Working Through Objects reader response

Susan begins her article by introducing the Freud museum implying its rarity and importance by comparing it to other spaces that artists normally have to work in. She states that it has layers upon layers of meaning even in the present that is based on the collections that have been preserved in his actual family’s home that has been turn into the museum. Susan brings us into her experience working on an art installation in the museum introducing her first obstacle, the large vitrine. She then decided to limit herself to confining her installation to the oversized vitrine. She believed that the vitrine was actually a great opportunity to bring in the viewer and have them be more intimate with the work. From this set up she ended up with viewers that had detailed responses to each of her boxes present in the vitrine. She sums up that that a conscious configuration of objects tells a story. She says that there are at least two possible stories. The one of the story teller (the artist as narrator) or the other of the listeners understanding. Each box in the vitrine is set up in a process that is very dream like. She has a word with each box, an object and an image. These three things create a relationship and thus a story.
Working inside the museum she started to draw connections between herself and Freud, such as ethnicity. Besides personal connection she started drawing similarities between their collections. She concluded both dealt with mortality and death. Working within the context of the museum she started to theorize about collecting itself. She related it to dreams where as in a sense they both have nothing to do with the necessities of physical existence. She then talks about how collecting is a form of joy, like categorizing when you were young and even as you grow older. The accumulation of objects is what gives us meaning she concludes. For her, she found she was seeking immortality and meaning through objects.

I think it is key that there is such an importance placed on the fact that the place where her exhibition took place was in the Freud museum. I couldn’t imagine working in such a space without taking in the context. It is easy to understand that she would start to relate her work and even herself to that of the collections of Freud and even to Freud himself. I found her box titled Cowgirl really intriguing. I found her point about western culture getting away with a lot by pretending to not know what we are saying to be quite honest. I also thought it was interesting that she used words in foreign languages for her boxes to make the viewer feel outside of the discourse, unless they knew the language. I wonder what the outcome would have been if the words had been in one uniform language of the predominant viewer. Would the connection of the images, objects and texts been easier to make, too obvious or if the word in a different language gave it necessary depth and ambiguity…

Vitrine - a glass cabinet or case