The Lives of Objects
An artwork by Joanne Bloch superimposes
various death/life-masks of Cecil John Rhodes in one sculpture to produce an object that becomes a physically swollen parody of the cult of commemoration
By Joanne Bloch and Hedley Twidle
From 20 to 22 September 2013, an inaugural conference, The Lives of Objects, was held at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, a research institute based at Wolfson College under the directorship of acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee and Elleke Boehmer, a Professor of World Literature who has published widely on southern African literature and history.
Object biography, according to the initial call for papers, continues to generate fruitful areas of enquiry that range from academic research into material culture, commodities and the social life of things (in the work of Arjun Appadurai and Bill Brown for example), to the more public modes of scholarship represented by the plenary speakers at this event. Over the three days we heard talks by Neil McGregor (director of the British Museum and author of History of the World in 100 Objects) and Edmund De Waal (a ceramicist whose bestselling book The Hare with Amber Eyes tells a traumatic family history via a collection of porcelain netsuke figurines). Hugh Haughton spoke on poets' letters, and how they could quite literally become 'marinated' in the historical events they described; Jenny Uglow anatomized a Cumbrian church as both object and vitrine, or container of objects; Michael Burden traced the private and public life of an 18th-century opera aria.
'No ideas but in things', wrote the poet William Carlos Williams - a line that was quoted approvingly at several points during the conference by delegates alert to the materialist and metaphorical basis of all cultural production. Yet faced with this rich but disparate catalogue of case studies and particularities, we found ourselves thinking also of Arnold Toynbee's irreverent definition of history as 'just one damned thing after another'. In the various themed panels (Memorials, Textiles, Archives, Oddities... to name just a few), the historical and disciplinary range of proceedings was amplified still further. Between the two of us, we heard about everything from Byron's slippers, to britches, to 'performative' denim; from garden gnomes to the Guardian series on 'Writers' Rooms'. One particularly fascinating paper traced the history of the BP-5 ration biscuit, opening an enquiry into Modernist feeding schemes and the politics of humanitarianism.
A parallel exhibition at the Bodleian Library showcased objects in the lives of writers. On display was a lock of Mary Shelley's hair from 1816 (the year in which Frankenstein was conceived); a blank 18th-century notebook of the kind that Jane Austen would write in; a china figurine that once belonged to Bruce Chatwin, with a line from his 1988 novella, Utz, setting up a dissonant note among the glass cases: 'In any museum the object dies of suffocation and the public gaze - whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch.' Two very different memento mori had also been retrieved from the library's archives: a list of repairs to the motorcycle that TE Lawrence had been riding when involved in the accident that ended his life; and a death mask said to be that of Dante.
This last item was of interest to Bloch, given that her paper considered a supposed death-mask of Cecil John Rhodes: an 'ugly old thing' (as described by a curator of Special Collections at the University of Cape Town), which has shifted from the quasi-physical relic of a revered figure to something unlovely and historically embarrassing. The inaccuracies and uncanniness surrounding this object were used as a way to meditate on the unresolved and unpopular elements of a South African past, a matter also taken up in a different medium with one of Bloch's own artworks. One of these superimposes various death/life-masks of Rhodes in one sculpture to produce an object that becomes a physically swollen parody of the cult of commemoration.
On a similar note, Twidle enquired into the history of Demetrios Tsafendas, the assassin of Hendrik Verwoerd, to speak about 'unusable' elements of our history: those figures and events that do not provide any ready party-political yield, but that may be all the more important for that reason. The extraordinary transnational history of Tsafendas was told via three objects: a dagger, a suitcase and the infamous tapeworm on whose instructions (so the myth goes) he had acted from when stabbing the father of apartheid on 6 September 1966. Conference delegates looked suitably bemused by this last 'object' - bizarre inhabitant of national imaginary, opaque symbol, elusive specimen, alter ego, parasite, delusion, messenger.
Faced with (and participating in) this array of objects, each of them trailing their own backstories and complex cultural charge, we began to wonder: what is the relation between such densely specific case studies and larger questions of theory and method? What is the status of the anecdotal, the singular and particular as a form of knowledge? What over-arching shapes for thinking about and through object biography were offered?
The plenary lectures of McGregor and De Waal were perhaps the most ambitious and thought-provoking here. Ranging from contemporary coffin design in Ghana to the Rosetta Stone, McGregor remarked that objects are 'stubborn, uncontrollable and unpredictable'. They can be imagined as witnesses to history, but also as agents and actors in it, liable to change and rewrite the script in which they are placed. Here he gave the example of a so-called 'Indian drum' sent to the British Museum from Virginia; some 140 years later, it was revealed that this was in fact an African drum, and one entangled in a complex history of the transatlantic slave trade.
Mozambican 'Throne of Peace', a chair built from decommissioned weapons following the civil war
He also gave examples of objects being repurposed, and their biographies reassigned. The Rosetta Stone had been, in its time, the equivalent of an EU document on tax sovereignty, McGregor claimed, 'and about as interesting'. Yet, in being the only object of a certain class to survive, its typicality had become exceptional. One of the most affecting objects of which he spoke was a Mozambican 'Throne of Peace' - a chair built from decommissioned weapons following the civil war. These were welded together in a civic gesture that marked the obverse of the Nazi practice of melting down 'degenerate' artworks for armaments. The subsequent travels of this artwork - from Wormwood Scrubs prison to Northern Ireland to mark the anniversary of the Good Friday agreement - added another layer to its meanings, as did the information (which McGregor showed via a carefully labelled exploded view) that every sub-automatic weapon used in its construction had originally been made in Europe.
He ended with an evocative 'Pirandellian' idea of a museum as a place full of resting actors, all of them in search of a narrative in which they might take a leading role - a narrative that might often require the revision of established historiography.
De Waal began his address by handing around some of the porcelain figurines on which his book was based: to emphasise their tactility and objecthood, but also to suggest that they took their very meaning from the act of being passed on, much like narrative.
These objects and their dispersal had provided him with a way of narrating the fate of his Jewish family following the Nazi occupation of Vienna. These netsuke had (he hoped) allowed him to avoid 'a melancholic, discursive, belle époque run-through', while also lending a specific, unexpected shape to the book. Stories, like objects, have contours and patterns. And certain objects, he suggested, might allow us to tell stories that are shaped more irregularly and are more interestingly patterned than the vast, over-arching narratives that we are often saddled with. As the objects circulated through the auditorium, he spoke evocatively of the 'synapse' of cultural energy that links an object with the place from which it has come.
Finally, he asked whether objects can ever be truly discarded, or come to an end. The question was picked up on in different ways in various panels as delegates traced the lives of things that outlast their makers and curators, exceeding or escaping the original narratives into which they have been conscripted. The buried implication seemed to be that object biography might head off the premature rush to meaning or closure often demanded in the production of immediately legible social narratives: working against the distortions and betrayals involved in the 'rounding off' or 'rounding out' of any over-arching social diagnosis.
At the end of the three days, we were left with much still to process and digest. Had the director of the British Museum paid enough attention to the provenance of objects and the politics of collecting? Were too many of the panels concerned with luxury objects? If so, what hope for object biography and 'thing theory' in a place like sub-Saharan Africa where there have been far fewer such 'things' available for cogitation and consumption? Nonetheless, the point about the stubbornness and unpredictability of things in the writing of history had been strongly made: the sense that (to adapt Walter Benjamin) the closer you look at an object, the more distantly it looks back.
https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/lives-objects/programme
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/97OnxVXaQkehlbliKKDB6A
To access conference podcasts, please visit: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/podcasts