When making love she had a habit of
clawing at the walls. In their first week of passion she succeeded in
tearing down all his posters. To make it up, she bought him a garden
gnome calendar (“I've no idea why gnomes”). This, along with many other mementos of romance past, make up the Museum of Broken
Relationships's summer show at London's Southbank Centre. The Museum
proper was opened 3 years ago in Zagreb and contains hundreds of
objects sent from exs the world over. Since then the popularity of
this archive of heartache has grown and now its curators are
embarking on open relationships with multiple cities and relying in
part from submissions from these host locations. As in Zagreb its
travelling exhibitions are admirably unfussy, sticking to just the
donated items and a description of the relationship, with start and
end dates, and how the object fits into this moment. Given that as
many as a quarter of the items on show at the Southbank are
from London the assiduousness with which visitors approach the
displays -many faces were almost rubbed up against the plastic
casing- may stem from the thrill of perhaps finding a relic of one's
own past romantic exploits.
Although I didn't discover anything
from mine, I was surprised by how moved, tickled and intrigued I was
by the whole thing. Much of what is here wouldn't even make the
discarded junk of a provincial car-boot sale; so whence its power? The
coupling of object and story obviously appeals to a sense that memory
can be stored in a tangible form; without these physical mementos we
would have little to anchor our histories. I'm reminded of Sergei
Dovlatov's discovery of his suitcase after four years of his Manhattan exile. When he had fled the USSR he was allowed only
one case, into which he put “all that [he] had acquired in thirty
six years”. Dovlatov, “engulfed by memory”, proceeds to tell a
story, in his wonderfully picaresque way, about each item inside it
and in doing so realises his own history as lived through a
double-breasted suit, pea-green crepe socks and a pair of stolen
boots. As Dovlatov reminds us, there's a reason books are shaped like
suitcases.
Perhaps in an age where so much is
digitalised we are experiencing a kind of nostalgia for the tangible;
not so much objet trouvé as objet redécouvert. Receiving a
handwritten letter now ranks among the paragons of serious romantic
expression; sacking Troy would only top that gesture. Whilst it's
always been possible for a theatre ticket or a book or a mixtape
to be cherished sentimentally, these days we simply have fewer of
these physical items in our lives. I see the memorialising of
objects through the Museum of Broken Relationships as a partial
recognition that the material paper-trail that once bound us together
through forms of socialising and exchange -banknotes, letters, DVDs-
are disappearing, or at least transforming into less tangible
incarnations.
When Walter Benjamin wrote about the
aura of authenticity he wasn't thinking about butt plugs or rice
cookers but the Museum of Broken Relationships succeeds in capturing
for the 21st century that very Benjaminian concern for how
we -whether as collectors or consumers- project ourselves through
through objects and objects through us. A concern for Benjamin was
the concept of ownership, particularly what happens to the phenomenon
of collecting when the object loses its personal owner and becomes
public. Although all the original owners of the Museum's items are
anonymous we still traverse that precarious boundary between the
universalism of the shared experience -haven't we all been there?-
and the voyeurism of peeping into the private lives of others, with
all their vulnerabilities and raw emotions on show. One item that seemed to
consistently command a flock of giggling hoverers, the aforementioned
butt plug (with attachable tail), is accompanied by a fetish-frenzied
account of body biting in the shadowy passages of the Barbican that
would make E L James (or indeed Luis Suarez) blush.
There is also the ambiguity surrounding
consent; donations only come from one half of the broken
relationship. Given that at the level of ownership these objects were
once shared between two, is it ethically acceptable for them to be
unilaterally made public? While the majority of the exhibits have the
sad old tale to tell of a couple drifting apart, there are also a
fair few where wounds are clearly still raw and the wrongs of the
cheating partner are laid bare. Here we're not so far from the territory of revenge porn. On the donors page of the Museum's website there is
a striking failure to address this concern. Anonymity of person is
presumably the sine qua non of ethical reassurance. But should
objects themselves not have the right to be forgotten too?
The parts of the exhibition that are
most worth remembering are those that don't so obviously call into
question the dubious motivations of their donors. They are the ones
that really think about how an object can come to stand in, however
subjectively, for emotionally involved life experiences. And as these
are some of the most important experiences in our lives, do those
involved, to use a Benjaminian term, come alive through the
objects that emerge during these moments? One admirably
self-analytical text describing a 30 year old toy still preserved in
its packaging captures this curious form of objectification. The
donor writes of how he gave this item to a former girlfriend and
has come to see in it everything that was doomed to fail about their
relationship: his controlling nature, seeking to mould things to his
own will and often unable to attend to the feelings and desires of
his partner. He, the same age as the toy, was not ready to open
himself up or perhaps, although not said, grow up.
The received meaning of objects is so
often at odds with what they have come to represent for the exs. In a
brilliant instance of curatorial thwarting of expectations*, a
jewellery set is exhibited alongside a banknote. In the text
accompanying the jewellery we discover that the partner who gifted
this set was a philanderer and repeatedly exploited the donor/author.
Pretty but worthless, she concludes. The Turkish banknote
tells of quite a different relationship. The setting is a first
dinner date: he settles the bill and refuses to accept any
contribution from her. Later on, as they are parting, she slips a
note into his coat which he discovers the next day. He puts the note
in his wallet with the intention of returning it but it ends up
remaining there untouched and functioned as a kind of lucky charm for
two years, the length of their relationship.
In using the vocabulary of mementos,
notions of containing and anchoring give what I'm talking about a
degree of unearned fixity. It is precisely what is so subjective
about objectification that makes the exhibition such a fascinating thing. They are not symbols because they do not aspire to any
universal significance; they are merely things that straddle the
boundary between two specific meanings. Is there a better way to
think about objects when they become tangled up in this ontological
game of public/private Twister? Divorced from their original utility
or purpose but through the act of being witnessed and shared taking
on new meanings, the objects of the Museum have a similar quality to
that of evidence in a courtroom. They testify for the time, energy and
emotion that we put into relationships.They are the physical markers
of this experience and it would be a tragedy if they were to vanish
into the algorithmic ether along with books and films and all the other things that once were real.
.JPG)
*I owe this point to a JC
