Grandiose titles seem to be all the rage in art-land at the moment. First, there was the wonderful The Museum of Everything, an outsider-art exhibition that opened on Primrose Hill during Frieze (and is still open, go if you get the chance). Then The Age of the Marvellous opened in Marylebone, followed closely by the Embassy show (in the former Sierra Leonean embassy, no less) and Laurence Owen’s Gold at 20 Hoxton Square. BIGGER, these exhibitions seem to be saying, is better. (“And if you don’t believe us, we’ll drop a gold ingot on your head”).Down in south
Those of you who went to Latitude this year are probably already familiar with the Museum’s predecessor, The Tree of Lost Things. The Museum, the version which appeared at NFMNFYBFY (phew!) on the 1st-2nd November, was very similar to the original, but in the place of an actual tree, the artists had threaded string across the space. Coupled with the BAC’s cosy chairs and ‘cup-of-tea-in-a- cup-and-saucer’ aesthetic, it looked rather like bunting at a village fete.
The idea of The Tree of Lost Things is simple. First, you have to think hard about all of the things (people, objects, morals....) that you’ve lost in your life. Then, once you’ve selected your most poignant, immediate or amusing loss (depending on your level of denial, I guess), you write your loss onto a luggage label. Finally you release your loss into the public domain, by tying it onto the tree (or, at BAC, string).
Once the label is tied, you have to log your loss into the Ledger of Lost Things. Type of loss; date of loss and, most interestingly, weight of loss (there’s a scale helpfully provided. I think virginity weighed in at about 8oz...), all get inscribed, alongside a list of the people involved in the event. It’s a fascinating read and I’m sure some of the dreamier geeks amongst us could turn the data into some really spiffing graphs.
Allegra, one of the artists who devised the tree, told me that the losses tend to be split into age groups. For children, it’s objects that make up the bulk of their losses. For older people: friends, lovers and relations. Twentysomethings, the largest group represented, tend to chose less tangible, more ephemeral things: morals or emotions - dignity features highly. When I read it, the most recent entry in the ledger was the rather troubling ‘my freedom’, a loss which was attributed, in matter of fact penstrokes to: ‘my son’.
Browsing amongst the dangling labels, or through the pages of the ledger, you’re faced with the difference between just losing things, and leaving them behind. Some of the labels seemed to see the loss as part of an ongoing process, following their declarations with the coda: ‘…but then I found my boyfriend/new house/self respect…’. It made me wonder about the power of collective action; if taking part in the installation can help with the process of leaving things behind.
Certainly the artists feel as though they’ve been left with something precious. They talked earnestly to me about the sheer weight of the losses they’ve been left with, and the responsibility that they felt towards them. They wondered about devising some kind of filing system in which to store the luggage labels, and talked earnestly about systems for cross-referencing. For now, though, the labels are being stored in a series of battered suitcases. If you’re an archiving genius, and can think of a way to file ‘Dignity’ so it takes in both ‘in death’ and ‘when wearing no knickers’, then I’m sure the artists would love to hear from you.
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