The Universe in a Lipstick

Open Call for Artists

Workshop by Current Obsession
Critical Multiplicity: The Universe in a Lipstick

 

Introduction:

 

Jewellery, adornment and body-related objects consistently communicate between the worlds of the wearer and the onlooker. Therefore, each object finds itself in flux – a multiplicity of interpretations, connections, assumptions, as its location on the historic timeline or a geographic map changes.

Words and Things

 

Focusing specifically on language, materiality and history of adornment, can we ‘scrape off’ the inherent narratives that are ingrained in the way we think about these objects? And furthermore, could we find methods of transforming and subverting the historically solidified conceptions about objects? Create a manual, a series of instructions or algorithmic steps to ‘drag’ the uncanny out of the banal. Push away from the beaten path of seeing jewellery as ‘ornamentation’?

 

 

Communication

 

At the center is the connection between two different materialities basic to any artistic communication: matter (as a physical substance) and language (as a phono-/scriptological substance). Both materialities can be coded and informed to generate things functioning as signifiers, like the words of a language or the material objects made of physical matter. There are obviously cross-connections between the two materialities. Words can only be perceived, when they are rooted in the physical materiality of sound waves, the printer’s ink, pixels, etc. Material objects can only be perceived, when they are rooted in the materiality of language manifesed in discourses that describe them, compare them, assess them, revalue them, devalue them, etc.

 

 

Jewellery

 

In the realm of the visual arts, jewellery has a special status, not only because of its objects, traditionally tending towards the dimension of wearability, which comes in addition to the dimension of viewability, also ascribable to painting, sculpture etc. Jewellery is moreover different, because its objects function as two-pronged signifiers. On the one hand, they can reveal the elements of an outer world functioning as the environment of a wearer. These are things like the matter of which they are made or – as in the case of archaic jewellery – the totem represented by their form. On the other hand, they can reveal the elements of an inner world by functioning as an expression of the wearer’s personality.

Jewellery objects are something like hybrids, in which an impressionistic and an expressionistic signifiers are mounted on each other. These hybrids are not merely isolated material objects, but also the constitutive elements of a plurality of discourses like the discourse of the maker, the wearer, the admirer, the gallerist, the critic etc.

 

 

Intention of the workshop

 

With this workshop, we ask a question: How to ‘multiply’ an object by shifting perspectives?

 

We would like to invite a small group of experienced artists to participate, without fixing age, specific disciplines, or other barriers. We seek individuals capable of making, reflecting on, and discussing their body-related work.

 

As our collaboration partner Design Museum Den Bosch will grant the participants access to its vast collections to get inspired, get sucked in, and get critical.

 

The workshop will unfold in two sessions, a morning and an afternoon, and culminate with a small public presentation of the outcome.

 

The entire process will be carefully documented and published as the second chapter of the #8 Placeholder Issue of Current Obsession Magazine.