Comments on: Objects of decay

By: Mike Rhode

Mike Rhode — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:00:00 +0000

I, but nobody else in the Museum, have been in favor of taking damaged or duplicate artifacts to use as spare parts, much like an airplane museum will cannibalize two planes to make one working one. This view has never gained any traction, but I still think it makes sense.

Mike
speaking for himself

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:58:06 +0000

Browsing around I found this comment on the American 'destruction artist' Gordon Matta-Clark's view on building decay:

One of Matta-Clark’s boldest and most direct statements on modern architecture [was] to criticize what he felt to be a lack of attention paid by today’s architects to the problem of decaying buildings. He was disturbed by the attitude he felt existed on the part of many architects who saw them only as structures to be removed in the interest of renewal and urban planning, and constructed replacements that themselves soon became objects of decay.

(quoted by James Stanfield from Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective. Chicago : Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985; "Windows Blow-Out, 1976" is taken from Stanfield's blog, too). Ambitious 'objects of decay'-freaks may perhaps get something out of Pamela M. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999; reviewed here.

By: Susanne

Susanne — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:23:36 +0000

I think it is something about time and the life cycle of objects that I find fascinating. I see the aesthetics of decay – of a “natural” decay of artefacts – as one aspect. Then there is the aspect of time and history materialized, i.e. the traces of time in this specific object or, as Søren puts it in his earlier comment, the aspect that “decay occurred with no specific end-point in sight, and that the scanner ended up looking like it did through the intervention of scores of factors over an extended period of time in a changing environment”. In a way, decomposed objects combine aesthetic fascination and unique traces of their trajectory over time – and, in being ruins and sometimes bulky and difficult to recognise, they can as well arise curiosity. Perhaps we could understand museums not only as places to conserve the past, but also as spaces where decay processes can be contemplated.