Artists: Mads Lynnerup, Jason Mortara, Chadwick Rantanen, Ben Riesman, Jon Rubin, Jackie Summel and Anne Walsh. With an essay by Scott Oliver

During the weekend of August 20th I screened this 40 minute long video program, comprised of 7 short video-objects, in 6 domestic living rooms around Portland OR. An open call for requests to see the program was distributed as part of the Taking Place series (organized by Sam Gould, Stephanie Snyder and Matthew Stadler.)

Images: (clockwise from top left) Anne Walsh, Jason Mortara, Jon Rubin, Mads Lynnerup

Objects Are Subjects
In consideration of Things Are People Too

Can openers are good for opening cans; shoelaces keep one's shoes firmly fastened to one's feet; basketballs are meant to be dribbled, passed, and shot through hoops while playing the game of basketball; toy talking parrots do an excellent job of mimicking real parrots; flowers are generally pleasing to look at, especially in the wild; backhoes are useful for digging big holes quickly; and world maps give us an idea of the political, geographic, and temporal divisions we've superimposed on this lonely planet.

These are some of the objects we encounter in the video works collected by curator Joseph del Pesco for the video program Things Are People Too. Utilitarian descriptions alone tell us little about what and how these objects mean. Nor do they tell us much about the videos themselves. Use has never been a primary concern of art. Still there is no denying that the makers of the videos used the objects listed above in their work. Roland Barthes once wrote "use never does anything but shelter meaning."(1) Barthes, a semiotician and masterful dissector of cultural phenomena, was no doubt concerned with the sign value of functional objects. In contrast the artists represented in this collection take a more hands-on approach to the mysteries of everyday objects - physically interacting with them as a way to uncover their hidden meanings. Things Are People Too offers a definition of use in terms of specific relationships with objects, and an alternative view to Barthes in the form of a response: "Yes, but meaning can only be acquired through use."

The seven artists featured in Things Are People Too (Mads Lynnerup, Jason Mortara, Chadwick Rantanen, Ben Reisman, Jon Rubin, Jackie Sumell, and Anne Walsh) are not unaware of the cultural significance of the objects they work with. Rather, in an attempt to cultivate relationships with their objects, they make an earnest effort to check their cultural assumptions and projections at the door and, in the process, ask us to do the same. For these artists objects are not simply to be talked about but talked with. In fact it would be more accurate to say that the objects featured in these videos are subjects. And they are subjects in the fullest sense-they are given subjectivity. So what these videos witness is not mere ventriloquism but meaningful transactions between person and thing. An initial reading might lead one to conclude that these videos anthropomorphize objects, but that is too easy. Besides, it is no surprise that we anthropomorphize objects. We are, after all, very anthropocentric. This too is not surprising. Nor should it necessarily be avoided. Consciousness has distinguished us from the rest of the world. There is us and there is the world. It is always over there-in front of us, behind us, above and below us. This is where our sense of otherness comes from. The world gets divided too, into good and bad, artificial and natural, object and subject, etc.- categories that confuse and intrigue us.

The fact is only people can personify and only people make things. There are some exceptions, but even the extraordinary Bower Bird can hardly be said to have a penchant for things. No, only we cannot satisfy our desire for things. People and the things they make are meant for each other, and we are blind to our own seductions. For a tree can be stubborn, messy and silly just as a table (or person) might be described as shifty, pale, and smooth. It's our language that anthropomorphizes. We simply cannot help ourselves.

But these videos do more than simply anthropomorphize objects. The illusory in these works is constantly thwarted by the artist's own hand-the means by which they manipulate objects are mostly made evident in the works themselves. The creators are more concerned with examining their relationship to the objects they use. So the object-subjects in these works are allowed to speak for themselves. And the artists seem to listen. This gives the videos the quality of documented performances and, in rare moments, the uncanny sense that one is overhearing a conversation. A conversation with things might sound ridiculous but taken as a whole Things Are People Too manages to revise the material world as surprisingly idiosyncratic and talkative. We are thus confronted with our own strange entanglement with things.

- Scott Oliver

1. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979)