Reminder! The Art of Noticing newsletter is expanding! Become a paid subscriber to keep enjoying all the fun and useful new additions: $5 a month, or $50 annually. All details here. Your support is deeply appreciated.
Paula Zuccotti, from Lockdown Essentials
THE PROMPT: Identify an object you learned to appreciate in a new way during lockdown. Try documenting it.
Last week I wrote about reflecting on the “underdog” places that many of us learned to appreciate during lockdown. Artist/ethnographer Paula Zuccotti has an inspiring project that applied a similar line of thought to what we might consider underdog objects: the everyday things that we have relied on through the pandemic era.
Last April, she put out a general call via social media: “I invite you to photograph the 15 items helping you get through this time.” She got more than 1,000 responses, from 50 countries, and has collated the results on the remarkable web site lockdownessentials.org. She recently told It’s Nice That:
“When the reality surrounding Covid-19 hit, I couldn’t help but notice a shift in the objects we were using. As someone who believes in the power of objects to tell our stories, I was eager to document the items we were using not just to create a time capsule for future generations, but also to find out what these items could tell us about ourselves and our present circumstances.”
(In The Art of Noticing book I mention another cool Zuccotti undertaking: Every Thing We Touch: A 24 Hour Inventory of our Lives, which involved keeping tabs on everything you touch throughout a full day. And as for connecting objects and stories, I can relate.)
Looking through the Lockdown Essentials pictures, I’m invariably drawn to the weirdest object — the kitschy figurine or silly plush toy, or maybe some banality like a coffee mug, whose status as a crucial object seems mysterious. It’s the weird stuff that always yields the best story.
For the last seven or eight years, I’ve taught a workshop on writing about objects as part of the Design Research Summer Intensive at the School of Visual Arts. My main assignment always involved identifying and writing about an overlooked or underrated object discovered in New York (where the Intensive usually occurs). Last year, of course, I had to change it up, since the whole program went virtual. So I modified the assignment to telling the story of an “overlooked object of home.”
[Write about] a designed object that you consider to be overlooked or underrated that you have noticed or paid more attention to since the pandemic crisis began.
We went with that assignment again this year, as the Intensive was virtual again, and I just got to enjoy this year’s results in a critique session this past Friday. It was, once more, a fascinating array of stories about objects both odd and seemingly quotidian — an hourglass, mosquito netting, a mailbox, a bilao, a tulip-shaped flyswatter, an armchair. Each yielded surprising observations and narratives.
What I really like about the assignment — and Zuccotti’s project — is that without this pause to reflect, the significance of these objects would inevitably slip away as life evolves into whatever post-pandemic “normal” awaits. And of course that’s why I think it makes a good prompt in general to consider and perhaps document these things now. In fact, as much as I like this prompt, I suppose that this time next year this it might not even make sense anymore.
And let’s face it: That sounds great. Maybe the best way to think of it is as a ritual marking an end — and a beginning.
In Other News
@untitledassociation, @vintage.paper.love
Very exciting to have been a guest on Peter Kafka’s Recode Media podcast! I’m a regular listener, and I’ve been a friend of Peter’s and a fan of his work for years. We talked about this newsletter.
“Chair Simulator,” a game in which players earn points by sitting. “Spend your Sit Points on new chairs!”
The Clock Radio, considered. (Thx E!)
Against The Cult of Ambition. By my former Medium colleague Kelli María Korducki. I’ve been thinking a lot about ambition lately. Curious to hear thoughts any of you may have on the subject; at some point I’ll be writing something about it.
Friend of TAoN Carolina Miranda on monument status for Corita Kent’s studio.
The Fearless Strategies, collected. From Friend of TAoN Lucian James.
Nothing in the news: “Invisible sculpture” sells for $18k+. The same artist has previously exhibited “BUDDHA IN CONTEMPLATION, a similarly invisible sculpture demarcated by a square of tape on a cobble-stoned walkway.” There’s a video of that one, below. “Just as music and prayer help us to see what we don’t see, even a title is enough to make us see and perceive an existence,” the video argues. “This form generated by thought is here now.” You know, the more I think about this, the more I’m actually in favor of it.
Okay that’s it!
As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments!
Thanks for reading …
rw
P.S. If you enjoyed this, click the heart symbol, share it and/or sign up.
Twitter | RobWalker.net | NB: I use (some) Amazon Affiliate links
All this by Rob Walker PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032
To unsubscribe see the grey box at the bottom of the email.