all over it.
ITEM 4: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. Kleenex tissues crumpled and scattered one by one through the galleryâs bright but narrow corridor.
ITEM 5: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A ring binder full of cutouts from a late nineties, early noughties teen magazine.
ITEM 6: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. Rubber chicken with a bundle of battery operated fairy lights stuffed inside it. The battery pack is trailing out the arsehole, it is hanging from the ceiling.
ITEM 7: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A ribbon of laminate flooring, fashioned into a bow and mounted on the wall.
ITEM 8: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. One and two pence coins in a plastic folder, nailed to wall. Plastic miniature items (dolls, clothes, dice, monopoly pieces, keyrings, tiny toys) in plastic folder, nailed to wall. Slips of paper from fortune cookie fortunes in a plastic folder, nailed to wall. Toothpicks and matchsticks in a plastic folder, nailed to wall. Silver teaspoons, nailed to wall. Shark teeth, nailed to wall. Wicker basket, nailed to wall. Wooden ladder, nailed to wall. Vintage porsche car catalogue, nailed to wall. Net curtains, nailed to wall. Razor blades, nailed to wall. Unopened envelopes, nailed to wall. Fossils and bones, nailed to wall.
ITEM 9: White walls, concrete floor, natural lighting. Five snowglobes in a row on a concrete bench. Each have a tiny miniature playing card inserted in them, suspended in the snowglobe liquid.
ITEM 10: White walls, parquet floor, fluoro bright lighting. Wax grapes in a bunch, arranged around and on top of a mirror on the floor. The mirror looks like it is a weird jagged shape.
ITEM 11: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. The icing from iced gems arranged on the tip of a plastic music stand. Plastic battery operated tea light candles in a circle around a Keurig coffee machine on the floor. A flattened out amazon box in a frame. A coffee table with a genuine actual birds nest, in the middle of the birds nest is a black and white photograph (no bigger than a business card) of an ear.
ITEM 12: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. Plastic bottles with the air sucked out of them, sealed with duct tape.
ITEM 13: I was in a crit the other week, and someone announced that they didnât really like or enjoy that so much art (at the moment) is made out of found objects. My body physically reacted, I nearly actually lurched forward in agreement. Yes, yes, I too feel like there is a lot of found objects in art at the moment! Lots of found images! Found text! I donât enjoy it, I feel like I donât know what it means, what it says about The Culture, what it says about the mood and temperature of the art world at large. But then I like some of it, I deeply fuck with some of it, then some of it irritates me! I donât know where the line is, itâs making me itch. I donât know how I feel about the fact of it, as a palpable resurgence. Ah â- yes, that I donât like!
ITEM 14: The week before that I was looking round some of the Bloomsbury galleries with my seminar group, on a Condo themed school trip. We found ourselves in Brunette Coleman, looking at [xxx]. A bundle of metal objects pressed into a cube, placed on the floor. A group of crystal doorknobs, still attached to a small square of wood from their respective doors. Arranged in a vertical line and slotted into a plastic wall mounted container. No one was particularly impressed with the work: it was pretty sparse, weird objects, we couldnât quite figure out what was going on or why these strange objects were here, how they all related to each other â they were familiar and yet made strange. The gallerist mustâve heard us complaining to each other about the confusion â me maybe the loudest of them. He poked his head out the office and asked if we wanted the intro. Yes yes please! Well, the metal cube was a collection of objects pressed together until they were the size and shape of the inside of the artistâs locker at the metal workshop they use over in New York. That space: the inside of the locker, thatâs the size limit of the work theyâre able to make because the workshop is communal, shared, they can only make what they can fit in that locker. So this sculpture is pushing up against the limits of that interior spatial question, reverse Rachel Whiteread, mini-Rachel Whiteread, talking to space, real estate, property, capital, the limits of the artistâs ability to produce when that is maybe literally an artistâs job and the means of production for that work are controlled by external forces, mysterious, un-named. And the doorknobs were bought on eBay â the artist browses online auction lots and thought it was curious that the doorknobs and locks were for sale like this. This is exactly how they were listed, how they were sold, how they arrived â with the little odd squares of wood still attached here. Thatâs talking about where value sits, in the lock mechanism and the doorknob rather than the door itself. I guess that can be extrapolated out into a wider comment â yes, I guess but I wouldnât know. At that point I stopped listening because I was having A Thought about Found Objects and Value and where Value Sits in this conversation about Found Objects. So I turned round to my seminar group and said there was a Cedric Fauq essay that they might find interesting, about objects and spaces and meaning â I would send it to them!
ITEM 15: Brief rewind to April 1917. Marcel Duchamp (or was it? Art history cannot agree. It is entirely likely that Duchamp stole this idea from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an artist working with found objects at the time) took a photo of one of his new artwork: Fountain â a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt. It was published in a Dada journal called The Blind Man. The readymade was born: âan everyday object raised to the status of art by the artistâs act of choiceâ. And then, ah, avant-garde, landmark, art history, the rest. The act of choice: artists have transformative power, anything they drag into the gallery is transformed from real-object into art-object.
ITEM 16: In 2020 Cedric Fauq wrote an essay for Mousse Magazine called Transactional Objects Full of Contexts in Voided Sites. He writes about the practices of four artists: Carolyn Lazard, Ima-Abasi Okon, Cameron Rowland, and Abbas Zahedi. He links their practices up, producing a model for an updated conceptualism. These are all artists that make work with objects in a way that feels adjacent to the readymade, but their work is elusive, mysterious. Thereâs something going on with opacity, rejecting coherence or legibility, refusing the terms of display and exchange, something fails. That refusal short circuits a transaction, highlights it, gestures towards it, questions it. Itâs not about the actual act of transaction, but more the idea of it, the conditions of it â the fact that this is all taking place ~in an INSTITUTION~. That is like a nail in the coffin. Because the institution values the aesthetic or vibe-register all this is working in â minimalist, conceptual, reflexive. But the thing being undermined, ultimately, is the institution itself: the value it assigns, the value it holds, the function this value performs. The institution is the thing that makes the object readymade and all that is being ditched, sharpish. Cedric says it fancier: it is all being problematised as various refusals are enacted. I mean, I think. I think thatâs what this essay is about. Sweeping generalisations etc.
ITEM 17: Art is caught up in a representational paradigm: art is the practice of image-making. Untouched and unblemished by the blistering heat of Real Life, art is able to take anything (literally anything at all), absorb it, go ble-ble-ble-ble-ble, produce it as an image of the thing it was before. The image is not necessarily an IMAGE-image, like it doesnât have to be something that is explicitly a picture, two-dimensional, permanent, visible or even physically-in-existence. It can be mental, volatile, fugitive. It is ultimately just a kind of sign, a proxy, an Other, a representation. The whole process of art-making: conditioning things and objects into art, fashioning them into image. The image is it, the only thing that is ever farted out the other end of this process. Art is a practice of making images. Everything becomes image. The objectâs value, function, use as object falls away or becomes part of its image. Image-image-image.
ITEM 18: In making object/thing into image, is it also about making it strange? Is the process of art-making also about a kind of estrangement? From reality, from use, from function, from purpose, from familiarity? I genuinely donât know.
ITEM 19: Itâs worth saying that Fountain was the starting gun for the New York Dada scene: nebulous and sprawling thing. Anti-art. Non-sense, rejecting sense, absurdist, irrational, refusing certainty, refusing coherence, refusing the bourgeois conventions that made up the formal traditions of âArtâ (whatever that was anyway), refusing accepted definitions, refusing artâs representational paradigm, turning it into something absurd, undermining it in that absurdity, using the absurdity to question the very category of the thing they were refusing. Art that was also anti-art, art that hijacked art itself and turned into a bastard-thing, that could dismantle or attack the original from the inside. Manchurian candidate, kinda.
ITEM 20: I read that essay by Cedric Fauq a couple of years ago and it has been burning a hole in the back of my head ever since. Every time I see an object in a gallery, a found object, an object that could arguably be categorised as a readymade, I get this-essay-heartburn. It has become difficult to sort through the points made in the original essay, and the points I have bastardised and run away with in my imagination.
ITEM 21: Objects can be made into gestures and through these gestures they can speak! Two or more objects can gesture towards each other, speak to each other, speak over each other. Conversational, choral or contradictory.
ITEM 22: I am left with the suspicion that: to refuse the act of making something, to literally just choose something you have found in the world, to drag it into the gallery, to select, act of choice â that is both a refusal of and an affirmation of artâs representational paradigm. Itâs critique of the gallery (the aura of failure) and confirmation of its transformational power (real life -> image). It is still anti-art, it is still conceptual art. Is that a short circuiting? Can something actually straddle both categories? If it does, then does that dual-thing still constitute a bastard-thing, Manchurian candidate, does it still attack from the inside?
ITEM 23: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A kebab shop sign, but the sign is empty. Itâs just a box with lights and two panes of transparent plastic. There are a bundle of white used towels piled in the box instead.
ITEM 24: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A plastic cabinet with thin shelves. On each shelf thereâs an oven tapas item burnt to a blackened charred mass. Oven chip, curly frie (singular), sausage roll, potato smiley face. I speak to the gallerist who says that it reminds her of mayonnaise â how it is both delicious and then also abject and repulsive, simultaneously. I think about that Hannah Black This is Crap essay, how the abject is cycling back into the culture in a BIG WAY. And yes, mayonnaise is abject, isnât it?
ITEM 25: White walls, grey roll out carpet, enormous white Frieze tent. One booth is just full of inflatable penguins. They waft on the breeze as people walk past.
ITEM 26: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. An enormous engine is sliced neatly into delicate chunks, like a beef wellington. It is presented to us on a metal table. I look through the gaps.
ITEM 27: White walls, concrete floor, fluoro bright lighting. A silver plaque on the wall with black round font. Writing reads: short term letting, for a period of 6 months or less, is strictly prohibited at St Johnâs Court in accordance with the terms set out in the leasehold agreement. This includes Airbnb style lettings.
ITEM 28: In 2009 e-flux published an essay by Hito Steyerl called In Defence of the Poor Image. The Poor Image is a low-fi, grainy copy. Lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances. The Poor Image has been ripped, squashed down to the lowest most blown out pixellated resolution, trading clarity and definition for speed and visibility. Its lack of resolution indicates its status as a copy (as a bootleg, a fake) â the original is sharp, clear, rich and exclusive. But all this hinges on a weird image class divide (rich/poor) or image privatisation (the real deal/the fake). Poor Image is popular image, made and seen by the many, passing through many hands â circulating. In 2009, I guess there was a cultural turn. Hi-res fetish got swapped out in favour of velocity, exchange, spread â it almost sounds trite because memes are all very ye olde to us now, virality is banal but thatâs what it was. The Poor Image had value because it circulated and constructed a network through its shared history.
ITEM 29: I spoke to someone about this resurgence of found stuff, just to check I wasnât losing the plot, seeing patterns and signs where there was nothing. They nodded sagely, said the vibeshift, yes of course.
ITEM 30: Not to be trite or dumb about this, but readymade also means found image, not just found object. And thatâs interesting. I donât know when this happened, but I see more images than objects. Object feels like original, image feels like copy. Is that just a symptom of subliminal marketing strategies? Is that the only lasting effect of the post-digital discourse, of art after the internet? The rarity and aura of the object? Is that object oriented ontology?
ITEM 31: Between 1980 and 1992 Richard Prince produced a series called Untitled Cowboys. He was an aspiring painter, working as an ad-clipper for Time Magazine. He began rephotographing the cowboys in Marlboro cigarette ads, cropping and blurring them in such a way that they are images that feel like fever dreams. A copy (the artwork) of a copy (the ad) of a myth (the cowboy), Princeâs cowboys are hallucinations because ads are hallucinations, symbols are hallucinations, social desires are hallucinations. They are also anti-art readymade, a hilarious theft from the banal world of advertising, hoisted up and framed like fine art. Lowbrow made highbrow. Found image, exploding the thing from the inside (the thing: artâs rarity/sanctity/exclusivity/separation from the imageworld of advertising, American icon/national myth/hero/symbol).
ITEM 32: Andy Warhol.
ITEM 33: At the end of 2023, in an interview for 032c, an artist called Ana Viktoria Dzinic spoke about the digital vibeshift. Images are assigned meaning when they enter into a network of other images. We are in a kind of weird liminal space between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Stuck between a version of the internet where everyone interacts on social networks, and a version of the internet that is totally decentralised (blockchain, crypto). That decentralised internet has largely failed to come about or failed to stick, but Twitter and Instagram (now X and Meta) are actually literally culturally dying, the ground is dissolving underneath us and we have nowhere to jump to. We are trapped in this digital barzakh of Web 2.5, where images are made and immediately mean nothing. Ana Viktoria Dzinic speaks around the idea that the lo-fi died because big brands co-opted it, the Poor Image stopped being a critique of capital. But then it hasnât necessarily been supplanted by the Rich Image in an equal switch, itâs more like they merged and value is found in oscillating seamlessly between high and low in a discordant contradictory way. The cleanest example is in fashion: you wear a fake Gucci bag, Brandy Melville top, Ottolinger pants, some vintage piece, and everyone knows you get it. Sheâs talking about anti-fashion, a way of dressing that undercuts or refuses accepted definitions of value, trend cycles. Or maybe anti-style? Something a bit more knowing, within and without, seamless oscillation. Itâs the collaging of all these elements that is crucial. The conversation bops and bounces in the way interviews often do, but these points about fashion are sharp, prophetic: the image maker of the future will probably be the person who has the most highly sought-after taste and always gets it right.
ITEM 34: I feel silly for asking this, but I want an answer so it feels worth asking: who is seeking that taste? Like, highly sought-after, but by who? Is it just about timeline visibility, in-app user interactions, general virality, mutual agreement that this is good taste, trendsettingcuttingedge, or is that demand related to freelance creative employment? Who do brands want to work with, contract in for a creative direction role? Strategic alignment? Sponcon? Gifting? Come to our fashion week party? Walk our runway? And if that is the image-maker of the future, what kind of image is that image-maker making? Are they making IMAGE-images? Pictures, two-dimensional, permanent, visible, physically-in-existence? Or are they making signs, proxies, Others, representations â conditioning things into art-image?
ITEM 35: Plaster magazine opened a pop up shop in Soho, selling objects by artists, ashtrays, jewellery, hats, brand new Plaster merch, all curated by the Plaster team. I stopped by on my way home from work. There were three shelves and two rails, Plaster merch and ceramic bowls, earrings in a jewellery stand (ÂŁ300). But scattered around the shop were all these art-adjacent books: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, a collection of interviews with Martin Kippenbergerâs friends (a monograph by proxy for the King of Weird Art Bros), an Andreas Gursky coffee table book. They were just nestled in amongst the mugs and lighters. It struck me as odd. It felt like an odd thing. It shouldnât have felt odd, so the oddness felt odd too. I described it to a friend and she said âoh, sexy books?â Like, yeah â books that are there to accessorise and make everything feel a bit sexier. I have bumbled and browsed through hundreds of shops that use sexy books, sexy items. To make one menswear shop intelligible against the wider landscape of identical menswear stores. To reinforce that YES! this shop sells HOMEWARE GOODS and this is what the goods would look like IN YOUR HOUSE! Boyfriend couches in Topshop, the original peanut gallery. Incense burners. Skateboards. Hay crates. Zines on coffee tables in the Urban Outfitters changing room. We are a visual species, ads have always been about communicating subliminal desires. Sexy books, sexy objects â you can curate items to communicate things to a potential buyer. This might look like a collection of twirly candles and Gildan t-shirts, but this is a shop that sells things that are connected to the art world.
ITEM 35: Do you remember when instagram was full of everyone posting photos of books and flat whites on the salvaged wood table tops in coffee shops? Yeah yeah, flatlays. Thatâs a job now. Thatâs gainful employment: user generated content.
ITEM 36: Back to Duchampâs Fountain â the readymade is raised to the status of art by the artistâs act of choice. Where is the line between an artistâs act of choice and curatorial selection and arrangement?
ITEM 37: The algorithm knows I am a 25-30 year old woman living in London, a woman who still calls herself a girl, despite no material evidence that that is the case. I am shown lots of things that align with this understanding of my self. An account called GIRLS WHO CLUSTER: pretty shots of intentionally selected and arranged clutter. Tortoiseshell combs, mints in metal tins, vintage hand mirrors, hand cream in metal squeezy tubes with continental-European looking labels, rosary beads, hair clips, silver dishes, Photobooth strips, Marvis toothpaste, French pharmacy liquid bubble bath, Diptyque candles, ribbons, Margiela Replica, earrings in scallop shells. Every so often this account posts a Cluster Favourites Gift Guide with product recommendations for things that could feasibly fit in one of these cluster shots. Everything is linked and shoppable.
ITEM 38: It has always been about the person with the most highly sought-after taste, who always gets it right. It has always been about positioning, arrangement. Fashion, ads, marketing copy, content, comms, PR. If objects and images have resonance it is because ad agencies clapped their hands and said SPEAK! If they speak, they voice nothing more than bland consumer desire. That is where all of this sits: somewhere between positioning and desire.
ITEM 39: I brought my work home with me one evening this week. I explained what I was writing to my boyfriend, I said writing this text felt like wading through soup, trying to pick soup up in your hands and grab onto it. I told him about Fountain, transactional objects, the vibeshift, anti-art. This poor sweet man. He said most people donât think this kind of art is actually art. Most people think art is a painting, a sculpture, art is the kind of thing where you know it when you see it. This is stuff thatâs made in niche circles for niche people who circlejerk about how clever they all are, how they all get it, closed loop, navel gaze, if-you-know-you-know and they know but who cares? But what about the artistic act of selection!? He shook his head. I asked him if he thought the emperor was wearing any clothes. He said none at all, not a stitch.
ITEM 40: I am experiencing great mental tension! I believe in the power of anti-art. I think advertising should be illegal. I think good taste is a kind of aesthetic fascism. I see a thousand images a day and I do not remember a single fucking one of them. I want all objects to disappear. I can think of so many artistic practices that use found objects in constellation arrangements, in this exact way Iâm describing, that I deeply spiritually enjoy. But I also think there is something here on the table in and amongst all this stuff that feels bad.
ITEM 41: Is this a symptom of the material conditions artists face in the actual real life world? They canât afford a studio to make stuff. They canât afford the time to actually make stuff. Practices are made smaller and smaller until assemblage is a shorthand for the fact that art-making takes place via proxy, in theory, concept and gesture.
ITEM 42: Is this all INSTAGRAMâS fault? Or is TIKTOK ruining SOCIETY? We are all image-makers, we are all curators now. We curate our feed our lives our existence, so arrangement is the visual language we are most fluent in.
ITEM 43: Is this because of TUMBLR actually? The aesthetic trickle, microtrend, Pinterest forecast â the way vapourwave got mainlined into the system? Back then we were all fascinated by substances rather than objects. Goo and gel and lubricants and water and jelly and metallic surfaces and marble â because cyberspace was so insubstantial, so absent of substances. We were all scared or excited that the body would get spirited away by the machine. Objects disappeared and we stopped thinking about images as copies or representations, a meta-image register developed where it was about networks of images. So: the Poor Image became The Image, then the divide between original and copy disappeared, images no longer existed as singular, but plural, within networks, aesthetics, discrete coded groups that formed a kind of image-language. The process of fashioning IMAGE-images into images contracted, trend cycles contracted, everything went micro. Yeah, it sounds like Tumblrâs fault, doesnât it? Aesthetic-death, image cycle, meta-image register, circlejerk.
ITEM 44: Is this all about HAUNTOLOGY? The future is dead, capitalism killed it, so we recycle the culture produced by the past. We chew up the old food left on the plate, spit it out into a new shape. Over and over and over, old broccoli, old rice, old chicken. Put them on a plate, constellation-arrangement. Look at my found dinner installation! A masterpiece! Readymade-ready-meal and social comment. Highly critical.
ITEM 45: Dada and anti-art was about art that collapsed the category of art itself from the inside. Hijack the form, bastard-thing, Manchurian candidate. It rejected or refused art, voiced a question about whether it really existed, whether it was separate from real life in the first place. It still did that from within the realm of art. This wasnât a failure, this was the strategy. A dĂ©tournement, a rerouting, a hijacking. Grabbing the steering wheel and turning the car around. Away from bourgeois conventions, formal traditions, categorical standards. But the thing didnât collapse from the inside, it never does! It exploded out, expanding the properties and potential of art, into a brand new conceptual medium. Art was now a nominal thing rather than an intrinsic thing. Now a distinct medium, it could be regulated, categorised, assigned its own set of conventions, formal traditions and standards.
ITEM 46: It seems to me that everyone is always proclaiming the end of something. The end of painting! The end of art! The end of this text! (I can only hope). The end is always a turn. Rerouting. Nothing ever dies! It only drifts off in a different direction. Itâll only get so far down the road and then someone will declare the end, and itâll drift right back. Normally the signal that the end is nigh is when advertising jumps on it as a means to produce fat stacks of cash. When it has enough cultural cache to be of interest to corporations, who value it as a viable means of enrichment. Sexy books, found objects, mutually indistinguishable menswear shops with plants, books and record players hidden amongst the rails â THE END IS NIGH!!!! It was good while it lasted, boys â weâve had a nice ride, but time to turn, sharpish.
ITEM 47: I wonder what comes next? Iâll tell you what Iâd like to see. Disappear the object entirely, make artworks in gestures, actions, secrecy, defiance. Like Sarah Boulton swallowing a pearl. Like Lydia Ourahmane getting a tooth pulled out, a 24 carat gold tooth surgically implanted in its place. Cameron Rowland mortgaging away the doors of the ICA. John Cage silence. Suprematist black squares. Collective affect, happenings, weird unexplained phenomena. Maybe someone could gesture at destruction as the only emancipatory form of production. Burn down the Blavatnik building, the White Cube, Parliament â as performance art of course. I am interested in things that donât or should not exist. Things on the edge. Lying, destruction, the void! No more seamless oscillation. Send in the Manchurian candidate. It is time for an end.