Dear Friends of VISA,For the last few years I have been thinking seriously about personal inventory and taking stock of all the objects I own and then this short video on Marina Abramovic preparing to her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,
The Artist is Present made me want to do go through everything I own. Sometimes I wonder if I were to suddenly die, what kind of narrative would someone piece together based on my accumulation of objects. I've always thought that one of the reasons I gravitated to life as an artist is to make use of objects that others see no value in; I love the possibility of transforming the throw away into an art object. I see possible art materials everywhere so the impulse to collect is a natural result. Over the years I have learned to be discerning about what objects can enter my life and try to discard things that I don't think I will use but there is always that voice that says 'you never know... one day you might make a project with this'. Sometimes I detest that voice. Lately I have been perusing blogs such as
The Minimalists where people can actually count the objects they own: '51 things' or '288 things'. Its quite amazing really to be so free of objects that counting what you own is a possibility. Years ago I saw work by Michael Landy (one of the Young British Artists) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The room was filled floor to ceiling with milk cartons. These cartons contained all of his belongings. There was an accompanying list that was a complete inventory of Landy's things. I decided at the time to take inventory of my belongings. I started a list but after about two pages, I became too overwhelmed to continue. I felt more like following the project Michael Landy did where he
shredded all his belongings. (If you'd like to learn more of Michael Landy's practice, here is an
artist talk). A couple of years ago there was a powerful exhibition called 'Waste Not' by Song Dong who arranged all his mother's over 10,000 belongings in two large rooms at the VAG. Here are some photographs of this show when it was at the
Barbican in England. Objects, objects, objects. Why do we need so many? Why do we hold onto them? And then the bigger question what happens to them when they are no longer in our possession?
Kate Bingaham Burt has a playful approach to accounting for her objects by drawing all the items she has purchased on a daily basis on a blog since 2006 (I came across her book about a year ago:
Obsessive Consumpution: What Did You Buy Today?) I tried this for about a weekend, but again it was too overwhelming to keep up with. Objects hold that ambiguous role of being both a source of inspiration and a burden.
