We Buy the Cosmos

On Wood St, unsupposing Wood St for a brief moment there exists a conjunction of two experiences of time, history and our place within it.

Both revolve around dumb objects. Objects in themselves arguably nothing more than the material which composes them. Nothing more than the whatever banding of atoms determines them to be.

Starting with a very earthly object, an LP, in particular The Beatles ‘The White Album’. Under the title ‘We Buy White Albums’  artist Rutherford Chang has been endeavouring to collect all numbered copies of The White Album. For Chang the famous white sleeve is a void which the concerns and personal history of whoever possessed it can expand into.

So you get exotic drawings, forgotten names neatly sitting in corners patiently waiting for identification and reunion. You also get a series of objects in various states of decay. Flick through the copies and each one is corrupted by its own existence. Each is its own maker within an individual journey in entropy.

Drifting through sleeve after sleeve, which can get repetitive, you do begin to think about the need for collecting. Is this need to collect some kind of attempt to keep entropy at bay? To halt or slow down the passage of time, by gathering object which hold residual histories.

Or is it simply something to do?    

                                                                                              

Objects with residual history also exist a little further down Wood St. Three meteorites’ sit patience on three brown modular plastic chairs. They can afford to be patient they’ve been around for a long time.

This is Beginnings by AKRA group part of Axolotl at Model. The aforementioned trio of space rocks and earth chairs sits in a group around a humming amp. Partly shielded by an old cinema screen, again objects imparted with historical residue.

The main focus is the meteorites; to experience Beginnings you select a meteorite don headphone and sinister black hood. Already under way is the narrative of the lump you hold in your hand. As the soft LIverpudlian accent intones this narrative, which for me starts somewhere out in space, heading towards, away from a familiar blue planet.

I begin to spin off connections, one of them being Charles and Ray Eames treatise on our place in the universe Powers of Ten. Of course all of this doesn’t matter to the space rock, it just is. All the poetry and astonishment comes from us, the humans. Due to our placement, out temporary placement, in the universe we create a sense of wonder; we attempt to come to terms with the incredible odds of our existence.

We do that do projecting some immense ideas onto the things that make up the world. Whether those object be record sleeves or things that fall from the sky. In pursuit to comprehend our place here and now.