Repair Shop, 2009
During the second week of September, Material Exchange, InCUBATE, and Adam Bobbette traveled to Buffalo, New York to develop a project called Repair Shop. The Repair Shop is our contribution to the larger exhibition entitled, Conversation Pieces, hosted by CEPA gallery. For information about Conversation Pieces, please follow the link.
The following images document the project from the build-out to the opening night. Objects are still under repair. There will also be a 180 page catalog that where we will produce a group-written text, as well as a flip-book style animation of one of the object repair transformations. Info to come!
Project Description:
The Repair Shop is a platform for experimentation. Repair is a process of transformation, determined through conversation, problem solving, and making-do. When an object, or and infrastructure appears to break (fall apart, peter out, decay, lose steam, or simply change), an opportunity is provided to reconsider our relationships to these things and re-make them in a way that pushes in a different direction. The Repair Shop addresses a number of things in need of repair (ordinary objects, the infrastructures of our everyday lives, and how the larger artistic community is supported in the current arts funding system). The strategies we use: an object repair service, a temporary space for non-profit use, a soup café and bar, all generate money for artist projects through the Repair Shop Grant. The grant is a means to facilitate new projects. These divergent yet resonant strategies experiment with the opportunities and constraints of broken things.
Please visit our Repair Shop Flickr set for complete documentation of the project.
Following is the piece we wrote for the exhibition catalog:
Object Repair
The Repair Shop project addresses a number of things in need of repair, including ordinary objects. Ten broken things were brought to the gallery to be repaired. Upon repair, the objects were returned to their owners from whom we collected a modest fee that was added to the larger Repair Shop Grant. The objects became for us 'conversation pieces' in which each object provided a vehicle for considering what it is to be broken, and what it might mean to repair the given object. The following are some thoughts on repair and brokenness.
In some cases "The Shop" is experienced as a retreat. It might be an organized space away from the world, a refuge to which one withdraws under threat of one form or another, from genuine conflict to simple boredom. A sense of agency is supported here, through the momentum of small successes and affirmations of creative capacity. The caster on a TV cart, a sticky handle, a small engine, a chipped teacup all yield to repair more readily than the broad world of intransigent socio-economic or psycho-emotional crises dogging even the most mundane lifestyle. In this simple sense, Object Repair links itself to the world of basement tinkerers, weekend craftspeople, and even Do-It-Yourselfers, but proposes that the rubric of tinkering be applied to a broader array of social, ethical, ecological, etc. problems or instances of brokenness.
Three options are available with each instance of brokenness:
Return: re-approximate the state prior to brokenness. This is our typical understanding of repair:, bringing the object back to its intended function.
Concession: landfill, death, surrender. At this point, we relinquish control to biology, the gods, the non-human forces. We relinquish responsibility for the object.
Transformation: material and/or functional qualities are diverted. We seek or uncover an object’s novel capacities. Examples might include recycling, adaptive reuse, or museological appropriation, amongst countless others.
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger proposes to reverse the common understanding of objects as most essentially materials possessing certain functional attributes. Through one illustration, he describes a hammer as foremost a capacity, fundamentally determined by its relationship to other things in a specific ‘world’. In this case, a hammer’s ‘world’ is comprised of human tool-wielders, the nails that it might drive, and the constructions that might emerge through its use. He points out that this quality of “ready-to-hand-ness” is one we do not regularly see because the hammer disappears so completely into its function. When it works, it is invisible. In fact, the moment of fracture alone is where this object’s more central identity comes into view. It is here that we are faced with the object’s loss of functionality and recognize its sudden alienation from this ‘world.’
Sitting idle, a broken hammer seems to ride between categories, to have no place. It no longer fits within the circumstance that provided the hammer a sense. The hammer has died in a fundamental way. Having lost its pounding ability, it seems relegated to brute materiality. Dead weight. It is more accurately a has-been than an is.
But is there a world in which a broken hammer has a place? Just as a hammer hanging from its place on the pegboard promises a capacity, might a hammerhead alone on the table point toward other possible forms or ‘worlds’? If a thing’s essential ontological status is observable in this moment of rupture, might it also give birth to an up-to-this-point-indeterminate set of capacities, something as well suited as a functioning hammer? The Object Repair project undertakes a kind of watchfulness, that in this moment of rupture, we might intuit what the broken thing might become. If, as Heidegger says we (dasein)are the "beings of the between," our imagination and synthesis is not only crucial, but a fundamental reality, more solid and basic than the ground we stand upon. The world is as much created as it is found. These objects become vehicles for conversation and exploration of the nature of things, and our nature in relation to them.
The following images document the project from the build-out to the opening night. Objects are still under repair. There will also be a 180 page catalog that where we will produce a group-written text, as well as a flip-book style animation of one of the object repair transformations. Info to come!
Project Description:
The Repair Shop is a platform for experimentation. Repair is a process of transformation, determined through conversation, problem solving, and making-do. When an object, or and infrastructure appears to break (fall apart, peter out, decay, lose steam, or simply change), an opportunity is provided to reconsider our relationships to these things and re-make them in a way that pushes in a different direction. The Repair Shop addresses a number of things in need of repair (ordinary objects, the infrastructures of our everyday lives, and how the larger artistic community is supported in the current arts funding system). The strategies we use: an object repair service, a temporary space for non-profit use, a soup café and bar, all generate money for artist projects through the Repair Shop Grant. The grant is a means to facilitate new projects. These divergent yet resonant strategies experiment with the opportunities and constraints of broken things.
Please visit our Repair Shop Flickr set for complete documentation of the project.
Following is the piece we wrote for the exhibition catalog:
Object Repair
The Repair Shop project addresses a number of things in need of repair, including ordinary objects. Ten broken things were brought to the gallery to be repaired. Upon repair, the objects were returned to their owners from whom we collected a modest fee that was added to the larger Repair Shop Grant. The objects became for us 'conversation pieces' in which each object provided a vehicle for considering what it is to be broken, and what it might mean to repair the given object. The following are some thoughts on repair and brokenness.
In some cases "The Shop" is experienced as a retreat. It might be an organized space away from the world, a refuge to which one withdraws under threat of one form or another, from genuine conflict to simple boredom. A sense of agency is supported here, through the momentum of small successes and affirmations of creative capacity. The caster on a TV cart, a sticky handle, a small engine, a chipped teacup all yield to repair more readily than the broad world of intransigent socio-economic or psycho-emotional crises dogging even the most mundane lifestyle. In this simple sense, Object Repair links itself to the world of basement tinkerers, weekend craftspeople, and even Do-It-Yourselfers, but proposes that the rubric of tinkering be applied to a broader array of social, ethical, ecological, etc. problems or instances of brokenness.
Three options are available with each instance of brokenness:
Return: re-approximate the state prior to brokenness. This is our typical understanding of repair:, bringing the object back to its intended function.
Concession: landfill, death, surrender. At this point, we relinquish control to biology, the gods, the non-human forces. We relinquish responsibility for the object.
Transformation: material and/or functional qualities are diverted. We seek or uncover an object’s novel capacities. Examples might include recycling, adaptive reuse, or museological appropriation, amongst countless others.
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger proposes to reverse the common understanding of objects as most essentially materials possessing certain functional attributes. Through one illustration, he describes a hammer as foremost a capacity, fundamentally determined by its relationship to other things in a specific ‘world’. In this case, a hammer’s ‘world’ is comprised of human tool-wielders, the nails that it might drive, and the constructions that might emerge through its use. He points out that this quality of “ready-to-hand-ness” is one we do not regularly see because the hammer disappears so completely into its function. When it works, it is invisible. In fact, the moment of fracture alone is where this object’s more central identity comes into view. It is here that we are faced with the object’s loss of functionality and recognize its sudden alienation from this ‘world.’
Sitting idle, a broken hammer seems to ride between categories, to have no place. It no longer fits within the circumstance that provided the hammer a sense. The hammer has died in a fundamental way. Having lost its pounding ability, it seems relegated to brute materiality. Dead weight. It is more accurately a has-been than an is.
But is there a world in which a broken hammer has a place? Just as a hammer hanging from its place on the pegboard promises a capacity, might a hammerhead alone on the table point toward other possible forms or ‘worlds’? If a thing’s essential ontological status is observable in this moment of rupture, might it also give birth to an up-to-this-point-indeterminate set of capacities, something as well suited as a functioning hammer? The Object Repair project undertakes a kind of watchfulness, that in this moment of rupture, we might intuit what the broken thing might become. If, as Heidegger says we (dasein)are the "beings of the between," our imagination and synthesis is not only crucial, but a fundamental reality, more solid and basic than the ground we stand upon. The world is as much created as it is found. These objects become vehicles for conversation and exploration of the nature of things, and our nature in relation to them.
