The art of keeping
di // pubblicato il 22 Febbraio, 2012
Discussions on objects in the consumer society are ubiquitous and innumerable. Objects as status, palliatives, fetishes, waste, addiction, means of control. Various reflections written down in ink, on a computer, pasted on billboards, displayed in a museum, almost always mediated by other objects. In acknowledging – as accomplices – the shallow nature of the diverse paraphernalia we fence ourselves in with, we sometimes developed a schizophrenic, neurotic relationship with the things we need and the ones we don't, the ones that satisfy us and the ones that make us guilty, or fleetingly pleased, all the ones we can do without and the ones that are indispensable; at times celebrating, at others renoucing that nature of primates that aims us towards living through learning and contrivances.
Waste not is the name of the extensive and touching installation by Chinese artist Song Dong, on display for free at London's Barbican from 15 February to 12 June 2012. Its name comes from a motto of the Cultural Revolution: wu jin qi yong, a monition inviting precisely “not to waste”, in times of hardships, the few resources available. A piece of advice the artist's mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, interiorised to the point of keeping every single thing she would use for over fifty years. Her behaviour is recalled, in an introduction by Song Dong himself, as a generational trait more than an individual one. Systematic towards the beginning, the hoarding of objects became haphazard and cluttered after the death of Zhao's husband following a heart attack, in 2002. Since then, as a “family healing” therapy, the artist suggested her to arrange in a work of art all the objects collected over the course of her life. Together, in 2005 both of them organised the first exhibition of the piece which since then, even after the mother's death in 2009, continued to tour the world, along with a set of neon characters – facing the sky – which read “Dad don't worry, Mum and the rest of the family are all well”.
The exhibition area devoted to the installation appears to be particularly fitting: The Curve is a long corridor that winds around the outside of the Barbican's concert hall. Thus, the thousands of objects do not show up all at once, but are slowly discovered, carefully treading among packaging and dolls, bottle caps and spirit flasks, stationery and shoes. Not only reusable objects are – in fact – collected, but also used up toothpaste tubes, cardboard boxes, broken high chairs, pieces of polystyrene that become unlikely non-figurative sculptures lined up along the walls. Once at the end of the route, one has the impression that these objects do not belong to one single life, but at least to five or six different lives, slightly unaligned in time.
But maybe this happens because, used to chucking what can't be used – and not to reuse what's chucked – it is hard to realise how many objects our hands come in contact with throughout a life; an almost inconceivable amount, and maybe not so useful to compute, like stars in the universe or cigarette stubs on the kerb. This celebration of thrift, though, is not necessarily a comment on waste. From the start it's instead permeated by a domestic, intimate atmosphere; and even if they may give rise to other conclusions, the objects turn time into matter and stretch to its limits what Song Dong considers the “invisible” part of the exhibition: his mother's house. Such intimacy is also produced by the work's only introductions: a text by the artist, and one of his mother's writings about soap.
Waste not makes it possible to gaze into a faraway (though rapidly moving closer) culture, to get to know a generation's life philosophy, but also to reflect on our relationship with objects. We can believe we live through them, or maybe that they only are our traces, scattered here and there through life. After traversing Song Dong's and Zhao Xiangyuan's installation, though, the familiar siege of objects can be contemplated from another, sweeter and gentler, point of view.