Objects and things

With obstructions in mind, together with recent conversations about our year 2 symposium, I was particularly interested yesterday in attending the one-day symposium Encountering Things. Design and Theories of Things organised by Betti Marenko and our recent MAGCD guest critic Leslie Atzmon.

Lots of interesting things to mull over, including the chilling pronouncement by UCL anthropologist Dr Adam Drazin in his presentation that we are now in a Post-Cosmopolitan stage of the anthropocene, but it was CSM’s Dr Peter Hall’s presentation which particularly struck a cord with my own inquiry.

In the context of his paper When objects Fail: Unconcealing Things in Design Writing and Criticism he discussed the 1934 Machine Art exhibition at what was then the fledging Museum of Modern Art in New York. A collaboration between MoMa’s first director Alfred H Barr Jr and Philip Johnson, the exhibition displayed some six hundred objects of mechanised mass production on plinths and pedestals like modern sculpture, using the language of Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas to contemplate their meaning and materiality. Below is a picture of the exhibition and the catalogue cover, designed by former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers (who had recently immigrated to the US on a visa secured for him by MoMa).

This exhibition rings so many bells with my paper and studio practice that I scarcely know where to start, so I shall take a little time to formulate my response to it.