Barbara Kasten

I mentioned Barbara Kasten during crit last week. I find most of her work interesting but I especially like this series. Its given me some material and formal ideas.

HYPER-OBJECT AND HYPER-OBJECT OOO

In Mike Kelly's discussion about the uncanny, he said " all feelings are provoked by an object, a dead object that has a life of its own, a life that is somehow dependent on you, and is intimately connected in some secret manner to your life" (Mike Kelley) I find this statement interesting because it resonates with my thinking process toward the old objects that tend to have a new life in an exhibition space. Everyone has a pan in their various homes yet seeing accumulated pans in a book self sort on gives the viewers a surprising feeling. The viewers began to relate to the objects but in more a curious way because the accumulation consists of only old pans that have obtained patterns with random manipulations through a long period of time. They are installed as dead objects yet I see life in them. Some viewers mentioned that they have several pans like these and others were also also narrating personal stories upon the pans.

My research is about seeing possibilities within objects and transforming them to have different context. All objects have hidden secrets, they are uncanny just as Timothy Morton mentions, yet it takes the creativity of an artist find those things as hyper-objects.  He talks about nature as hyper-object and I'm very much interested in the fact that nature particularly climate change affected the material thus the rusted aluminum roofing that I'm using for my work. This makes me consider the material as hyper-object

The play with dead things also reminds me of my previous exhibitions where I titled the series of works as "fantasy town". I collected several dead objects that have been processed for sale. In this work the frog is positioned as if it were alive, crawling to eat a blade stick. I was playing with the idea of fantasies as Mike Kelley mentioned. 

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In the exhibition space all these dead objects were placed as if they were plucked from the tree. It suggested the possibilities within objects, the hidden secrets that we don't see in objects. I see that objects have power. In this image, the objects are no more what they are or known to be, I was seeing them as vegetables and fruits. They were arranged as how fruits and vegetables are sold in Ghanaian market. It was a way of of placing value on the objects.

Mike Kelly also said that " For the very young child, a stuffed animal is not simply a model of some agreeable object, a friendly animal or an object to weave fantasies around, like a doll" I think this statement relates one of my students Wyatt Lucovsky's work he made which was inspired by his nostalgic experience. In his artist statement, he referenced Mike Kelley's stuffed animals. Wyatt made a TV out of card board, through which stuffed animals were dramatically jerking from the virtual space into the real world. He states, "I remember experiencing this as a kid and I believe that I often learned from and was inspired by the cartoons that I watched, as many of the were created to teach and inspire". I think that this work explores a child's curiosity in the nature of cartoons sometimes we tend to love some characters in the cartoon movies that we wished they were our real friends. According a child, this is ultimately uncanny. Mike Kelly calls it the "child's first Not-me possession" 

PROMPT 1




PROMPT 2

HYPEROBJECTS OOO

I would talk about hyper-object focusing animal rather than any other object or human because Timothy's hyper-objects explores non-human elements. I see an elephant as a hyper object, in terms of its scale. It could be friendly and at the same time harmful. It is so big that it could do so many things beyond our imaginations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MTABm-BLMc

Timothy Morton also mentions that "to be a thing is to be haunted". It makes me understand what the term materiality of objects mean to artists. In other concepts, materiality sometimes relate to amount or scale. This connects to Timothy's explanation of the TARDIS. I think that object oriented ontology suggests the metaphysical study of nature of objects through which ideologies or possibilities of  could be revealed. He said, "Hyper objects are big but we have the controls, we can do anything about them" The OOO means that we have the capability to control the hyper-object, we could manipulate it to rather become a "thing" but not just an object

He said "everything is uncanny", just as Mike Kelley's uncanny analysis about objects. I find the idea of architecture being haunted very intriguing and I think U Ram Choe's Plastic bag in  the pavilion gives me that picture clearly. The artist saw the plastic bag as a critical object because it was able to scare him beyond his imagination. He built a golden pavilion and kept the plastic bag in it as an artwork. The plastic bag is a hyper-object because Timothy also mentions that the hyper-objects are scary things. According to Timothy, buildings are also haunted by the past and future so plastic bag is haunting the pavilion thus a building just it haunted the artist.  

Prompt 1. Carefully define "hyperobject." Offer a few examples hyperobjects not mentioned in the reading and specifically describe a hyperobject that relates to your own work/research.

A hyper object is an object that you cannot touch Is is an object that is dependent on forces of nature and relevant on elements factors outside of our human control. 

  

 Marc Quin Self Portrait 

Saharan Desert Dust

Prompt 2. Timothy Morton describes himself as being engaged in ooo or object oriented ontology. Define this term. Describe its possible relationships/applications to sculpture. 

Object Oriented Ontology--

OOO

Takes issue with thoughts and being

Object Oriented Ontology is the questioning of our own understanding of the existence in relationship to those objects around us. What is the difference? What is the gap? Do objects outside of us experience a different existence? This is incredibly relevant to us as sculptors because we are constantly evaluating and investigating the meaning of objects. Essentially as sculptors--we are intervening with those objects and their destiny as sculptors. 

OOO is about acknowledging and exploring the “private lives” of objects around us. 

 “unified realities—physical or otherwise—that cannot be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects.”

 Graham Harman (philosophy professor at AU) 

Prompt 1.

In our reading, Morton defines hyperobject as “objects of such massive scale and temporality that they exceed the perceptive capacities of humans” with examples such as global warming and neoliberalism.

Considering the ideas I am experimenting with my work. I started to wonder if superstitions, traditions, and history can be viewed as a form of hyperobject. 

The artist and work I am relating to is Xu Bing and his Book from the Sky. This book was completed by 4000+ words that were unreadable for both the audiences and the artist. This makes me think about language and history and how they are pass down continuously through time.

Xu Bing. Book from the Sky. 1987-91.

I do not see the work I created as hyperobject,  but the container that holds the hyperobject that exist in my culture. The education system, social hierarchy, social expectation are things that were created by humans but are too large to think about.

 

Fang-Yi Su, Untitled, Fall 2018

Prompt 2.

According to our reading, OOO is a popular movement in contemporary philosophy characterized by a rejection of anthropocentrism (the privileging of the human over the nonhuman), and "correlationism", the post-Kantian assumption that reality is a product of human thinking.”

OOO argues that what we think are unique about human are not for human only.

I think OOO has a lot to do with sculpture because if we started to think of the world as object oriented rather than human oriented then what are we doing to the materials that we altered and turned into what we so called “sculpture”? We turned these materials into something meaningful for “us”, but what about for the material themselves? Is the wood I picked out from Lowes wood, or is that just something us humans categorize it as?