Do Your Object Speak to You?
Perhaps the objects in your home speak to you in these troubled times. Maybe they say, “restore me,” “donate me,” or “think of what I mean to you.” Objects remind us of the way we were. They also remind us we are their stewards. Maybe while in lock-down you created objects, made art, crafted an object to mark this time of quarantine. All these factors now let our objects speak to us in ways differently than before.
Some objects call out for your attention. Some long to help others by allowing themselves to become a re-gift or donation. I hear such expressions of ‘objectification’ from many of my clients retired inside the walls of their homes these past three months. The things they carry with them on this Corona-journey inspire them to take action, expand upon the ‘social responsibility’ philosophy of this unique era. At the end of this article, you will find that social responsibility has long been thought to begin at home, involving all things a home contains and signifies.
Last week the online magazine NerdWallet called me for an interview. The reporter asked where my clients donate objects in these times and asked if I wrote many appraisals for charitable contributions lately. Indeed, I have. Are we giving new life to belongings? How? Not all charities are anxious for more stuff!
I study material culture, how objects define, explain, and symbolize how we experience our present era’s culture. Each era has a different relationship with the material world, and objects bear that stamp. The pandemic caused our relationship to the “material” of our lives to change in significant ways. And we’re experiencing a double pandemic, one biological, one societal. Objects now take on a significance beyond their pre-pandemic stature.
The Artist’s Impact and the Impact upon the Artist
I began to interview artists and performers of all stripes in March 2020, all of whom create things. On this radio series on KZSB AM 1290, called The Artist’s Impact and the Impact upon the Artist, ‘creatives’ guide us through a double pandemic of viral transmissions. I actively listen to stories of coping with the unseen transmission of a molecular disease, as well as stories of the historic transmission of the disease of racism.
For the past thirteen weeks I spoke every Friday morning on the air with remarkable playwrights, musicians, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, and dancers. Each discipline now possesses, or builds toward, a new platform. For example, a painter who created a body of work upon a theme for a gallery show has no traditional gallery in which to show today. Not only is the creative person making work, but they’re making spaces in which to show the work.
In no other discipline is this more challenging than in the dancer’s world. Dance professors from UCSB holds class from their kitchens. Dancers who perform in a company film themselves dancing in their living rooms, and patch their images into their fellow dancers’ moving images.
Painters who paint “en plein aire” now use their time outdoors in two ways: a time for solitude and focused work, or a time to witness community and mourn through the work. Artists handle creative projects in innovative, and deeply felt, ways.
My clients handle their handmade objects with more respect. I received calls asking my opinion on restoration of old family paintings and photos, queries about re-framers, bookbinders, silver-platers, questions about repair people of all kinds. Cooks handle food with more respect, too.
We also enjoy the artist with new respect:
I bet no one has gotten through these long days without a musical playlist running in the house. We’re re-viewing favorite films, symphonies, plays, or television shows we forgot we loved. Musicians in Santa Barbara convene jazz nights, viewed online by their fans, together in real time. To come together for a performance feels bittersweet, and to view a performance alone has its own cage of emotions, through which we must “feel” the art and the artist without actually touching.
The creative product, whether an art product consumed in a short period of time, as in a performance, or the physical object, either handmade or mass produced, beg for our attention. From the standpoint of material cultural analysis this is because our culture asks for new solutions for a material world. This “re-start” involves our efforts to understand, as we’re called to understand, that we all belong to a larger system. We learned respect and became cautious because many factors disrupted our balance as individuals. That lack of harmony caused a ripple effect, indeed.
As in nature, so in the material world:
To counteract unconscious negligence, our belongings ask to be rethought, repurposed, and used for good ends. This next section answers the question, “How can we use our possessions, either self-created or curated for years, to express our concern for others, as well as our concern for our planet?”
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Elizabeth Stewart, PhD is a certified member of the Appraisers Association of America, presenter of custom Antique Road Show style events, and author of No Thanks Mom: The Top Ten Objects Your Kids Do NOT Want (and what to do with them).
Originally published at elizabethappraisals.com on July 9, 2020