The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

Visit: 1st March 2013

from "yourlittleampersand.tumblr.com"

I felt quite alienated from the exhibition. I was really trying to understand the relationships between the objects, which I assumed was the meaning, but I couldn’t gather anything very ‘deep’ or intellectual – only the similarity of body parts or machinery. Because of this, I didn’t feel like I understood the exhibition, in fact, I felt quite stupid. (And a look through the visitor comments book didn’t make me feel alone in this!)

The only thing which grabbed my attention was the penis model which Malcolm McDowell kills a woman with in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – that made me feel like the exhibition was worth seeing because it’s such a classic film prop. However, I’m not sure whether I felt comfortable with it being high-jacked for the purpose of an exhibition. As with Glam!, I enjoy the mix of high and low culture in art, but I think the rather pretentious gathering of objects with some cult status, ambiguity, or cheap shock factor reduced the worth of the prop – it made it sink into that world of pretention and clever-clever self-congratulating intellectual worth of the exhibition which is an association I didn’t want it to have.