Objects

Introduction

My reserach into objects has changed somewhat since the beginning of my MA. Initially I had written the following regarding my interest:

"I have for a long time been interested in the memory of objects; not so much the memories we have of certain artefacts or possessions, although these are important, but rather the memories objects have of us. This fascination with - in particular man-made - objects, which often survive their makers in some form by centuries and even millennia pervades much of my work. The definition of object (as regards my research) can be broad, and includes the abstract as well as the physical; shadows and stories for example."

Since starting my MA however, I have discovered new 'frameworks' for researching or rather questioning objects, one of which I have described at length in my study of Old Musical Instruments. In this section (Approach) I discuss an article by Jim Davis entitled Talking with history: Using Goethe's scientific approach with human artifacts' in which Goethe's approach to science is described as as being 'science as conversation.' "Approached properly," Davis says, "things do, metaphorically, talk back, and even have important things to say."

To quote Davis at length, he describes how the "is-ness of the artifact exists in a human, expansive, unfolding process that I can participate in. The artifact connects to be the needs and desires and social connections - history - from which it developed. Through the contemplation of this complex web of connection and interactions, I can understand the artifact in a way not immediately apparent from its surface. Perhaps more important, the artifact in turn gives those connections and interactions a concreteness, a tangibility or reference point. In the metaphoric conversation, history expresses itself through the artifact. I talk with history."

The object then connects to history (needs, desires, social connections) via a pathway, and to contemplate the object is, as Davis describes, to contemplate a "complex web of connection and interactions" which allows us to "understand the artifact in a way not immediately apparent from its surface". The object is in this sense an intersection. It is a point where a whole number of paths meet.

The Sands of Time

The following is an extract taken from a novel I wrote called 'The Sands of Time.'

"Since returning from the coast – I’ve still yet to learn my lines - I’ve often found myself in the Ashmolean Museum, a place which in many ways reminds me of my garage. I go and stare for hours at the orphaned objects set in their glass cases; each preserved behind my own reflection like patients on an isolation ward. I feel like an anguished relative come to mull their condition, willing them back to life as they lie behind a curtain of plastic, while remembering (at least by conjecture) how they used to be.

A week or so ago, I took Jack to see Guy Fawkes’ Lantern, a part of Elias Ashmole’s original collection and the very lantern which Fawkes was alleged to have carried when apprehended in the cellars beneath the Palace of Westminster; a small battered object which – if its provenance were proved – would be one of the most vital artefacts in all of British History; a mute witness with an amazing story to tell. As we stood staring, I told Jack to look with his mind as well as just his eyes, to place a candle where there was none, to conjure a flame and to see the world from which the lantern was estranged.

“Do you see the walls? Can you feel how damp they are? Listen for the footsteps chipping at the floor above…”

We did the same with other objects, recreating the worlds to which they once belonged; shards of mediaeval pottery, time-bitten swords and rows of empty bottles all of which spoke of what they’d seen. And no matter how old, how ancient these relics, the voices of those who knew them, could still be heard from beyond the grave.

Perhaps it’s this which gives me comfort? Although, walking amongst them I am once again made incongruous, and to borrow from my own journal; I am in the land of the dead when I am living. I am like the sandcastle: a part of the day marooned in the night. Perhaps the strangest thing from which I’ve derived comfort however is a door in the Tower of St. Michael at the Northgate; the cell door of the Protestant Martyrs who were held in the city’s Bocardo Gaol before their execution. Fixed to it, is a brass plaque which reads:

‘This door was at the entrance of a cell in the old City Gaol, Bocardo, called the Bishops' Room, where Bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were confined, and from whence they were taken to suffer martyrdom in the town ditch behind the houses opposite Balliol College in the reign of Queen Mary.’

I’ve been to see it a number of times in the last month or so, deriving as I said a peculiar sense of comfort from its grim and tragic provenance. Being as it was the door through which the martyrs departed this life, it has become - in my mind at least - a doorway to death itself. Positioned for display against a wall, only one side is ever shown, and this side I see as representing life. On the other side is death; always out of sight but never out of mind; there within reach and never far away. As I look at it, I see it through the Martyrs’ eyes and think of what awaited them as they passed to the other side, the dreadful manner of the deaths they suffered, and it’s this I think which makes me a little less anxious about dying."

Common Space and the Art of Memory

This extract features a couple of objects which have always held a particular fascination for me, Guy Fawkes Lantern and the cell door of the Protestant Martyrs taken from the Bocardo Prison (demolished in the 18th century) and now standing in the Tower of St. Michael at the Northgate. These objects, each through their own unique provenance, allow us, if we use our imaginations, to glimpse people from the pages of history; they, along with tens of thousands of others, once held a place in the minds and memories of men and women long since dead. Now we hold these objects within our minds and memories and as such share a place, a single, common space with those who have long since vanished from the world. To read about the past and those people who made it is one thing, to share this common space with them through the power of objects is quite another.

A couple of quotes from Aristotle, allude I believe, to this idea of spaces. In Frances A. Yates book, 'The Art of Memory,' we read:

"We should also seek to recover an order of events or impressions which will lead us to the object of our search, for the movements of recollection follow the same order as the original events; and the things that are easiest to remember are those which have an order, like mathematical propositions. But we need a starting-point from which to initiate the effort of recollection."

This starting point is, in the example I've given above, Guy Fawkes' Lantern. It is the cell door and the Tower of St. Michael at the Northgate.

"For remembering really depends upon the potential existence of the stimulating cause... But he must seize hold of the starting point. For this reason some use places for the purpose of recollecting."

Just as we can seek something in our own memories by navigation a course through our minds, following the order of those events which first saw that thing fixed there, could we not do the same with the collective memory of the past? As Aristotle says above, 'remembering depends upon the potential existence of a stimulating cause...'; the cause being in this case the objects/buildings mentioned above. If we find these objects today, as others would have found them centuries ago, could we not follow a course of events from times before we were born?

King of Infinite Space

I first began to explore these ideas formally with a project called 'King of Infinite Space'; a culmination of ideas beginning with an exhibition of the work of John Malchair and ending with a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "If I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself King of Infinite Space."

The following is an extract from a piece I wrote about the project a few years ago:

"At the Solomon's House exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, items found beneath floorboards during renovation work were displayed, comprising 18th century dust, grape stems and nutshells and from these remains I tried in my mind to rebuild the world from which they'd been discarded. For many years I've been interested in the idea of historical space and memory - a conflation of ideas, the consequences of which are, as the quote from Hamlet states, potentially infinite.

An illustration of this would be the tower of St. Michael at the Northgate, built c1050. This edifice has occupied the same space within Oxford's landscape for almost a thousand years, and therefore a space in the memories of tens of thousands of people throughout the past millennium. These common yet individual spaces link those of us in the 21st century directly with those of the pre-conquest world and thereafter. And although our other, personal 'memory-spaces' are quite literally "worlds apart", nevertheless through this single point of reference we might navigate our way between them.

John Malchair was an artist and musician who through his many drawings recorded the destruction in 1771 of a great part of mediaeval Oxford. For me the most poignant of these are those of the mediaeval Northgate (which had once joined the Saxon tower) and those of Friar Bacon's study which stood in the south of the city. This edifice was demolished in 1779 and a drawing showing the last of its stones being removed is particularly heart-rending. When a building is lost, not only does its very fabric disappear but also thousands of memories that are associated with it. A building is in a sense constructed not only of bricks and mortar, but also, perhaps more significantly, of memories. With regards to Friar Bacon's study, there is little in the modern city to help us see it again.

But with the Northgate it is a different story. For me, one of the most tragic losses to Oxford is that of the Bocardo Prison which stood, in part, on top of the Northgate. Two drawings of Malchair's show it as it was in 1771. What is helpful about these images - in respect to our reconstruction of it - is the familiar image of the tower which looks much the same as it did through Malchair's eyes. By taking the tower as our point of reference, we can begin to journey back into a wealth of memory-spaces. Such memories might be those of the martyrs for whom that tower would have been one of their last sights as they were taken to their deaths in what was then Canditch - a ditch outside the city wall and what today we know as Broad Street. Here is where the concept of personal memory takes on another dimension. As we look at the tower's stones, our eyes become those of the Martyrs themselves and our minds are filled with their fears. They are also those of Malchair (who was buried in the church of St. Michael's) as he commits the tower to the page. They are the eyes of everyone who has lived in the city over the past 1000 years.

Back at the exhibition, at the Museum of the History of Science, we find ourselves looking at the discarded nutshells and can begin to apply the same thinking. Such inconsequential items are, as a result imbued with life. The very fact that they are small and insignificant somehow, paradoxically, makes them more significant in terms of recreating the past. It's as if they've only just that minute come to rest, a journey of a few feet which has taken two hundred years to make. Or to put it another way, the world of 200 years ago, moves to with a few feet of our own. These shells like the stones of the tower once occupied a space within someone's mind along with a million other memories; it's almost as if the shell had once housed the rest of it's eater's existence. Whose mind was it? And what was this mind thinking as it ate? Whatever it was, it's landscape would have been that of Malchair's with its Mediaeval gates still intact.

A nutshell is indeed small, but as Shakespeare said, the space inside is infinite nonetheless.

Old Photographs

These memory-spaces, as described above, have since c.1839 seen themselves turned by cameras into photographs; cameras which Roland Bathes describes as being 'clocks for seeing'. To see a photograph from the nineteenth century is to see a world which no longer exists, which has not done so for many years. Yet when that image - that world - contains an object, or an identifiable landmark with which we are familiar, one is thrown into something of a puzzle, particularly if people are present in the same picture.

When describing Lewis Payne's portrait of Alexander Gardener awaiting execution (1865), Barthes' states: 'He is dead and he's going to die..."

Lewis Payne's portrait of Alexander Gardener

The same paradox could be stated when looking at any photograph from the nineteenth century. One can bet with certainty that everyone shown there is dead. Yet here they are, quite alive.

In this photograph (linked from the English Heritage Viewfinder site) of Cornmarket, Oxford, taken in 1885 we can see clearly the tower of St. Michael at the Northgate. It looks much as the same as it does now, yet the tramlines, the horse and carts, the shop fascia, and the people are from an entirely different world.

Click here to read more on Old Photographs.

Found Objects - Auschwitz

Following a visit I made to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 2006, I have taken this interest in objects further, so as to explore the more recent past and the horrors of the Holocaust. On seeing the piles of possessions left in the wake of this prolonged atrocity, I came to realise that in order to fully understand Auschwitz-Birkenau, I had to understand what it was like to be there.

In a recent display of work I made as part of my MA, I wrote:

"I can never know what it was like to be there, just as they could never know what it was like to leave."

This is indeed true, but admitting it is rather like turning a blind eye to the tragedy; not in the sense of condoning or denying such appalling and inhumane actions, but in leaving Death to continue what the Nazis had begun and erase all trace of individual existence. Mountains of shoes and suitcases, photographs of piles of corpses are all testament to man's inhumanity, but they also make it difficult to seek and remember the individuals who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among the 1.1 million dead, it should be remembered, are 1.1 million names.

Click here to read more on objects and Auschwitz-Birkenau.