exhibitions
Jiří Skála: Two Families of Objects
photographed by: Jaroslav Skala, Jirina Skalova, Jindrich Boublik, Josef Malat, Vaclav Suda, Jiri Stupka, Jaroslav Zitek, Stefan Kadlec, Vaclav Tous, Oto Husta and Jiri Skala
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Travels in Hyperreality--Two Families of Objects
Umberto Eco, Harcourt-Brace 1986
What would be a better way to initiate a column devoted to signs and myths --which we will try to carry forward without any obsession with regularity, responding instead to the suggestions that arrive from all sides-- than by making a devout pilgrimage to one of the sanctuaries of mass communication, The Milan Trade Fair? And with the awareness we are going there on a specific mission, because it is one thing to enter as an economic operator. For him, the Fair doesn't spout any false talk, it gives him a chance to find what he is looking for, touch it, buy it. This is a game with no double meanings, as least as honest as any commercial competition is honest in a market economy. But it's another thing to go there as a spectator (as most visitors do). For him, the Fair is a great Kermesse of triumphant merchandise, and it takes on the characteristics, to a minor degree, of the big international Expos. The worlds fairs. If -- as Marx said-- "the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an [immense accumulation of commodities,' ' then worlds fairs are the temple in which this merchandise loses all real contact with is value in use and most of its contact with its barter value, to become a series of pure connotative signs, at an emotional fever pitch. The goods almost lose their concrete individuality to become so many notes in an anthem to progress, a hymn to the abundance and happiness of consumption and production.
But a trade fair is an international expo only halfway, because the merchandise is there to be sold. The products are signs of an undifferentiated desire, but they are also objective terms of an individual and precise desire. The immense population of objects refers us to that "sociology of objects" that is developing in France, of which we will speak on another occasion. But a sociology (or a semiology) of objects means they must be seen within the concrete system of the society that creates them and receives them, so they must be seen as a language listened to as it is being spoken, and of which we are trying to discern the regulating system. Here, on the other hand, the objects appear lined up as in a dictionary, or in a gramma book, verbs with verbs, adverbs with adverbs,lamps with lamps, tractors with tractors. Would it not it be right to conclude that this collection of objects, which is a trade fair, actually leaves the visitor free, because it imposes on him no logic of the accumulation of objects and allows him to gaze coldly to choose? On the contrary, however, the ideological message of the fair emerges only at a second glance, when we have almost been taken in by the persuasive game it establishes.
The objects are of two types. The first are the "beautiful" objects desirable, fairly accessible. They include easy chairs, lamps, sausages, liquors, motorboats, swimming pools. The visitor loves them and would like to own them. He can not perhaps own a motorboat but he thinks of the remote possibility--one day, who knows?-- of making such a purchase. But there is one thing he doesn't desire: to accumulate objects of a single type. He may want an ash tray, but not a hundred ashtrays; a rubber boat, but not a thousand rubber boats. So his desire is keen but not frantic; it can be postponed, but its difficulty never creates the drama of impossibility. When you think about it, these " beautiful" objects are all consumer goods.
Then there are the others. They are "ugly" because they are cranes, cement mixers, lathes, hods, excavators, hydraulic presses (actually , they are very beautiful. More so than the first but the visitor doesn't know this). Since they are ugly and cumbersome, they are undesirable, also because they seem strangely defunctionalized, with their wheels spinning pointlessly, their blades striking the air without slicing anything... They are inaccessible, but the visitor doesn't care. He knows that even if he could buy a machine tool, it would be of no use to him. Because these objects, unlike the others, function only if they are accumulable. A thousand ashtrays are useless, but a thousand machine tools make a big industry.
At the end of his rounds, the ordinary visitor believes he has chosen. He desires beautiful objects, accessible, and not accumulable, and rejects those that are ugly and accumulable (but inaccessible}. In reality, he has not chosen, he has only accepted his role as a consumer of consumer goods since he can not be a proprietor of the means of production. But he is content. Tomorrow he will work harder in order to be able to buy, one day, an easy chair and a refrigerator. He will work at the lathe, which is not his, because (the fair has told him) he doesn't want it.