That Becomes You
How much of your self do you owe to the things you have encountered?
A thing is often thought of as something concrete, the reality as opposed to the idea or symbol, though we also use “thing” in reference to concepts, as in “don’t fill his head with such things.”
“Thing” comes from the Scandinavian ting, meaning assembly or congregation, and is also related to the Gothic theihs, the word for time.
I am concerned with things, most particularly with my own personal use of the objects that I have been drawn to and have collected, like a constellation, around myself.
I am interested in how possessions can also possess.
When we make an object, we create an other that will exist outside ourselves. This action is highly social; it assumes that the object will have use or meaning to someone other than the self. The ultimate selfish act is to keep a creative idea to yourself; to never make anything of your ideas is a form of non-participation in the world of things. (Conversely, in the digital world, the world of NON-things, more people should probably learn to keep some of their ideas to themselves… Cue the audience of this Substack to not-so-gently suggest I take my own advice!)
Ultimately, we are creatures of a material world – “We are spirits in the material world – and I am a material girl, girl, girl.” – a world of things.
And these things are all made from other things. We live in a closed system. We have a finite number of materials at our disposal and we are each born into a particular subset. From these materials we construct ourselves, producing things of our own. It is in what we produce, what we do with the resources at our disposal, that we construct the world we share. (Personally, I believe more people should shop locally, supporting the products of their neighbors’ labor rather than feeding the fruits of their own labor — money — to a soulless corporation atop of which sits a gluttonous parasite devouring the life force of billions while growing bloated and decadent from an excess that only becomes more obscene by the minute. But I don’t have particularly strong feelings about this, heh.)
It is not necessarily how an object comes into my possession that I find interesting, but with what happens to it once it has entered my orbit. How often does its own gravity attract me and to what effect? Does the object exert an influence over my choices in the gathering and use of other objects?
In this age of dwindling resources, there is a small, but growing concentration on footprints: how much carbon do I use; how much trash do I generate; where do the goods I purchase originate and what is funded by that purchase? We are paid in return for the energy we expend. We support the energy expenditures of others through our spending habits. Given the crisis in economic confidence we are currently experiencing, it is amazing how even the simplest equations remain mysterious or are intentionally obscured. (I believe the current identity crisis in the United States is a hangover from bingeing on cheap goods, which could only be produced by exploiting inexpensive labor overseas. Did this activity raise living standards elsewhere or just export already poor working conditions? The wholesale demolition of entire industries in the U.S. hollowed out the working classes and decimated communities, while wealth flowed more switfly upward.)
It is easy to posit blame elsewhere for the various crises plaguing our society today. (Interestingly the word “crisis” comes from the Greek krisis, which means “to decide.”) Especially in a democracy, we must analyze our own patterns of behavior (what we decided to do or not to do) to better understand how we arrived at our current state. It is the question of where something (an idea, a situation, an object, a way of thinking) comes from that is critically lacking in the prevailing discourse.
(Today, November 4, 2025, I went to the voting booth to support the best possible way forward within the current social/political crisis, knowing full well a whole new one will pop up if not tomorrow, then certainly by next week. I get to do this because I live in a quote unquote democracy, for however long we continue to use that word to name the system we have that passes for such.)
I am constantly preoccupied with patterns of use and the social nature of objects, while also recognizing that many objects also have a power of their own.
Are there objects or patterns that loop us back to the past, where we can see ourselves and our situations becoming? I have been exploring these objects — mostly films — for a long time, wondering how I became what I have become.
References:
Mashup of “Spirits in the Material World” by The Police and “Material Girl” by Madonna
Carter E. Foster & Franklin Sirmans, Steve Wolfe on Paper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Jennifer Gonzalez, Kim Gordon, Matthew Higgs, Christian Marclay, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 2005).
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, (New York, Bantam Books, 1988).
Jan Verwoert, “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1.2 (2007)
I’m glad you didn’t keep this “thing” to yourself!