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Theory of Objects

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By Geo Ong

An Extraordinary Theory of ObjectsI read Stephanie LaCava’s An Extraordinary Theory of Objects the way I would probably regard someone’s cabinet of wonders. A lot of peeking and poking, going from one object to the next, and then maybe back to the first object, which now looks different. In a way the book is constructed that way. There is, of course, a main narrative of American-born LaCava growing up in Le Vésinet, a suburb of Paris, as a result of her father being relocated when she was twelve.

What makes it interesting is how much of it seems to be missing. Throughout the narrative, especially when covering more touchy material, she only touches upon them, leaving unsaid what you really want to hear. Instead she fills the rest of the book with facts and historical information about objects, like opals or bangles or living relics like scarabs or lilies of the valley, the objects that fascinated her as a child.

At first it made me wonder whether this was what a premature memoir looked like. After all, LaCava isn’t even 35 yet. But I am starting to realise that her decision to fill the blank spaces with very interesting yet seemingly inconsequential facts about objects isn’t a flaw of her book. Rather, it provides an even more accurate look into her life and mind, which, I suppose, is what a memoir is supposed to. When asked in an interview about how her book came to be, LaCava said, ‘I wanted to write something that illuminated what I had found out—or was still looking to find out, about change and control and circumstance.’ No longer do I wonder whether she struggled with the decision of what to say and what to leave out. It is now as if she is reserving space for those objects in her cabinet she hasn’t yet found.

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A fetish, so the dictionaries tell us, is a spirit attached to a material object…

To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions…

All art is a magic operation, or, if you prefer, a prayer for a new image…

—Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

Several decades before LaCava wandered the rows of Parisian flea markets and antique fairs, Joseph Cornell was rooting through New York City junk shops. The poet Charles Simic wrote that Cornell ‘worked in the absence of any aesthetic theory and previous notion of beauty. He shuffled a few inconsequential found objects inside his boxes until together they composed an image that pleased him with no clue as to what that image will turn out to be in the end.’

Cornell himself explained the process as ‘being plunged into [a] world of complete happiness in which every triviality becomes imbued with significance.’

'L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d'histoire maturelle' by Joseph Cornell (1940)

‘L’Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d’histoire maturelle’ by Joseph Cornell (1940)

Are our imaginations so powerful that, by surrounding ourselves with inanimate objects, we can understand them, mould and meld them with our own real lives, and thus they can become real themselves? Is this what it means for some of us to be able to create?

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The first object collector I came to know well lived in London when I lived in London. I had been sleeping in the living room of an Urchin apartment for a couple months. I never put much stock into a bedroom before (perhaps thinking I would just leave it), so a bedroom in London was as nonexistent as my need to have one. But stepping into her room made me realise that I didn’t have one, and seeing the treasured objects around her room made me feel, for the first time in a long time, spiritually vacant, somehow. The feeling didn’t last. When I moved back to Los Angeles, the room in which I slept was just that. Three years later, having just moved to New York City, that same friend would visit, see my dull bedroom with its bare walls and negative space, and remark, ‘How Spartan of you.’

It’s true; I am only now beginning to notice objects, regard them as historical time capsules, and attach meaning to them. But it’s all very new. I’ve never been that fascinated with objects before, yet I seem to be fascinated with people who are. I have another friend whose fascination with objects was, in her words, ‘given to her.’ She and her sister got it from their father, a science writer with an eye for some of nature’s imperfect examples of beauty, beckoning them to come see this rock or that insect. (LaCava at one point in her book finds a ‘classic storybook mushroom with its red cap and white spots’ and refuses to get rid of it, despite it attracting insects into her bedroom.) My friend’s father in turn got it from his mother. My friend then explained to me that there seemed to be a definite connexion between a fascination with objects and the experience of childhood. She said that the earlier in age such a fascination develops, whether you pick it up or it is given to you (just like an object), the deeper ingrained it is, and it can be as visceral as a small or a song can reignite something from your past. As she looked around the ground for rocks to use as examples, I wondered whether I never had that because I grew up in front of a television. ‘I used to hate wearing dresses,’ my friend said, ‘because they usually didn’t have pockets.’ She found a small piece of glass, which I had probably stepped on a minute earlier, and set it on the table, and for a second we watched it shimmer. ‘Did you have a cabinet of wonder back home?’ I asked her. She scoffed. ‘I had a museum.’



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