One of a Kind (1) Part 2
This video is made up of a series of still images of one of a kind (everyday) objects bought in Johannesburg, South Africa. The narration is commentary taken from notes made while watching Chris Marker's film essay titled San Soleil (1983). Beyond being mere commentary, the narration argues and questions the notion of history and memory in contemporary art practice in South Africa, particularly with regard to the film essay as a potentially political form in activist work. The video starts with a quote by Meshac Gaba about the notion of contemporary African architecture and the ways in which this can be re-imagined from the center rather than the peripheries. The quote reads as follows: “I think that people can consume the exoticism of the modernism and modern cities… it is culture that determines evolution. It is the African people who decide what contemporary African architecture is and how its development in the future will be taking shape according to their own needs, ideas, and influences.” Meschac Gaba (2005). The soundtrack to the video is multi-layered; dominated by a royalty free rendition of 'The London Bridge is Falling Down' among other drum beats and chimes which interrupt and corrupt the song at various intervals. The film essay, like the written essay, is never a thing on its own, never a completed thing, it can never be, because its a setting of a dialogue, not an ultimate truth but a suggestion, trying something out, not entirely true or false or the way it has to be. The narration, sound and the images create a dialog which deals with how meaning and memory become a question rather than an answer; and what it means to position the question as the end point. Take the end point and bring it back, to work with it, to question it, constantly in motion.
One of a Kind (1)
This video engages with questions I have about about commoditization as part of artistic process; what defines this work as a text worth 'value', what are its limits and how does one position oneself as a reader of a text of this kind. I hope to question whether it is possible to read this text in terms of a constellation of concepts: value movement/travel, production, and reproduction– looking at commodification as a process with the capacity to subvert and uphold dominant social and historical perspectives. The idea of commoditization as transformation and then the life of the object after the moment of exchange is implicit in this work which looks at the relationships between architecture, transformation, photography (mechanical reproduction), and travel. The narration for this video is a series of quotes by Igor Kopytoff's essay The Cultural Biography of Things (1986) edited by Arjun Appadurai. In the essay Kopytoff argues that like a house, its changing statuses and uses, Kopytoff argues that an object's status as a commodity is neither finite nor fixed. Rather it is a result of varying social relations and exchanges that constitute it as a valuable product. Therefore its status as a commodity is not the collapse/ end of the artwork or object but rather a chapter in its biography, a moment in its life. The fact that an object is a commodity, only mattered at the point of exchange, thereafter its status was redefined by its functions, through interactions, contexts, needs and desires. Therefor, the object is only worth the social relations which were required to produce it, often viewed as removed from the commodities true worth and replaced with social power. The mystification of the product (it’s fetishization) from the social relations required to produce and use it; and the systems of exchange which govern this production are not the only moments that exist between individuals and objects. Saying this negates the ways in which objects are used or re-used, transformed and altered after they have been produced and long after the moment or moments of exchange. Basically, the writer shows through this comparison that something which is sold as a commodity can accumulate value which is neither visible nor tangible through cultural interaction, moral, racial or historical value, and through this becomes singularized. Singularizations can generate moral or material value depending on the social context. This process of commodification, he identifies as being possibly integral to an object and person’s biography.
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