The Inner the Life of Nouns

Cook, Raechel

Publication

The Inner the Life of Nouns

Cook, Raechel

Abstract

By what means do objects become significant to individuals? What experiences shape our relationship with particular objects? What experiences can an object evoke? More than 200 artifacts from every decade since 1900 and corresponding stories have been gathered to further explore the relationship between people, objects, and experience. Acquired objects and collections are only a sampling representative of the interests, values, and quirks of their keepers. Even the smallest of trinkets from the handmade to the mass-produced take on new significance when tied to a story, memory, person, or experience. Objects were on view from March 2-7, 2014 in The Reading Room of Objects, Oddities, and Stories (The Reading Room) in an exhibition titled The Inner Life of Nouns. Planning materials and preparatory sketches for this project are included as a supplemental file. The Reading Room can be described as a place formed between people, stories, and objects. It provides a temporary space for discovery through the use of multiple senses, curiosity, and story-sharing. The Reading Room is a constructed space made from second-hand or borrowed items that have been culled from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and the surrounding environment. It is designed to give visitors the time and space to have what literary critic Walter Benjamin described in his 1940 essay On Some Motifs of Baudelaire as a "long experience" (erfahrung) in contrast to the fragmentary moments (erlebnisse) more commonly experienced in daily life. For this project, the "long experience" is being considered as a decelerated space for lingering. The purpose of this project is to explore constructed conditions that might allow a slow space to emerge by using some of Benjamin's theories about interiority and objects.