It feels odd to spend Sunday morning browsing a spotless gallery.
To the unpleasant tune of a grand piano lid slamming shut, it’s especially –emphasis on special-ly– odd to be enveloped at the UCLA Hammer Museum and its “Stories of Almost Everyone” exhibition by ordinary objects: socks, shoes and litter/literature that come from your average human being’s mail box. (Who gets mail any more, I wonder?)
Some of these — socks, shoes, mail — are “placed” on the museum’s floor. Why? What’s the purpose?
Latifa Echakhch, a Morrocan-French visual artist, tells her story through an installation entitled, “Used Shoes.” Hers is indeed a pile of shoes.
This pile — mostly worn-in Converse or Nikes — is of shoes that teenagers buy, flaunt and sport. Their relatively neat, yet haphazard placement by Echakhch, communicates ideas about suburbia and images of kids gathering for a basement hangout. HANGOUT is the operative word.
While each of the thirteen pairs of shoes is different, their brands and styles are reminiscent. Each demonstrates a level of sameness. Already, it feels as though we may know something about the person or persons who would have worn the shoes: brand-obsessed. And in no time, we begin to relate.
Does the installation’s ability to tell its own story establish itself as artwork? These objects communicate in a way that is somewhat inartistic, arguably rendering descriptions obsolete – a self-referential commentary that the exhibit emphasizes by pointing out the dependence of average viewers, like myself, on the artist’s own analysis.
Recurring themes of abandonment, emptiness and absence strike one: dead bouquet of flowers; antique dressing table with no one occupying its seat and no makeup in sight; slightly deflated party banner and other remnants from last night’s party; empty postcard rack; old knit socks placed as though thrown on the floor; pieces of smashed chandelier, etc. etc etc.
On closer inspection, Mungo Thompson’s abandoned house, where mail has piled high through the mail slot only to be ignored and forgotten, the pile consists of commercial junk mail, communicating and interweaving a reflection on consumerist, capitalist culture. The lack of personal letters points towards the absence of handwritten letters in our modern era.
For whomever this mail is intended cares little for it. Think about that for a moment. Goal is not goal. Target is false target.
Mail is symbolic of bureaucracy, and a buildup of which is symbolic of absence and passed time. This redundancy asks contemporary art viewers to focus on the stories that these objects tell. The exhibit overall poses, without necessarily answering, the question: Should we allow objects speak for themselves? Or is it the role of the artist and the contemporary museum to act as a mediator and speak for them?
A cohesive narrative, written by author Kanishk Tharoor for the Hammer exhibit, concerns absence and abandonment. The narrative affirms what the viewer already understands. The objects speak for themselves.
And who do we care about? Almost everyone? Or everyone?
Stories of Almost Everyone is on view at the Hammer Museum until May 6.