you sit upon the electrical box on gottingen and north,
is your stain of poison? why has no one taken you home.
you are a old looking bread box or possibly a vintage desk organizer. but you wont be in good condition for long with the humidity and summers rains, your wood is sure to swell and split. the person who put you there maybe had intentions of it making someones day with its high traffic placement, and maybe they see it everyday, and are saddened no one has taken it, and maybe they feel bad. or maybe they are elated it has become a installation in the city? who knows. but you sit there day after day. no one wants you and your watching summer pass you by. will you be there for every day of it? —curious passerby
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2014.
I.E.D.?
More like OB COD.
UN OBJET TROUVÉ
“or maybe they are elated it has become a (sic) installation in the city? who knows?” curious passerby
What is going on here? From the perspective of the passerby – the wooden box, of course, has no perspective – what is going on is the interaction between human beings and an inanimate object but – and this is important – by describing the wooden box as a “poor wooden box,” the passerby has projected her conceptual framework onto the box and made it meaningful, at least to her.
From a philosophical perspective, however, we must ask whether such an imaginative projection is meaningful. In the case of objects bearing a high degree of symbolic meaning – one thinks of a flag, for example – there can be no question that such projection onto an inanimate object is meaningful but can the same be said about a wooden box?
The difficulty here is that the wooden box has no intrinsic symbolic meaning apart from those, of course, who have or have had breadboxes in the past. For these people it may well result in an evocative response as with Gide’s “A la recherche du temps perdus.” In general terms, however, it is just that, a wooden box, a “found object” as we say in Montréal. So what, apart from the imaginative projection of the passerby, can we say about the interaction between the wooden box and an impartial passerby, one who does not invest it with imaginative meaning? In other words, can the question, “What does it mean?” be legitimately asked?
I believe it can, but the question must be elevated beyond that of just the wooden box itself. In other words, the issue must be engaged at the level of of the relationship between mind and matter, between our concepts and reality, that extra-mental world of objects which surround us. So what, then, is that relationship?
Sadly, however, constraints of space prevent my pursuing the question here.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
I meant OCD but my COD kicked in.
Vintage?! you mean old and shitty? Only hipsters use the word vintage so this was written by a hipster and should be ignored for being too hipsterish. Down with hipsters!!!
If they use the word vintage, then can ask a ridiculous price for it.
I dunno op. the summer isn’t passing by the box, the box is in an ideal situation to completely experience summer. outside, in the thick of activities day and night. gets to ogle all the good looking girls and guys, up high enough to escape the dog pee, probably gets a whiff of herb from time to time, a crust of pizza or a timmies cup propped against it.
could be worse summers