Too Many Things

The museum, in its beginnings, was primarily an accumulation of a lot of very different stuff. Only over the course of the centuries, did it develop into the institution that it represents today classifying and endowing identity. A central component of “musealization” is the disentanglement of the exhibition object from its original context and its re-contextualization through placement and description.

In L’Objet, the artist approaches the future of a banal object (a toy coffee pot) as an archaeologist would and attempts to draw conclusions about the past—that is, our present-day—civilization. This process is equivalent to interpreting a work of art. The “Hall of Sculptures” in User Group Disco is lacking museum space as well as objects worthy of being collected. Everything imaginable flies through a black void both reminiscent of the solitude of outer space and of the glossy aesthetics of advertising. In Too Many Things, volunteers (usually old men) sort out and repair the garbage of affluent society for a Salvation Army charity shop. Since people rarely donate things that are really important to them, this store filled with worthless and partly superfluous objects becomes something of an ironic anti-museum of consumer society. Unusual Red Cardigan examines the rapport between artists, art objects, art users and eBay—among numerous other things.

The Object – L'Objet, Jacques Louis Nyst, be 1974, 12 min

User Group Disco, Elizabeth Price, uk 2009, 15 min

Too Many Things, Donigan Cumming, ca 2010, 36 min

Unusual Red Cardigan, John Smith, uk 2011, 13 min