here are some quotes to get you thinking:
…
I could mention the chapter of 'Mimesis' entitled, “The Brown Stocking” in which Eric Auerbach (1953) evokes a passage of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the representations or, better, the repercussions that a minor external event triggers in Mrs Ramsay's consciousness. This event, trying on a stocking, is but a point of departure which, though it is not wholly fortuitous, takes value only through the indirect reactions it sets off. One sees well, in this case, that knowledge of stimuli does not enable us to understand much of the resonances and echoes they elicit unless one has some of the idea of the habitus that selects and amplifies them with the whole history with which it is itself pregnant.’(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 124)
Basically what this means is that we need to understand the way of being and doing in the world, the habitus, in order to understand the object and its reactions.
Habitus is a set of structuring structures, it is the way you live your life in a house. Objects and their meanings are all subject to the logic of the habitus.
I read the concept of habitus as a heuristic, as a point of departure and reflection. In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau’s argued that habitus is a metaphoric chimera, a dwelling pace (like Kate's dwelling) which nevertheless, is generative of research (de Certeau 1984).
Anyway, what do you think?
here is the draft proposal as it stands:
How do objects get transformed by narratives and how do they become divested of narratives? This presentation will interrogate what we call ‘the systems around the object’ drawing on a year-long research project, funded by the Arts Council UK, involving 2 artists and 2 researchers, and a collection of artefacts for schools in Leeds. It aims to develop theory around how objects can sit within systems, stories and places. Drawing on auto-ethnographic discussion about the relationship between artefacts and their context, this paper seeks to uncover and unsettle this relationship. In particular it will ask the following questions:
How do objects move in meaning, or move from function to meaning?
Does it matter if an object has no provenance?
What happens if there is a narrative and no object (the case of the disappearing object)
Are objects merely taking their menaing from their form and function or do they acquire new identities as new resonsances and echoes take hold of them?
What does everyone think?
2 comments:
i wonder rather the objects did have a provence when they arrived which was cast aside and was lost, as they transformed into generic objects about material culture and the past. So they still have provinence, its jsut quite short and maybe a liitle less exciting, but i feel we some how devalue them because of this and in a strange way this makes me sad.!
Is it provinence amnesia?
Is it possible for an object to have no provinence? Am i right [probably not] that even in steves idea about an object at the moment before it becomes it has a providence and a context?
yes it looks good, shall i put that bid in for money to do a project with drawings and link it to this?
Descart and mind body duality spring to mind I see therefore I am in the fixed materiality of the object we find a reference for our own position and it makes us real.
On the other hand this could be rubbish. The idea of the object before it becomes was derived from all the stuff about the universe nano seconds before big bang. the idea of the primordial partical infinatly dense and infinitly small - So perhaps the object the moment before it becomes is as it transforms from a physicallity into a materiallty whci Kate Pahl explained to me yesterday - as if changes from stuff into a thing.
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