09 Posit
THE POSITING OF OBJECTS
PREFACE
The positing of objects is the concern for the position of things. The innate ability I have to determine the position of an object; for the correct qi, feng-shui, energy, reflection of energy or just plain satisfaction stems from playing with toys as a young boy.
I was born on 10th June 1980, the day a leaked letter from a prison in South Africa; stated clearly: 'WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID'. Obviously this letter came from the hand of the legendary Nelson Mandela. The relation of this letter from Nelson, to the title of this book is thus: 'WE MUST NOT ONLY CRUSH THE STATE OF BEING APART; AS FAR AS OBJECTS ARE UPHELD TOGETHER AND WITHIN THEIR ENVIRONMENT; BUT THIS MAY GO TO HELPING TO UNDERSTAND THE MIND, IF WE SIMILARLY BRING TOGETHER AND DIVIDE OBJECTS.'
There is something inherently 'Black' and 'White' about the positing of objects, and it is free for us all to partake in.
When I was four, in 1984, and still hung up on pushing the wooden shapes through the correctly shaped hole in the box, it struck me how satisfying life was, when it was just dealing with shape, and identity of shape. This is the essence of my project. To understand shape, categories, and life with both colour and line.
Please read further to enjoy this delightful topic.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. History
3. Context
4. Shape and FORM
5. Colour
6. Line
7. Positing
INTRODUCTION
The positing of objects is the innate ability to co-ordinate shape, form, colour and line in order to gain gravity to one's psychological well being. It is a little like obsessive compulsive disorder that you are allowed to do. However that feeling will wear off, when eventually you can lift the curtain on your newly posited draw, bedroom, house, building design, or city, and with a new perspective on the polar power forces in the world to share and enjoy with your friends and family if not like I, just for myself.
We sit in our homes, as pawns on a chess board, fine there is a King and Queen, and the odd rook flying around! And we say to ourselves if only life was not so difficult. I cannot seem to overstate how claustrophobic our lives have become. I can move forwards, and nothing more. Eventually I get taken, and really it all does not last too long. This happens whilst there is a supposed power struggle between China and the USA, between Russia and Europe, between Australasia and again the USA, for resources. However really we are all looking for well-being. We are looking for well-being for ourselves and the planet, and too often or not our ego ensures yoga, counselling, green tea, and holidays, come before recycling everything with minute accuracy, handing down clothes to a neighbour, buying fair-trade tea, and avoiding long haul flights. Therefore the polarity of power sits with every individual to act on their own lives.
We have established it is ourselves we are concerned with, so why not let the ego evolve and acquire an attitude of solemnity. In effect the positing of objects is good portentousness for future events.
HISTORY
Objects encompass our histories and lives, from the memory or experience of our past, our birth, our childhood, our youth, and our adulthood, through their anthology of marked times. There is a rebutment in their previous context as they take on a primary association through their new context allowing the shape to take form amongst other similar objects, vestibules and furniture. The original association is primarily supplementary to the context of a given house and its new homeliness in a position regarded by the eye to give the best aesthetic reminding us of its originality towards the new context of our lives in our houses. My mother has a blue bowl from a holiday I distinctly remember her picking it out for its natural leaf design, now placed on a blue chest, it makes the house designed, thought about, and pleasant to look at, but only she has the memory of finding it, and what that holiday meant. For me it is just a nice bowl in its central position balancing the chest below.
There are a great many ways to present an object and our insistence on its position allows harmony of a new given context, creating a collection of memories, but it is that creation that is so important; making a whole new creation, one of unique bourgeois credentials. That is not to say that the duck on the wall in the working class home is any less significant, just we see those with less money as typecast by their traditions of what a home should be like, and how it should be presented to make it truly homely. I remember my grandmother's house for its porcelain. Nothing of great aesthetic value, but its collection sighted value and belief in her as someone who did have an eye for what made her fall in love with the caricatures in the first place.
When we create our own homes, we follow fashions, collate second hand goods, make things, and so we can end up with a tapestry of things we love, but not in any order. The refinement of making comes later, when we have surplus money to afford what works together and we start to co-ordinate, albeit it is more minimal, just more expensive to afford as a single object.
What we forget about our parents, our siblings, our partners, and our children, is that they have a whole life, within a given context, before they ever met us. They have colours, deep and rich envisioned in their minds, that remind them of their lives before, and that will become important in their future. They have a childhood toy, a life, and learning, environments in which they won an award, lost money, took their first painting home from the gallery, found a chair, made an artwork, played an instrument, created a memory, living with the overwhelming plethora of life itself, filling us with good hope for the future; sharing these times and experiences with others.
CONTEXT
Hidden behind the curtain, the little girl hides from her father, who has just arrived home from work. He hangs up his jacket on his designated hook like a hanging meat carcass and sets down his shoes; placed neatly together. The shoes line up like swimmers on the blocks at the start of an Olympic swimming race. Keys from pocket to door to small wooden bowl nestled on the sideboard. Cup of fresh tea with his regular 1 and a half sugars; not one and a bit, and he reclines in his Norwegian chair, to see the fingers and eyes of a little girl peering from the reaches of a long draped beige curtain. Fingerprints adorn the window doors into the garden. This is all much like the John Lewis Insurance advert of Autumn 2015. Little Megan has been practicing her ballet around the house and whilst teetering on tip-toe in full ballet outfit, has knocked over a glass from the coffee table. To her embarrassment, her father calls her over for a pep talk.
'Megan'
'Yes Daddy'
'Why is there water on the carpet?'
To the luck of the father it wasn't the dregs of an over-sized large glass of red wine from the night before.
'Please clear it up' he says.
'I don't know how to Daddy?'
She does know however how to pliat, and spin in a leather upholstered Norwegian chair. She knows basic calculus, Pythagoras' theorem, when the Pyramids were built: 'The pyramid of Djoser was built 2630BC – 2611BC, during the third dynasty, to be precise.'
But she is unaware how she will reach the kitchen towel to mop up the remaining water on the speckled carpet.
'Don't worry I'll do it!' he says.
'Now let's have a little chat, please.'
'Very well' she replies.
'If you want to perform. You will need a stage, an audience, and a set time and date to perform'.
'Marvellous Daddy!'.
'But you will have to practice at school, behind closed doors, so as no-one copies your immaculate pliats.'
He chuckles to himself.
Megan looks out of the window over the frosted trees and plants of the garden. What a great wide world we live in she thinks to herself. Then she thinks: 'I wonder how I can change it?'
The positing of objects are often times thought about, decided upon and are challenged behind closed doors. It is not only the position of her fathers jacket, shoes and keys that count, not only her near miss of breaking a glass. Not only her rehearsals for performance and the performance itself, but the context of the World we live in. Whether there is a war going on in the Middle East, a political movement in Russia, an architectural movement in the UK, a growing sex industry in the US, the increase of fair trade across the third World, Chinese Industrialisation, or a calligraphist in Japan painting symbols in Japanese. All these things postulate power over others as we devolve into happier more democratic smaller communities becoming self-sufficient. We assert ourselves in our lives to be active thinkers, because we know best. In communities of dignified, free, and rational individuals, we must be careful of the abuse of freedom and too much competition through the rational mind as populations grow. We must be dignified.
Objects exist around us and we have become objects like Russian dolls, or pieces on a chess board.
SHAPE AND FORM
The shape of an object dictates how we perceive its form by light and shade. Shape can be cast by a mould or by the eye of the maker. There are so many objects that hold little desire to be seen or held for their shape is either badly chosen and this applies to all ergonomically designed objects. Why we cannot have tactility and simplicity in shape and form I do not understand. Everyone would prefer a flat cuboid wooden TV remote. However there is something to be said for ergonomics because they are often hard wearing, and fit the shape of the hand, or head, or other part of the body that in all is ergonomically designed. I have to say when I tried a wooden square toothbrush, I was only satisfied with looking at it, but not using it. Wood does not tend to complement the mouth, for it is dry, and it was environmentally friendly; all the better for the planet but a difficult object to get used to. Therefore I returned to my ergonomic plastic, many bristled brush, and forgot momentarily about the planet, when plastic is made from petroleum.
The point here is though, there are examples of when new materials would make sense for everyday items, new in as much they have not been used before. Particularly sustainable materials. Cardboard has been used for building, buildings by Shigeru Ban, a world famous Japanese architect, who uses rolls of strengthened cardboard in outdoor situations, where wind, and water cannot affect the structure. Often draped with textile curtains, to give a weather barrier to the cardboard.
Shape means we can structure objects in new ways, in order to re-define the table lamp, the pencil, the pen, the chair, the mobile phone, the glass, the plate, the cutlery, etc. There are many shapes like honeycomb that get disregarded, and overlooked, for more direct relationships, between junctions in order to create a machine aesthetic of this age, where efficiency means upmost to the consumer. However why not re-interpret the shape of an object for the purposes of a new material, just as we did in the modern movement, during the beginning of the 20th Century, in order to create objects with the new material of that age, namely Steel. When a spiders web, so fine, produced by the spider from sugar and water, is 5 times the strength of Steel, there must be a way of enrolling nature in order to find solutions, if not clues to the problem of new form through required structure as a result of sustainability, not forgetting the sometime, adherent necessity of body ergonomics.
COLOUR
Colour ultimately goes through changes by fashions. Who remembers the orange and browns of the eighties, for an age in which I was born. I can't say I was old enough to know any different, but I am sure it swayed me to convert to pink and Navy by the time I was in stripey shorts, and cut T-shirt, and sun-hat. I found these colours so powerful in fashion I still wear them today, as recognition of my past, and good days, on holiday in France, for where I was conceived on the beaches of Brittany. The ultimate French blue T-shirt came a little later. What France does for colour knows reckoning for the rest of the world, and we see it rarely in Britain, through our brick cavalcades, looking at red clay outside, and if we're concerned, no more magnolia, but white, off white, and greys.
Here is where colour gets interesting, for it is not only the virtue of complementary colours, over those that are contrasting in our neo-Scandinavian, scandi-haus desires, but it is a religion to wear similar colours, in our wardrobes. How many choose all black, all blue, all red? Many of those with taste co-ordinate with complementary colours, because the eye is not drawn to one area of the body, making someone look taller, shorter, fatter or thinner, by extenuating the form.
In painting we often choose brighter colours, for there is room for an injection of colour in many a room, with a taste for the antiquated tradition of art on the walls, without any other added decoration in the room. Now we see art referencing the objects in old interiors, through the work of Rachel Whiteread, and her pick and choose neutrality of sourcing traditional pieces of furniture to be cast in resin, and that are made colourful, of object form, of anonymity, cutting away their story in the context of a white art gallery, and allowing the colour to extenuate their casts, but at the same time through their re-interpretation she states, that she is trying to bring their story through abstraction into the gallery.
Should we re-interpret old form with new colour. This could be a mistake because form says so much of the age, but when we look in Elle Decor, and Vogue magazine, we often find couture interiors, and fashions work with historical context with new form in old fabrics, or new fabrics in old forms, there is always a play with history. For example who does not love a boutique hotel with an old facade behind which there are mute new tones of greys and blues, and modernity in abundance. The cornucopia of interior design, allows more of the same, with variation in selection of fittings, and this means colour must always be played down to allow the special one off elements to shine as a dot on a Juan Miro, the art of minimalism and the art of abstraction.
LINE
Line allows the adjoining and separation in the positing of objects. Line can be carried by the height of pictures on the wall, composition of a number of pictures, and the placement of furniture and objects upon a table or chair. I often find myself piling objects on my favourite meditation chair, an oak traditional single back dining room chair. It is for reasons of not wanting to do my daily mindfulness, and also because of its use; it becomes an art object itself, lining up stationery, papers, and other found objects in nature, to re-interpret its use, more as a table.
A phone is a prime example of something that constantly gets picked up, and put down, so I have a phone pocket in my man bag to take it out, and afterwards I line it up on the edge of the chest or table it sits on, to give a pleasing aesthetic, as if it has artistic value in the 21st Century. No-one is anywhere these days without an i-Phone. From compact to larger screens, we now value its camera, and practicality, I am sure it will not be long before we are lining up our phone, and other useful objects, like a note-pad and pen in the bath under water.
NASA & the Americans even invented a space age pen, that would work in 0 gravity, lining up their notes for daily diaries and reports on the ships well being. Whilst the Russians cleverly used a pencil, because the ink would not travel in all directions, but graphite could be applied with pressure. It is not necessary to have every gadget in the house, but if you do, you may want to consider line if you can afford it, such as speakers that sit inside the wall, plastered over, and guaranteed to continue working through their proven durability. No object for sound, just your apple remote to be placed in a recess in the table, as long as you can pick it up again, so we can make it generous at one end.
Something I have discovered is to pull the bed away from the wall, in order to allow a hoover around the bed, preventing dust to form at the edge of the bed. There are many practicalities that go hand in hand with aesthetics for the lining up of objects. As Le Corbusier said in Toward an architecture there must be 'regularity of line'. To regulate is to create divination.
POSITING
The positing of objects, allows for the removal of clutter, non-existent residual claims of organisation because you know where you left it! There is a new order, of minimalist reprieve that creates the divine, and a quality to make the dweller appreciate a space not just for the colour of the walls, and furniture, preferably mute, but to allow each object a home. Ultimately we all have too many objects, but we are not used to living without that sentimental twinge, that allows us to enjoy the plethora of objects in our possession.
We can create a new theatre, whereby our lives are organised, and coherence of the mind with the objects themselves makes for a better life, and creates a sense of established luxury in the order of aesthetics, and practical aesthetics.
Utility would seem subsidiary to constantly lining your phone up with the edge of the table, but it makes sense to regulate line, like a painting, and then the artwork starts to speak within the house or room. There may be doubt in your mind that there is any point, but until you have tried it you may not realise how one can start to re-interpret the value of that old chest of drawers, simply by minimising objects and vestibules, displayed, and making their position worthy of a Donald Judd, or Patrick Heron.
There is something to be said for taking the artwork in your home, and replicating something in it in the use, display and position of your objects, from the dining table and chairs, to the singing bowl, and cd's left undecided on the sideboard. Even the kitchen needs creativity. Will you fill them high, cluttered in one vestibule, or will you hang your utensils in line, like Dad's hanging meat carcass in 'context'? There is a theatre behind the curtain, there is no more Apartheid, at least none physically visible, in both instances, but hopefully this black/white practice of object thinking, and organisation will make your Othello board both black and white, because life is not of colour, but exactly of colour, and creativity. May we all live side by side in harmony with our individuality shining through in the positing of our objects.
There is only one more point to make. When we have decided how we want to live, keep reducing and changing. For as we learnt through Rachel Whiteread, the timelessness of our positing is in its evolution and change, not in stagnant sameness for the virtue is its very positing will come and go.
