The Oscillation of Relation
Matter and Meaning in The Plumb’s Libations of Liberated Living
Micah Adams, Friendship Lighters, 2021. Bic lighters, welded steel, 4 x 3 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches. Courtesy of MKG127, Toronto, and the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
Two Bic lighters, soldered to each other, freeze in a kiss. They do not stand upright as one object ready to light a candle, a cigarette, a bonfire; they lean shoulder to shoulder. Their personalities hover like ghosts greeting me at The Plumb: a basement gallery located in an alley off Dufferin and St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto. Even the meandering journey to The Plumb moves from the prosaic — the realm of Church’s Chicken and 7-Eleven — to the poetic — a space for reimagining everyday objects cordoned off by an (often unmarked) purple door. Such is the context in which I encounter Micah Adams’s Friendship Lighters (2021), part of the 2022 group exhibition Libations of Liberated Living. These lighters relate to not just each other but also Meichen Waxer’s Horus (2021), a beeswax candle shaped as a doughnut-esque torus. They also counterpoint Diana Lynn VanderMeulen’s strawberry milk plaid baby chairs (2021), a set of two acrylic seats hand-laminated in pink plaid. They relate to me, a graduate student who studies performance and tends to ask what an object can do rather than what it is. They relate to the gallery and exhibition organizers: Laura Carusi, Emma Green, Alison Postma, Callum Schuster, and Emma Welch. They of course relate to the 7-Eleven just on the other side of the alley where two dollars will buy you their cousins, ready to light your candles, cigarettes, and bonfires.
Then the spell is broken. I observe the objects as dead and inanimate once again. I see the work of the artists, and I take note of the materials, tools, and production modes that went into each object. I consider the even lighting, the admirable grout work between the tiles, the padded drainpipe. I wonder if it is too early to get a beer or too late to get a coffee. Reality butts in uninvited, just when I was starting to enjoy the exhibition. This oscillation — or maybe fall from poetic grace — characterizes my experience with nearly every work of art. Prosaic materiality yanks me out of momentary immersion in an almost romantic world of art. Occasionally I regain my focus and snap back into this magical realm, but each time the impact diminishes.
Karl Marx describes something similar happening with a table. “As soon as it emerges as a commodity,” he writes, “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness . . . and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”[1] This cheeky observation bore some similarity to my confrontation with the art objects in Libations of Liberated Living, but art does something different than straightforward commodity production. Recognizing this, Marx brings his concept of the “relations of production” — where “Production not only provides the material to satisfy a need, but it also provides the need for the material” — to bear on the art object, noting “An objet d'art creates a public that has artistic taste and is able to enjoy beauty.”[2] Emerging modes of production — such as the Bessemer process of mass-manufacturing steel in Marx’s time or Zoom in our own — determine how workers (the proletariat) and the owners of these means of production (the bourgeoisie) relate to objects — artistic and otherwise — to one other, and to society in general. Such social relations and commodity fetishism bring an appearance of life to the art object.
A uniqueness in means — and thereby relations — of production and a rising singularity in the experience of service and gig workers informs artistic production in deindustrializing countries today. In other words, service and gig workers increasingly both own and operate their machines and materials of production. Jodi Dean recently described this shift in labor experience and exploitation as “neofeudalism.” Under such conditions, “one’s car isn’t for personal transport. It’s for making money. One’s apartment isn’t a place to live; it’s something to rent out. Items of consumption are reconfigured as means of accumulation, as personal property becomes an instrument for the capital and data accumulation of the lords of platform, Uber and Airbnb.” [3] This, too, is the context in which I came to The Plumb.
Libations for Liberated Living, 2022, installation view, the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
Among these objects vibrating between the living and the dead, Ciar O’Mahony led a group of roughly ten artists, curators, and scholars in reading aloud Fredric Jameson’s “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” In this article, Jameson contends that “we not only use technology, we consume it.”[4] Technology impacts both production and consumption, and as how we consume technology becomes ever more individualized, what we produce with it also atomizes. Marx predicted that the alienation of producers from their means of production would eventually unify the working class, and that the various material and social technologies of capitalism would arm workers with the means of their own liberation. Today, Uber and Lyft drivers must make use of their own cars and phones and take on personal liability for what amounts to the hourly wage of the employers. This, along with countless other forms of untethered economic relations, has made one and the same technologies of production and those consumed by individuals in their spare time. Needless to say, this shift heralds further privatization of the economic sector and huge implications for unity, solidarity, and class consciousness.
Within this fray, those things Marx called objets d’art become, for Jameson, events “made, not for posterity, nor even for the permanent collection, but rather for the now.”[5] Postmodern modes of artistic production are “generated by a single bright idea” of work.[6] However, he cautions that this work is now “a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick — a singularity — has been performed.”[7] The one-shot quality of the event, from its production to presentation, resonates with the singularity and uniqueness of worker experience. As tempting as it may be, I would argue against aligning Jameson’s account of the singular nature of the art object with a thinker like Michael Fried — who cautioned against the increasing “theatricality” of art objects.[8] Jameson’s events, their artists, and their publics enter into a relation with the gallery space and the curator — “the demiurge of those floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art” — that exceeds theatricality.[9] This complex web of relations all collide in the present of the singular — and necessarily disposable — event. Walter Benjamin argued that the “aura” of an art object disappears when it loses “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”[10] Jameson’s singular event reclaims a measure of Benjaminian “aura” but at a cost: its unique form and content can never be reproduced or used again.
Joshua Augusto, Pile of Scraps, 2021. An accumulation of selected construction debris and curb finds, assembled onsite, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
O’Mahony’s project presented a new layer to the work on view. As I oscillated in and out of the worlds of art and material reality, this theoretical lens sutured the two in the form of the singular event. Nowhere was this clearer than in Joshua Augustino’s Pile of Scraps (2021), an assemblage of construction debris and road-side detritus. Many of the readers — unaware the artist numbered among their fellow participants — used Pile of Scraps to illustrate the theories found in Jameson’s text. Relating to one another in an abstract logic of color, shape, and texture, these objects resisted the anthropomorphism I noticed in Friendship Lighters. Each of Augustino’s objects held another in place, resisting external interference and commodification. Extension cords and wadded paper nestled in the legs of upended or sideways chairs; stacked floor tiles supported a gas canister; a ripped plastic bag full of rusty nails, screws, and other fasteners found shelter in an aquarium. The assemblage worked in dialogue with the others in the exhibition and seemed to benefit from the grounding in the real world provided by its peers. Rather than first seeing the spell cast by the installation, I saw first the individual components, the material reality. Only section by section did the total work come into view, and imagined connections among the constituent parts start to form in my mind.
Joshua Augusto, Pile of Scraps, 2021. An accumulation of selected construction debris and curb finds, assembled onsite, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
Perhaps the strength of exhibition came in driving me in and out of the “world of art” and the “real world,” between theory and sensuousness, between human and non-human relations. The idea of the work and work as idea flickered in and out of existence: first a chair, then a “chair”; first friends in an embrace, then two lighters soldered together. The theoretical even intruded into the object world itself. The bricks and cinder blocks of Pascal Paquette’s Brick series (2011, 2015) and Concrete Block (2014) became bookends and plinths for various texts of art theory, including Arthur C. Danto’s What Art Is, Peter Selz’s Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art, and Brian Dillon’s edited volume of documents on contemporary art and ruins.
Pascal Paquette, Bricks, 2011–2015. Spray paint, brick, approx. 8 x 2 x 3 inches each. Courtesy of the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
The churn from idea to event to object continued as I stood in the gallery or read Jameson aloud with this temporary cohort. From reified to rarified and vice versa and back again, this exhibition pointed toward the increasing convergence of philosophy and curation. As Jameson writes, “what has replaced philosophy in our own time, namely theory, is also perhaps a kind of curatorial practice, selecting bits from our various theoretical or philosophical sources and putting them all together in a kind of conceptual installation, in which we marvel at the new intellectual space thereby momentarily produced.”[11] As class consciousness collapses and the relations of production start to map directly onto the relations of consumption, philosophy and art also undergo a kind of atomization. Theory and curation emerge as ways to reestablish social relations. And it is in the event that these become evident, that what is joining or separating the objects is as artistically important as the objects themselves.
But these relations don’t just exist, they are made, and they are not made just in the studio or at the moment of curation, they are made in situ. All parties — artist, curator, spectator, gallery, object, neighborhood, city, country, and planet — make and unmake these relations in an oscillating fashion. They vibrate between the material and ideal world at the frequency of the individual. We’ve yet to determine, however, how these parties form solidarity — or even class consciousness — in this increasingly atomized world. Libations of Liberated Living forms and realizes the artistic problem, but maybe now we need an artistic solution, if such a thing could ever exist.
Pascal Paquette, Bricks, 2011–2015. Spray paint, brick, approx. 8 x 2 x 3 inches each. Courtesy of the plumb, Toronto. Photo: Alison Postma.
[1] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Random House, 1990), 163–64.
[2] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (Marxists.org, 1999), 117. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_ Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf.
[3] Jodi Dean, “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/.
[4] Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (March/April 2015): 111.
[5] Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 111.
[6] Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 112.
[7] Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 113.
[8] Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967): §3.
[9] Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 110.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Random House, 2007), 220–21.
[11] Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 110.
by Evan Moritz
Evan Moritz is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Center for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. He is interested in the outer limits of science-fiction and fact with research exploring relationships between colonization of planetary bodies, the future of settler colonialism, the loss of liveness in the communication gaps between planets, global catastrophe on Earth and off, utopias, dystopias, and the impact of science fiction on contemporary practices.
