sticky/smooth
There is an image that I want to talk to. It is of gift exchange on a beach somewhere, a fatal shore. Two groups of people are there, there are the gestures of meeting—arms moved in those sub-Poussin calligraphies of dialogic encounter.
Clean air, fresh morning, non charted waters, a new start, my new found land, my America: a moment when Terra lncognita becomes a place.
But we look to the objects that are there in front of these players, the beads, bolts of cloths, rifles and we see in this moment the commodity and the gift in action, that nexus of giving, receiving and reciprocating, Marcel Mauss’ foundational apprehension as to the orthography of the gift played out with real and serious consequences: here are some beads can I have your country? These objects have a presence because they are Ur-objects for each group. It is the moment of naming from Genesis.
Marx writes that: ‘The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities… However, as soon as products have become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the internal life of communities’ [1] and he is correct to locate this way in which to externalise objects as commodities changes the internal life too. But in trying to locate this image I kept coming across another kind of imagery. Instead of the neat pile of things that I wanted to illustrate this, I kept being given images of Captain Cook being killed on the beach in the South Seas. The beach, Marx’s boundaries, the strand, the most liminal place you can be, a place contingent on time and tide Google images suggesting that gift-giving is a little more dangerous activity. Another form of the encounter, but one that made me try to unpick the imagery of the gift exchange a little more.
For in working around this area I have been very struck by how deep the valency of the poison apple is. ‘The gift that goes wrong’ seems to be common currency across cultures. Its structure is simple: you need a gift to be happily received but the necessary proprieties of the gift to be misunderstood. You have to give nothing—expect to give nothing—in return. And in that moment of expectation it all goes horribly wrong. The unstable gift where nothing is returned—has been given. Roll on the Trojan Horse, Snow White’s poisoned comb, Hansel and Gretel, Judas’ kiss. We know not to trust the seemingly unilateral gift, because intuitively we understand the basis of reciprocity.
The gift is a trap. Accept it and you are part of that nexus of giving, receiving and reciprocating. Refuse it and you cross the boundary of asocial behaviour. What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back? Better to externalise the reciprocity through the adoption of money, the anxiety about giving that lies at the heart of Capital. In Given Time: /. Counterfeit Money, Derrida revitalised interest in the gift among literary scholars and critics with his provocative claim that the gift is impossible since, from the moment one even recognises a transaction as a gift, it becomes weighted with obligations and therefore no longer qualifies as a pure present. Indeed, for Derrida, the gift is a figure for the impossible, for whatever lies outside of symbolic systems.
Traps are key. In Alfred Gell’s vivid apprehension of this in his essay ‘Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artwork and Artworks as Traps’, an essay in which many of his arguments later used in Art and Agency are rehearsed, he writes: ‘The trap is both a model of its creator, the hunter and a model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space. Our illustrations cannot show this because they either show traps awaiting their victims, or victims who have already been entrapped; they cannot show the ‘time structure’ of the trap. This time structure opposes suspended time, the empty time of ‘waiting’, to the sudden catastrophe that ensues as the trap closes.This temporal structure varies with the kind of trap employed, but it is not hard to see in the drama of entrapment a mechanical analogue to the tragic sequence of hubris-nemesis-catastrophe.’ [2]
Gell argues that the trap may be seen as the archetypical art work since, by looking at the trap, the spectator is capable of deducing the intentions of the person that has produced the trap—how she or he wants the animal to be attracted to the object and how the trap will catch the prey. In other words, by use of a material object, the artist has externalised his or her mind into the social world. Furthermore the trap is an archetypical art object ‘since the aim of the art object is exactly to entrap the spectator, to catch his or her flow of consciousness and impose the social intentionality of the artist on spectator’ [3] as Peter Bjerregaard has written.
The idea of the gift as a trap, the trap as a gift, is rich. What started to interest me was the imagery of flow and of entrapment, of liquidity, illiquidity and viscosity. Or as it ended up for me, sticky things and non-sticky things.
This is what makes the concept of the potlatch so fascinating. I first came across it in Thorstein Veblen’s use of the ceremony in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class where he made potlatching a symbol of ‘conspicuous consumption’ [4]. Then it turned up again in Georges Bataille for whom it came to symbolise the anarchic. The communal nature of the potlatch was one of the reasons that the Lettrist International named their review after the potlatch in the 1950s.
The potlatch takes the form of governance, economy, social status and continuing spiritual practices. A potlatch, usually involving ceremony, includes celebration of births, rites of passages, weddings, funerals, puberty, and honouring of the deceased. Through political, economic and social exchange, it is a vital part of these Indigenous people’s culture. Although protocol differs among the Indigenous nations, the potlatch could involve a feast, with music, dance, theatricality and spiritual ceremonies.
Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches. In many potlatches the objects are thrown into the air.
So the potlatch, one of the most closely mediated of all gift exchanges, the one that is used as an exempla of prestige and non-symmetrical relationship, and of luxury display, is also one where the object is thrown, let fly from its grounded relationship to the owner. Throwing, or scattering, reveals the richness of the owner—largesse and carelessness (however carefully it is thrown, however carefully the person is chosen to whom it is thrown to or at which it is thrown). If placing gifts at the feet of someone, grounding the gift is one extremity of gift-giving, then potlatch’s seemingly random raising of objects into the air is another. Of course there is self-interest, but Lee A. Fennell has emphasised how the “illiquidity” of gifts (that is, their non-monetary value) generates “empathetic dialogue” between parties exchanging [5]. llliquidity is, however, not solidity.
Here is Mary Douglas’s summary of Satre’s account of ‘viscosity’ as an ignoble state of being: ‘The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. It is unstable, but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding and compressible. There is no gliding on its surface. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into a pool of stickiness... to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity…’ [6]
The gift is sticky in this way, because we cannot turn it into anything else—it cannot return to the liquidity implicit in the commodity. It binds us to the giver with both the stickiness of social interaction on the one hand (I have a strong somatic memory of Great Aunts and Fruit Pastilles) and the stickiness of objects. It may not be disagreeable, but is certainly complicated (we will return to the idea of decoration as stickiness) and complicating.
In my family we have a present drawer of unwanted gifts that cannot be got rid of, or things that have been bought with no purpose in mind as possible gifts, only to stay stickily in the drawer—it being impossible to anticipate gift-giving and have non-specific gifts. Non-specific gifts are commodities in waiting, paused in their liquidity, Marx’s definition of the ability of one kind of object to be turned into another—20 yards of cloth into a suit of clothes, or more poetically ‘The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity into the body of gold is the commodity’s salto mortale, as I have called it elsewhere. If the leap falls short, it is not the commodity which is defrauded but rather its owner’ [7].
Commodities are not sticky, their liquidity allows them to be capable of endless transposition between people and places. Perhaps this is where the smoothness of objects comes in. Think of a Brandt teapot, or of the design section of the Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue of Machine Art from 1932 in which objects are as readily identifiable and figurable as Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two. We actually know that they are as capable of stickiness as any other object, that the Bauhaus teapot took longer to construct than the handmade object, that the collectibility of the smooth, the attachment of the object to the world of commodification, is as complex as the sticky. But the fantasy with the smooth object of Modernism is of the object in flight.
These smooth objects are the objects in which the object contains enough—but not excessive—materialisation as objects to keep away the risk of their corruption by any hint of sensuous presence. Their smoothness keeps away metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.
Now this is interesting as I’ve been trying to think about viscosity in contemporary art—not the sticky surface of Beuys’ lard, Kiefer’s paintings, Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax, but those things that seem to explore the stickiness of the gift, those things that resist liquidity, that entrap you. I’ve been trying to locate those objects that don’t take part in the (wonderful) fantasy of Wittgenstein’s language games, or the Modernist fantasy of the acultural, typological object able to slip into any home undetected...
I started by thinking about decoration as stickiness, of Gell’s idea of decoration as adhesive.
Talking to David Clarke brought this alive to me as a silversmith he has begun to find smoothness problematic. One way he found of dealing with this was to attack the surface of the silver with salt and lead, to scar it. Another was to find sticky objects. He bids for objects on eBay that have had no other bids. They arrive he says, literally sticky, smelling of cigarette-smoke and polish wrapped in newspaper. They are sticky in that they are unwanted, commodities that have got stuck. And they function as traps: highly decorated metal birdlime. He cuts them up, elongates, foreshortens, wraps them heightened and truncated so that dissonant patterns are created and decoration subverted. Their functionality is not so much borrowed as nicked. This is not a gift. It is a steal. Smoothness is added to bits of his objects, like botox. There are moments in his viscous objects of solidity.
And Paul Scott too explores the territory between the gift and the robbery. His practice is concerned with the way in which commodities borrow and steal ideas, images, skills and techniques from each other. He is aware of the ebb and flow of imagery: how the Willow Pattern is a highly stylised fantasy of Orientalist dreams of an imagined China of lovers, desire and loss. How the landscapes that are the basic ground of European porcelain since the eighteenth century enact very particular narratives of ownership. These are landscapes to consume, just as a Fragonard nude is consumed. He talks of the ‘confected nature of printed ceramic landscapes’, a phrase that happily includes the saccharine alongside the constructed.
In this assemblage we can see not only English pastoral, a landscape as highly idealised that of the Willow Pattern, but screaming overhead is a low-flying (American?) jet, the whole landscape tidy behind a barbed wire fence, an industrial chimney belching smoke into the sky. The lexicon of castle, village, countryside—that of owner, vassal, land—is extended into our own century of militarism, pollution and exclusion.
But here the gift is a trap too. This object is a gift object: it is created to pass on, created for display. The meaning of all its decoration, its wrapping up of the English countryside as a sticky present. Remember: confectionary rots the teeth.