Beneath the Surface
Humans like permanence and certainty. We carve initials in trees and desks and doorframes. We seal documents in plastic. We enshrine important things in stone. But no matter how we feel about it, things change, and even if they do not, how we feel about them does. We work hard to paint over those initials. We lament the unknown damage we caused by sealing things “permanently” in plastic that is now degrading. We have protracted public arguments about a number of the things we have enshrined in stone. Despite all of our efforts to the contrary, the objects in our lives change, and even when they do not appear to, the world around them does. The back rooms of antiques malls, the shelf lots at auctions, and the upper floors of museum storage—they are all filled with things that have dropped out of the flow of the world. That is what we do, all of us in this business. We mine those spaces, those dusty corners and mildewed basements, for things that we can find uses for again. We are rooting around in detritus, looking for salvageable bits.
It is just that objects lack permanence to a frustrating degree! The things we love, even as they sit quietly in the dim light of our silent spaces, are deteriorating. Nails are oxidizing, wood is warping, glass is crizzling, paint is lifting—compound by compound, it is all quietly coming undone. So are we, annoying and humbling though it may be. The only thing more inescapable than entropy might be gravity.
Things also lack permanence in terms of what they mean, how they serve us, and how we view them. This was the driving message of an exhibition titled Gala Porras-Kim: The reflection at the threshold of a categorical division that we saw recently at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. A Colombian/Korean/American artist, Porras-Kim devoted a significant amount of time to mining the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Carnegie Public Library inside the museum of art, focusing in particular on objects that were “least likely to be on view.” Porras-Kim’s work focuses on how “art” is a subjective category, one that is not fixed (objects can become art or cease to be art, for example), and how the idea of “art” in collections is influenced by individual subjective choices and institutional labels. Of course, museums and libraries are often like icebergs, with just the tip visible to the public, belying the vast reserves of material stored away safely for future study or exhibitions. But this exhibition (which is on view through July 27) seeks to make at least some of these objects visible by transforming them into art.
The reasons objects were not on view varied, but they mostly fell into a handful of categories—too unwieldy in some way to effectively display, too fragile for the process of installation, too biased or inaccurate in their depictions, or simply lacking enough context to be interpreted effectively. (This is an official way of saying something along the lines of “We have no idea where this came from or who made it so we cannot really tell you anything useful about it!”) The artist seemed to be making the effort to take these objects—negatives of photographs, heavy-handed and insensitive ethnographic depictions, a damaged section of the UV-glass ceiling tiles that protected artwork—and turning them from historical objects or damaged remnants back into art by placing them in a different context and talking about them in a different way.
For example, the center of the gallery contained a large section of skylight on a low platform. It was weather-beaten, and the protective treatment on the glass was blistered and deteriorating. Brand new, it was no doubt pristine and angular, so perfect as to go almost unnoticed. In the current state, dropped on a heap of construction rubble, it would likely appear to be trash. But placed in the center of the gallery with label copy discussing its years of service, and placed in the context of the works it protected and preserved, suddenly it took on a degree of nobility and honor. How, we wondered, does that work? How is context so powerful?
Part of what we kept mulling over after seeing the exhibition is how fluid context is. Context is one of those fancy words that are rolled out with weighty solemnity by critics, but to simplify it, context is a lens or a place to stand while viewing something. When we are examining an object, we can view it from the personal life of the maker, how he or she practiced their craft, and how it stands against other work the maker completed. Or we can examine the object from the viewpoint of the world in which the maker lived—how typical or atypical is the work when compared to work by other craftspeople of the period, how skilled is it compared to that of their peers, etc. We can talk about an object from the viewpoint of the people who utilized it and discuss what it meant in their daily lives. We can think about it in comparison to where we stand today—how is it different, better, or less desirable in relationship to similar objects today? Those are all different contexts—frameworks, angles, or viewpoints—that might increase our understanding.
Maybe all of that is too abstract, too “modern art,” but we do the same thing much of the time with objects. Take a 19th-century medical book, for example. When it was printed, it was informational. It was not intended to be art or social commentary or anything other than a source for conveying what was known about the human body at the time. But within 20 or 30 years, much of the information contained in the book was obsolete. At that point, it was just an outdated textbook, not really useful for anything. But in another 60 years, the hand-colored illustrations might be sliced out of the book and framed as art, and in another 100 years, the book itself might be displayed to convey the sexism and racism inherent in many early medical texts.
Our homes are filled with hundreds of objects like this—objects born in one context, used until they became obsolete, and then transformed by the application of a new context. In fact, the objects themselves cannot easily shift context, and if they get stuck between contexts for too long they do not survive. Think of how many things that we now embrace as colorful, decorative, or folk art—painted coffee grinders, lithographed tin advertising wares for products that no longer exist, or lead-glazed tablewares—had to survive a long period of time when they were not being used to grind coffee, advertise baking powder, or serve dinner. Drifting around without an applicable context, at any point they could easily have been recontextualized as trash and relegated to the burn pile or the dump.
The antiques marketplace, a fairly new thing in most respects, has historically taken one aspect of a work or some combination of fairly straightforward attributes—a name, a form, a style—and tied that collection of attributes to a dollar value. But what happens as the context of an object shifts?
That is the reason many objects come up for sale or depart collections. Whether publicly or privately owned, when an object ceases to have a useful context it also tends to lose value. If it loses context in the larger market, the object loses monetary value. (Look at the current state of the Tesla brand. Many people bought Tesla when the company was viewed in one context, and now that that context has changed, the “value” of a Tesla, socially, has changed, and has changed dramatically enough that the objective, non-partisan monetary value of one is changing also.) For another example, we had a small paint-decorated desk in our kitchen. At one point, it served a purpose, but as our business and the attendant paperwork piles grew and we developed a designated office, the desk ceased for us to be a functional work and storage object, so it was sold. On a larger scale, we helped sell a large collection of quilts that had been donated decades ago to a museum. Upon closer examination, few of the quilts had enough information attached to be part of the context of the museum’s mission, so deaccession for sale and transfer was deemed the wisest course.
It is important to remember that objects can exist in more than one context. In fact, if you are reading this and thinking, “What does this have to do with my work or my collection?” take a moment to think about how objects fare in the market when they are relevant to multiple contexts. Auctioneers love items with multiple contexts! A daguerreotype? Context of interest to photography collectors. An Ohio daguerreotype?
Photography collectors and regional collectors. An Ohio daguerreotype of a child with a toy? Photography collectors, regional collectors, and collectors of childhood-related objects. An Ohio daguerreotype of a child with a toy taken by J. P. Ball of Cincinnati? Photography, regional, childhood, and black history! The context in which the object speaks loudest or the context with the least associated objects tends to be the context that wins the bidding war. There are plenty of regional photographs of cute kids out there but far fewer photographs taken by black men in the middle of the 19th century.
It is a great thought exercise when you are somewhere surrounded by objects to imagine other contexts for them. To one of us, a given object might be a sculptural form that fills a space with a splash of color, but might it have other contexts that could inform other people’s opinions of it? One infamous task from Andrew’s graduate school interview days was to design an exhibition around a paper cup. At the time, it was an intimidating assignment, but as the years have passed, we realize that the idea was to see how much deeper the students could go with their thoughts. Where does the paper come from? What kind of story is there to tell about the origin of the raw materials, the process of harvesting and transforming them? Who is involved, and what kind of life do they live, and how does the production shape their lives? What is the history of disposable cups, and how did this design gain popularity? As our knowledge of environmental impacts has grown, how are disposable cups viewed now? What might the future of disposable products be like?
This is not just an academic exercise. This is how many of us make money. Find an object like a sampler or a trade sign or an unidentified landscape, and with a little research we can often add contexts—locations or family histories—that add interest, which in turn adds value. Do we know the maker or the place the object was made? If so, and a person out there has a relationship to that specific place, then the object may have meaning to them for that sole reason. Does the object represent something positive or negative? To one person, it might offer a warm, fuzzy feeling, a sense of nostalgia, but to another it might inspire only a shudder. (Some of us have conflicted feelings from childhood about wooden spoons and fly swatters, for instance!)
All of this is to say that this task was designed to make us more aware of and increase our appreciation for the things around us—and to offer a less personal explanation for what can sometimes feel like a rejection. It is not simply that younger people “do not want your stuff.” It is merely that your stuff is appreciated by you for very specific, sometimes very personal, contexts, and they do not have the same context for other people. You liked that stand because it was the right size to fit in a specific corner, was well crafted, and had a beautiful piece of curly maple for the top. They want something for a different context—a different space, a rustic top that can hold a plant and coffee mugs, with a drawer or lower shelf for small projects. And who knows? Someday, the context of their stand might change enough that they would prefer yet another one.
That is the only guarantee here—that stuff changes. People change. Contexts change. What does not change is the human desire to hunt, gather, and apply context. No matter where you are in your collecting journey or in the market food chain, we are all just rummaging around in shoeboxes of old photographs, chests of fading quilts, shelves of toned books, or sheds of furniture with splintered veneer, looking for “we-will-know-it-when-we-see-it,” listening quietly for something with a context that speaks to us.
Originally published in the May 2025 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2025 Maine Antique Digest
