Finders KeepersFinders Keepers

Imagining a museum where objects themselves become curators and choreographers, Sam Jacob takes us on a tour from the Crystal Palace to the IKEA store, as he explores our obsessive, uncomfortable and shifting relationships with things.

For the first issue of MacGuffin, I wrote a piece about life without objects -- or more specifically, life before objects. About the human invention of the object that created a distinct category of 'things' in the world. About how these 'things' were material shaped by concept, matter mutated by idea. But most of all, how the invention of the object was also the invention of humanity as we understand it. That perhaps it was objects that made us human even as we made them. But now, MacGuffin suggested I write the other end of this history. From within the world as it is now, a world inhabited by billions of us and trillions (at least) of them. Stuff, things, objects. 2.8 million years of them. Piling up in the archaeological record, amassed in the great museums of the world, flung into dumps, stored, hoarded, arranged and discarded, bought. All of that material. All of those ideas-made-solid. All of that intelligence given form, for millennia after millennia.

What do objects mean now they are so utterly ubiquitous? What is the view from inside the Anthropocene. What does stuff mean in the era of peak stuff? Where better, it seemed, to start than Antiques Roadshow? Antiques Roadshow is a long-running British TV show that plays to our nations twin passions for history and money, buried under the comfort blanket of nostalgia. It's a fixture on the Sunday night prime time schedule, a time reserved for gentle comfort viewing. There ain't no future on Sunday evening listings. Instead its hymns, travelogues and period dramas all attempt to summon a nostalgic English dream before we plunge into the brutal future of Monday morning. _Antiques Roadshow _has been broadcast in various forms since 1977. Each episode is set in some historic location -- a stately home or castle that wouldn't be out of place printed on a tin of souvenir shortbread. Vast crowds turn up, most with some kind of object plucked from their domestic circumstance. They stand in line in the garden, waiting to show these things to experts, hoping for some immense valuation. Most often, of course, they have to disguise their disappointment at the paltry sum the specialist quotes. Luckily, everyone -- even those few whose things are worth something -- disguises their venal hearts with a very English ambiguation: 'Oh, I'd never consider selling'.

On the other side of the screen, we enjoy the Schadenfreude. But there's something else too. All these objects out of place, precarious in the landscape, eagerly proffered, examined in minutiae by the panning camera. The unease in the way they are presented and described by their owners, the things they know and the things they don't. The fact that their stories are so often not about the object itself but about the sentimental or familial histories attached to them. Maybe it would be different if it were filmed in Italy, a culture that has a more nuanced relationship with material things. But here, it is as if objects are a category of things in the world that are somehow awkward and alien. Very different to the shows about gardens and plants. Extremely different to the shows with pets. These are the things that we feel comfortable with. Objects? Despite our near complete obsession with them, they remain somehow distant. Despite the fact that we ourselves have manufactured them, they are somehow unknowable.

"Objects? Despite our near complete obsession with them, they remain somehow distant. Despite the fact that we ourselves have manufactured them, they are somehow unknowable."

Antiques Roadshow is, in its own way, a show about our relationship to objects. On the one hand, there is the domestic narrative that their owner explains -- 'We bought it on our honeymoon', or 'I used to play with it in my grandparents' house', and so on. On the other, the element of scholarship that the appraisers bring -- 'This was made around 1895 or 1896 in France', or 'It's a lovely example of something or other'. And, hovering in the background, the question of value, not only the spectre of the auction room reserve or insurance value. And underlying all of this is the question of the status of the object. Is it ordinary or special? How does its sentimental value compare to its art historical value? Does it belong in the attic, the home, the museum or the dump? Is it really worth anything at all? What could it possibly mean for an object to have value in the first place?

The categories of object-meanings that Antiques Roadshow offers are simple and reductive. In reality, our relationship with objects is far richer. Object categories are more fluid, loose, and contradictory.

Zoom out from this Sunday evening slot. Pull focus to the thousands of objects that fell on the cutting room floor. Jump cut to the very room you are in and look at all the stuff around you. Can you explain all this stuff? What it's doing there? Why you have it? Why you keep it? How could we begin to describe our life with objects?

As you cast your eye around your room, flickers of meanings, symbolisms of groups, suggestions of associations, possibilities of action, records of events, expressions of identity, failures of personality, and other deep, mysterious stirrings most likely envelop everything like invisible torrents, with their own tides and eddies. Or is it auras and halos that outline specific narratives?

Perhaps here it is useful to change scene. An apartment building at Berggasse 19, Vienna, where we find ourselves in Freud's consulting room. A room with, yes, that couch with its patterned rug, but also all that stuff. A room almost oppressively full of furniture, pictures and objects as documented in Edmund Engelman's photographs taken in 1938 that show the sheer precarious volume of stuff arranged. We can also be transported there by the notes written by H.D., aka the poet and sometime patient of Freud, Hilda Doolittle, who wrote of his apartment that it felt like a '"room in Vienna" in a play or film'.

Freud's room does seem overly domestic. Too furnished and draped, too populated, too cosy. Ad hoc like a junk shop yet also carefully composed: A small museum of objects, totems, fragments of archaeology. Freud collected somewhere in the region of 3,000 antiquities -- statuettes of Greek, Roman and Egyptian gods, Assyrian fertility statues, figures of one sort or another, Egyptian and Roman glass vessels, a collection of jades, bowls, vases, belt hooks, table screens and so on. H.D. wrote that Freud sat 'like a curator in a museum, surrounded by his priceless collection'. Yet this was not a museum.

The collection was instead arranged as a prop, as a device, as a set of skeleton keys that could open multiple gates to the royal road of the unconscious. These were not objects and things with straightforward use value. Nor were they subject to the categorization of art history. Instead they operated for Freud associatively. Not for the thing itself but for what it might suggest. Their assemblage all taken out of the time and context of the cultures that created them, shorn of their original meaning yet somehow still retaining an aspect of symbolism, imprecise to his patients. A vast yet vague history of human culture. Freud's objects, often fragmentary, Freud telling H.D. that his statue of Athena was 'perfect, only she has lost her spear', symbols that seemingly make deliberate effort to remain incomplete. And it's the incompleteness, the careful creation of missing meaning that was their operative power. If the objects and the collection could remain potent yet unresolved, it would then be beholden on us to 'complete' it and them.

If objects in the world of Antiques Roadshow are presented as having a direct meaning, here in early-20th-century Vienna, they possess another order of significance. Not a meaning that resides in the material or formal properties of the object itself, but in our relationship with them. When Freud shipped his objects to London, Doolittle sent him a bouquet of gardenias to mark their safe passage. Freud's letter of reply read: 'I got to-day some flowers. By chance or intention, they are my favourite flowers, those I most admire. Some words "to greet the return of the Gods" (other people read: Goods).'

Gods and Goods. A play on words that shows how deliberately Freud's objects operate with at least double meanings. Or perhaps it is without meaning whilst also layered with multiple and shifting significances. A collection whose specificity is designed to create a provocative ambiguity. Gods and goods also suggests a particular relationship with objects. Are they things with power like deities? Or are they things to be bought and sold? Do they exist as symbolic, ritualistic entities? Or do they circulate through systems of economic exchange? Freud suggests through the addition or subtraction of that single 'o' that these things might be interchangeable or simultaneous.

Freud's play on words also suggests a shifting power relationship between us and things. We create goods. Gods create us. The power of objects over us is not an unfamiliar experience. It's central to the way psychoanalysis describes our internal psychic structure: love objects, hate objects, phobic objects, fetish objects, internal objects, part objects and so on that we direct our actions or feelings towards. Or should we see it the other way around, that objects project their power and control over us?

"The urge to collect can be a form of mania: a desire to exert control on an otherwise chaotic world, a form of extreme allegiance, a way to construct a legible form of self to society".

The urge to collect can be a form of mania: a desire to exert control on an otherwise chaotic world, a form of extreme allegiance, a way to construct a legible form of self to society. Collections can become obsessive, emerging from the heart of our Freudian interior, expressions of id or ego as arrangements of material things that sit between the deep dark personal pools of our own interiority and the brightly lit vitrines of public society.

Freud's own collection was designed for intimacy, for a particular triangular relationship between object, subject and Freud himself. But both gods and goods exist in the public realm. They require disciples and congregations, markets and demographics. Without these audiences, they cease to exist. Just as the first human objects required concepts to be transmuted into material form, objects require our belief in them to sustain their existence. And belief in objects itself has to be manufactured.

Things, at least as we understand them, are a relatively recent phenomenon. Mass production, born in the industrial revolution, created a new type of thing. These things emerged into the world formed by new processes and in vast volumes. Exactly because objects are innately unnatural, precisely because they are an alien species on the earth, their status and position here was not immediately obvious. What did they mean? How should we relate to them? How would we use them? What mght it mean for things to be multiplied exponentially? The shock of this new type of thing was not just their material form, not just their aesthetic qualities. The sudden presence of all of these new things amongst us was equally an economic and social question.

Like a society debutant, this new object type was given a grand entrance into society by Prince Albert through the Great Exhibition of 1851. Here, under Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace -- itself a kind of gigantic display case -- were assembled and displayed the riches, resources, and power of Empire all evidenced by the material culture of stuff.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing on the Great Exhibition in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, described it as a 'World Congress of products and producers', a 'bourgeois pantheon of commercial idols'. Like Freud, Marx and Engels conflate goods with gods. They note, with some irony, that the exhibition took place 'when the whole continent dreamed of revolution'. Instead, Britain 'summons all her vassals from France to China to a grand examination of which they are to prove how they have used their time'.

And they were absolutely right. In the midst of Victorian industrialization, the exhibition acted as a clear statement of the full transformative power of industry and production over geography, material and people, even time itself -- transformed by industrialization, standardized by railways, compressing and stretching the time it takes to produce an object, the expected lifetime of an object.

Charlotte Brontë, writing after her second visit, described the Great Exhibition in more atmospheric terms:

It is a wonderful place - vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth - as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.

For both Marx and Brontë, though, the Great Exhibition is presented in terms of an encounter with a new world, with a different kind of thing. More precisely, the new multiplicity of things. Both suggest that this 'congress of objects' exerted a power over its huge audience. The amassing of things creating a beautiful (perhaps also terrifying) spectacle, a panoramic view of a new world whose things 'ruled and subdued by some invisible influence'.

The Great Exhibition, short-lived as it was, still casts its shadow over London. Not just the ruins of its base left in the South London park named after Paxton's Crystal Palace but in the museological institutions of South Kensington. The V&A, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum all trace their origins to the profits accrued by the Great Exhibition and an atomization of its contents.

"Commercial spectacle is the matrix that spawns the cultural institution".

If gods and goods can be confused, then so too can commerce and culture. The distinctions that we often draw between the two -- and the morality with which we judge them -- might well be false. In this case, the trade show precedes culture. Commercial spectacle is the matrix that spawns the cultural institution. Manufacturing creates the museum. And the objects and collections that the museums contain are simply products given special status by the place that holds them. Meanings and significances are projected onto objects rather than intrinsic to them or baked into their material form. The meaning of objects here becomes circumstantial. The same thing somewhere else performs very differently, just as Freud's broken Athena acts in an entirely different way on his desk rather than in the Parthenon.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, to the sudden arrival of the vast blue and yellow out-of-town homewear hangers -- the lightless offspring perhaps of Paxton's glassy palace of manufacturing. I don't remember my first IKEA. Maybe you are not supposed to. What I do recall, though, is the incredibly long journey from start to finish: car park to entrance; the stair by the ball pit; the reveal of the upper floor and its deep, far horizon; the switchback route through zones of domesticity; the room sets with no fourth wall that allow us to try various arrangements; blind windows hung with curtains; a smattering of books on shelves, just enough to suggest the possibility of life; kitchens that double up; Siamese worktops sprouting cascades of stainless steel taps; banks of ovens like mission control - all loosely arranged under one seemingly endless roof, a weak serpentine, a loose promenade through domestic product. And we're not even halfway yet.

What I remember most of all is forgetting. At some point on the excursion, during the process of proceeding through space and stuff, a kind of numb awe took over. A banal echo of the sensations Charlotte Brontë described falling over the crowds at the Great Exhibition. A kind of empty-mindedness brought on by the fullness of the space. A forgetfulness so profound that it no longer felt like a retail environment but something less prescribed and far more aimless.

Something like the 'Void Thoughts' that Robert Smithson described as part of the museum experience: Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called 'pictures' and 'statues'. Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows (frames) that open up into a variety of blanks. Stale images cancel one's perception and deviate one's motivation. Blind and senseless, one continues wandering around the remains of Europe, only to end in that massive deception 'the art history of the recent past'. Brain drain leads to eye drain, as one's sight defines emptiness by blankness. Sightings fall like heavy objects from one's eyes. Sight becomes devoid of sense, or the sight is there, but the sense is unavailable.

"But then the museum and the shop, the twin palaces of objects, create a specific relationship between us and them".

The same is true of shopping, inducing that glazed-eye drift through a landscape of things. But then the museum and the shop, the twin palaces of objects, create a specific relationship between us and them. Both are places where things are classified and quantified, valued and described, whose narratives are presented as fixed and innate to the thing itself. Grouped and corralled, choreographed in performances of significance.

In his influential essay on the development of the contemporary art gallery, Brian O'Doherty wrote: The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is 'art'. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.

O'Doherty describes the essence of this art-space as a hybrid of other environments: 'the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory [joined] with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics'. In other words, that familiar hyper-refined and sophisticated, generic space of the white cube gallery is blank yet loaded with meaning. It is a space that evolved together with modern art itself. The gallery, in other words, precedes the artwork. The space itself invents and determines the performance of objects and our relationship with them. Context is everything. As Bernard Tschumi wrote: 'Murder in the Street differs from Murder in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the street differs from the Street of Love. Radically.'

Outside of the shop, the museum, the gallery, object meanings dissolve and mutate. These are the objects in Freud's consulting room and the things held in the queues at Antiques Roadshow. Things whose categorization is unclear, whose meaning is obscured, forgotten or broken. Whose value is questionable, whose status is ambiguous and slippery. Things that have their own power to form relationships with the world, to negotiate their own treaties with us, to broker their own deals. Things with their own agency in the world.

The desire for category judgments comes perhaps from the very strange quality of things themselves. That they are alchemized from matter and idea, forging an alien entity. Objects are a different form of stuff that is fundamentally unnatural. Springing from our invention, objects take on a life of their own. And it is their very alien-ness that causes object anxiety: the necessity to name and fix.

Instead, perhaps it is forms of collection that act in concert with the agency of objects that provide a more productive kind of relationship. The Wunderkammers and cabinets of curiosity that brought together disparate kinds of things without categorical boundaries. Collections that derive their significance from oscillations of meanings with an open-ended conclusion. Where natural history, geological specimens, totems, craft, fakes and archaeology sit side by side. Where the rights of objects to assert their own presence in the world are granted. Where we let their alien intelligence help us understand the possibilities of the world.

"This is not a manifesto for the dissolution of the museum, but a plea to release it from policing the naming of things".

This is not a manifesto for the dissolution of the museum, but a plea to release it from policing the naming of things. To turn the knowledge they contain loose, to imagine themselves not as institutions where knowledge is preserved but where ideas are created and forged into new shapes.

Imagine, then, a walk down Exhibition Road with the signs removed from the buildings. No longer organized by subject but by other means. A constant rotation of things: a lunar lander next to a throne, a dinosaur and a beam engine. Or even more: where the ice cream van and the cast of David exchange pleasantries as equally valid forms of material culture.

Where the distinctions of value between shop and showcase see each other in their reflection. Where the security guard who checks your bag might remark on the quality of its contents. Where the narratives that are held in place are no longer of nations, of separate silos of culture, of the past. Rather, that all of these things are exposed and revealed as 'things' too, rather than the natural order of things. The Museum of Idiocy, the Gallery of Mistakes, the Institute of Your Own Making, the Theatre of the Unknown Unknowns, the Hall of Cultural Hallucinations, the Museum of Modern Manias, the Collection of Collections, the Foundation of Foundations and the Congress of Objects.

In other words, to reinvent the museum as a space where the agency of objects can be fully mobilized. Where the strange occult knowledge that they -- our hybrid offspring -- possess can be divined. Objects as MacGuffins: as the motivators of plot, drivers of the narrative of culture. Objects that themselves are curators, choreographers, directors. Things that pull the strings, in whose form our own ideas have fermented into sometimes powerful and heady brews. Goods that become gods.

Perhaps a place where we queue with our own objects not for valuations but for the opportunity to create new dialogues with the object world. The void of the museum transformed into a congress of objects, a unique chamber, vast, strange, new and impossible to describe, that opens vistas into the unconscious. Now that's a show I'd tune in for.

Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design. His work spans scales and disciplines ranging from master planning and urban design through architecture, design and art projects. Previously, Jacob was a founding director of FAT Architecture where he was involved in many internationally acclaimed projects including the BBC Drama Production Village in Cardiff, the Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet park and cultural centre in Rotterdam and the curation of the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. He has exhibited at leading galleries and museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the MAK in Vienna and the Biennale.

Sam Jacob is also contributing editor for Icon magazine and columnist for both Art Review and Dezeen and a regular participant in talks and events for institutions such as MoMA, the Southbank Centre and the Soane Museum. Jacob is Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture and Director of Night School at the Architectural Association.