Catalysts

The purpose of this project was to start from a point of research and expand upon that. Starting from Conceptual art, I considered pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dada artists before looking at Assemblage art, and artists such as Jean Tinguely.

                               

  

To keep with the traditional attitude of Duchamp, I first experimented with whatever I had on hand - car registration plates, a toy keyboard, a CD and tape player, and later on, a sheep skull. It was greatly amusing to pull apart everything I could reasonably get my hands on considering the shorter time frame I had been given for this project than my previous two.

I assembled them and considered the new forms, shapes, and also any lack thereof. My experimentation wasn't so much in order to achieve anything, more towards discovery, and as a result this project has produced a series of different images that I could all happily use. I experimented with using the piano keys to obscure the letters of the plates, leaving them useless.

I have realised over the course of these few days' experimentation that I greatly enjoy making items useless.

 
  

 


To further this line of thinking, I considered how to transform these ‘readymade’ objects. After ‘unmaking’ them, I applied the same idea to them as I had the registration plates - how to best render them completely useless, yet again. By removing their only function, they could no longer be considered as the objects they once were.

At what point did the CD player stop being a CD player? When I took all the screws out, it was a potential CD player in different parts. When I glued the screws together and removed any possibility of the pieces being reunited, was that potential destroyed with any object we might still call a CD player? Or had that potential already been destroyed when I accidentally ripped with wiring from the speakers in an attempt to access more of the screws?

Questions like this might be travelling too far into the philosophical, however in conceptual art, it is ideas like this that may drive pieces.

The photograph above shows (from left to right) a piece of the plastic body of the CD player that once-was, a headless quadrupedal body made using wiring and circuit boards, and a sheep’s skull. From displaying the three once-were-objects next to each other, I am forcing an association between them; an outer casing, a structure of connections akin to motor neutral pathways through a body, and an organic, complete skull.

Whether this implies that they all fit together in some way, or tell some meaningful, disturbing story, is entirely subjective. However, these objects were all once part of something that had a function that is now impossible for them to ever regain. I think that bringing in complex ideas behind simple or seemingly random collections of objects is both highly enjoyable and rewarding.

Ultimately, I would have loved to have more time to simply keep unmaking objects, to keep re-assembling and to experiment even more with creating associations between them. However, as I have to leave the project, I am satisfied with the level of sophistication of ideas I managed to express in such a short space of time.