The Nothing Object
Riley O'Keeffe
Riley O'Keeffe
Note from the curator
Anastasia Booth's objects play out a strange paradox of sorts. The materials, arranged and constructed, facilitate the transformation into elegant devices of eroticism and fetishisation. But through these same materials, Booth renders these objects almost uncomfortably dysfunctional. There exists, as she says, a liminality. The work oscillates between being something absurdly useless and something that is functional; between the hilarity of their illogical dysfunction and the uncanny way they abstractly mirror our bodies, protruding and gaping and dangling, begging their audience for exploration. The associations we make with these objects is clearly evident: they are objects of twisted desire, uncomfortably sensuous and alluring. Though despite these desires, we are struck with their paradoxical self destruction, the negation of function and of logic. Booth’s objects hover uncomfortably. They appear in a suspended state of transformation, between being one thing and being another thing. A perpetual transition between object and an art object. A substantial something, rendered a perpetual nothing.
The following seven points were given to Anastasia as a starting point for her response. Her response appears here after a considerable edit to adhere to a suitable word count. Anastasia’s response, being the third and final in the suite, was the ideal response I imagined for this project.
The Nothing-object
1. Over the last 100 or so years, contemporary art has consistently been adopting objects, on the terms of a change of scenery, context and consequence. These objects adapt; to their surrounds, functions and to the demands of the artist. Something peculiar happens in the liminal transition between something and something else, the precise moment of transformation; the object of no meaning, function or intent.
2. The nothing-object is as much nothing, as it is everything. It is Du champ’s ready-mades and Ellsworth Kelly’s bands of colour. It is out of context. Without context. Damien Hirst had a shark and Piero Manzoni had a can of shit. Carl Andre had bricks and Felix Gonzalez-Torres had candy. Tracy Emin had a bedroom, so did Claes Oldenburg. Arte Povera had it and so did minimalism and the YBA’s.
3. They aren’t always nothing objects. They are laden with purpose but briefly devoid of meaning. They share tasks and are often avatars; for something sublime or something utilitarian. Nothing objects are transformative, interchanging one thing for another or making something-objects into other nothing objects. A nothing object makes a kebab a vagina and a coat rack into nothing back into a coat rack. They demand attention as readily as they get walked past and ignored. A real nothing-object starts as a something-object, until, as if by an unseen energy, it is plucked from it’s contextual habitat. It is void of meaning. Its only significance in the universe is the space it takes up. It is back to zero, blank, nothing. The nothing object is filler, renounced of all prior vices and tasks, it attracts meaning and personality from its surrounds and the words written where old ones once were.
4. The object leads a cyclical life. Of an orientation towards something, a particular set of qualities and purposes and then circling back on themselves towards zero. And if they arrive, they start back a zero, slightly altered, motivations and aspirations with different results.
5. This transformation of the object appears to happen in secret. A series of steps is taken by the artist in order to re-present the object in its new form. The process is kept from the viewer and instead they are presented with a situation in which their imagination, if they let it, creates or completes the work. This potentially trying relationship between object and audience can be difficult to overcome because often these objects seem so utilitarian and unapproachable. However, they endeavour to provide a common ground for open dialogue, where objects and people exist in the same hypothetical world that the artist has created.
6. The nothing object is sometimes funny but sometimes too serious. Its been trodden on before and also been eaten. Its transformation is not always permanent but usually dramatic. And maybe the distinction between something and nothing is negligible, maybe just a different orientation or a change in colour or size. Or maybe a transferred purpose or sound or presence. The importance is belief in the object, otherwise its nothing.
7. Two clocks placed on a wall become not just a symbol of love but become the lovers. Though time is relative, the clock objects are functionless in time, their existence is pertinent to their function and their circumstance. You have to believe in the lovers, just as you believe in the oak tree and death and the sublime.
Riley O'Keeffe, 2012
Artist Response
Art as an erotic substitute, can appropriate the mechanisms of fetish as strategic tools, evoking a new way to transcribe the body within the material, physical and conceptual contexts of art-making. Objects within my practice are rarely left in their original state without particular material intervention, deconstructing, altering of amplifying their original purpose. The found or adopted object, when placed in relation to a series of other forms, has the ability to subsume everything under the banner of the sexual. There is a sensuous materiality in objects that exist in close proximity to the body, the animism in these objects are directly linked to a feeling of sexual gratification.
Fetish objects move constantly between the whole and its parts, between the genuine and the substitute. Acting in this way it constitutes a liminal zone that engages the tactile and confuses it with the emotional. Pantyhose may stretch and have vaginal-like openings, furniture becomes sexual device (rack like) contorting the body, and fruit sit in a suggestive parody of breasts and genitalia. Just a trace of material can recall the erotic body despite any prior purposes: the object can be rewritten. We write our experiences onto these forms as makers and viewers.
These objects are first and foremost vessels and avatars of desire. Benign and seemingly innocent objects enact pleasure through symbolism and substitution. Our interaction with them becomes inherently phantasmic, with the real serving only as a support for our physiological projections. When the mental images and trains of thought elicited become the substance of the object, they are the object. In this dynamic the potential of the object is to enact the tension between the real, the simulated and the desired. Interestingly the simulation can fail, the object cannot sustain the desires placed upon it, and there is great potential in this failure and the slippage of the sensuous ideal.
The processes around objects can often be hard to circumscribe, sometimes an object can be a physical testament to an undefined ephemeral process. It is hard to track down exactly where certain objects and ideas come from. Whether making these ideas apparent is essential to the viewing of the object? My opinion changes about that all the time.
The highly sexualised becomes absurd and impotent, through the realization of these objects in strange and dysfunctional materials. There is humour. There is always humour around sex. From a disapproving snicker to the nervous giggle of discomfort, laughter is a buffer against that which we find offensive and disquieting. Humour can come from a perceived threat towards the viewer, when an object is symbolic of a violation or the enactment of what the audience believes is taboo. When sex is presented in the gallery, the viewer forgets that it is an art object, that those materials and techniques have their own history of display. The mockery created is still scrutinized under the same guidelines as the original object, how does this work? What happens if? Where does that fit? In this confusion the dysfunctional object is given the same functionality as the original and so carries the same moral consequences. A change in form and environment is unable to remove that association and believability.
I’ve always been told how highly sexualized my work is but I find it ironically impotent. What is the implication of an inoperable sex object? A testament to the inability and awkwardness of the maker, perhaps it comes from a deep running discomfort I have about deviant sexuality, the experience of it in my mind and the actuality is remarkably different. I very rarely do the things that people imagine I must, rarely visit those places, rarely indulge in those objects. Frequently I feel like a hypocrite, I studio full of dysfunctional objects, nothing objects. They are full of potential, generating content due to material inadequacy and yet all just a testament to my personal inability. The nothing object, my nothing object is an embodiment of all those things. Deeply personal and yet so far removed that it wallows in its own ambiguity.
Anastasia Booth, October 2012
Anastasia Booth's objects play out a strange paradox of sorts. The materials, arranged and constructed, facilitate the transformation into elegant devices of eroticism and fetishisation. But through these same materials, Booth renders these objects almost uncomfortably dysfunctional. There exists, as she says, a liminality. The work oscillates between being something absurdly useless and something that is functional; between the hilarity of their illogical dysfunction and the uncanny way they abstractly mirror our bodies, protruding and gaping and dangling, begging their audience for exploration. The associations we make with these objects is clearly evident: they are objects of twisted desire, uncomfortably sensuous and alluring. Though despite these desires, we are struck with their paradoxical self destruction, the negation of function and of logic. Booth’s objects hover uncomfortably. They appear in a suspended state of transformation, between being one thing and being another thing. A perpetual transition between object and an art object. A substantial something, rendered a perpetual nothing.
The following seven points were given to Anastasia as a starting point for her response. Her response appears here after a considerable edit to adhere to a suitable word count. Anastasia’s response, being the third and final in the suite, was the ideal response I imagined for this project.
The Nothing-object
1. Over the last 100 or so years, contemporary art has consistently been adopting objects, on the terms of a change of scenery, context and consequence. These objects adapt; to their surrounds, functions and to the demands of the artist. Something peculiar happens in the liminal transition between something and something else, the precise moment of transformation; the object of no meaning, function or intent.
2. The nothing-object is as much nothing, as it is everything. It is Du champ’s ready-mades and Ellsworth Kelly’s bands of colour. It is out of context. Without context. Damien Hirst had a shark and Piero Manzoni had a can of shit. Carl Andre had bricks and Felix Gonzalez-Torres had candy. Tracy Emin had a bedroom, so did Claes Oldenburg. Arte Povera had it and so did minimalism and the YBA’s.
3. They aren’t always nothing objects. They are laden with purpose but briefly devoid of meaning. They share tasks and are often avatars; for something sublime or something utilitarian. Nothing objects are transformative, interchanging one thing for another or making something-objects into other nothing objects. A nothing object makes a kebab a vagina and a coat rack into nothing back into a coat rack. They demand attention as readily as they get walked past and ignored. A real nothing-object starts as a something-object, until, as if by an unseen energy, it is plucked from it’s contextual habitat. It is void of meaning. Its only significance in the universe is the space it takes up. It is back to zero, blank, nothing. The nothing object is filler, renounced of all prior vices and tasks, it attracts meaning and personality from its surrounds and the words written where old ones once were.
4. The object leads a cyclical life. Of an orientation towards something, a particular set of qualities and purposes and then circling back on themselves towards zero. And if they arrive, they start back a zero, slightly altered, motivations and aspirations with different results.
5. This transformation of the object appears to happen in secret. A series of steps is taken by the artist in order to re-present the object in its new form. The process is kept from the viewer and instead they are presented with a situation in which their imagination, if they let it, creates or completes the work. This potentially trying relationship between object and audience can be difficult to overcome because often these objects seem so utilitarian and unapproachable. However, they endeavour to provide a common ground for open dialogue, where objects and people exist in the same hypothetical world that the artist has created.
6. The nothing object is sometimes funny but sometimes too serious. Its been trodden on before and also been eaten. Its transformation is not always permanent but usually dramatic. And maybe the distinction between something and nothing is negligible, maybe just a different orientation or a change in colour or size. Or maybe a transferred purpose or sound or presence. The importance is belief in the object, otherwise its nothing.
7. Two clocks placed on a wall become not just a symbol of love but become the lovers. Though time is relative, the clock objects are functionless in time, their existence is pertinent to their function and their circumstance. You have to believe in the lovers, just as you believe in the oak tree and death and the sublime.
Riley O'Keeffe, 2012
Artist Response
Art as an erotic substitute, can appropriate the mechanisms of fetish as strategic tools, evoking a new way to transcribe the body within the material, physical and conceptual contexts of art-making. Objects within my practice are rarely left in their original state without particular material intervention, deconstructing, altering of amplifying their original purpose. The found or adopted object, when placed in relation to a series of other forms, has the ability to subsume everything under the banner of the sexual. There is a sensuous materiality in objects that exist in close proximity to the body, the animism in these objects are directly linked to a feeling of sexual gratification.
Fetish objects move constantly between the whole and its parts, between the genuine and the substitute. Acting in this way it constitutes a liminal zone that engages the tactile and confuses it with the emotional. Pantyhose may stretch and have vaginal-like openings, furniture becomes sexual device (rack like) contorting the body, and fruit sit in a suggestive parody of breasts and genitalia. Just a trace of material can recall the erotic body despite any prior purposes: the object can be rewritten. We write our experiences onto these forms as makers and viewers.
These objects are first and foremost vessels and avatars of desire. Benign and seemingly innocent objects enact pleasure through symbolism and substitution. Our interaction with them becomes inherently phantasmic, with the real serving only as a support for our physiological projections. When the mental images and trains of thought elicited become the substance of the object, they are the object. In this dynamic the potential of the object is to enact the tension between the real, the simulated and the desired. Interestingly the simulation can fail, the object cannot sustain the desires placed upon it, and there is great potential in this failure and the slippage of the sensuous ideal.
The processes around objects can often be hard to circumscribe, sometimes an object can be a physical testament to an undefined ephemeral process. It is hard to track down exactly where certain objects and ideas come from. Whether making these ideas apparent is essential to the viewing of the object? My opinion changes about that all the time.
The highly sexualised becomes absurd and impotent, through the realization of these objects in strange and dysfunctional materials. There is humour. There is always humour around sex. From a disapproving snicker to the nervous giggle of discomfort, laughter is a buffer against that which we find offensive and disquieting. Humour can come from a perceived threat towards the viewer, when an object is symbolic of a violation or the enactment of what the audience believes is taboo. When sex is presented in the gallery, the viewer forgets that it is an art object, that those materials and techniques have their own history of display. The mockery created is still scrutinized under the same guidelines as the original object, how does this work? What happens if? Where does that fit? In this confusion the dysfunctional object is given the same functionality as the original and so carries the same moral consequences. A change in form and environment is unable to remove that association and believability.
I’ve always been told how highly sexualized my work is but I find it ironically impotent. What is the implication of an inoperable sex object? A testament to the inability and awkwardness of the maker, perhaps it comes from a deep running discomfort I have about deviant sexuality, the experience of it in my mind and the actuality is remarkably different. I very rarely do the things that people imagine I must, rarely visit those places, rarely indulge in those objects. Frequently I feel like a hypocrite, I studio full of dysfunctional objects, nothing objects. They are full of potential, generating content due to material inadequacy and yet all just a testament to my personal inability. The nothing object, my nothing object is an embodiment of all those things. Deeply personal and yet so far removed that it wallows in its own ambiguity.
Anastasia Booth, October 2012
