Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary

The relationship between the part and the whole

The exhibition, Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary, located at the Museum of Art and Design has artists taking the most menial things such as buttons, eyeglasses, shopping bags, thread spools, coins, toys, etc. and turned them into portraits, statues, and furniture. In our lives we see things and objects as they are, most times not bothering to wonder what goes in to making them. For example at first glance we see a computer and just see a computer but not notice the processors, drives, chips, or bytes of memory that make up the basis of it. It is the same thing with all the things in our lives that we take for granted. The artists of Second Lives have taken objects like the ones mentioned before and were able to transform them into things that most of us on a daily basis, as well as images we can only hope to see in the near future. The main topic here is basically the relationship between the part and the whole, in short, the whole is more apparent then the parts that are used to make them.

A good example within the exhibition would be Teresa Agnew’s Portrait of a Textile Worker, in which at first glance we see an image of a worker sewing a piece of clothing. When I first saw I thought that it was just a large black and white photograph, but it was after reading the information next to it that I realized that the whole image was made up of many clothing tags. From what I can remember the premise for the work was that so many brands have the name of just one person, namely the designer, and not the person who actually has to create it. In this example the whole is the portrait and the part or parts are the various clothing tags that represent various fashion and clothing designers who use people like the one represented in the portrait to create what it is they envisioned.

Another example is Doh-Ho Suh’s Metal Jacket. At first glance what you see as a whole is a garment that somewhat reminiscent of what a king would wear. However when you look closer the parts are actually military dog tags, which in my opinion symbolizes the sacrifices that had to have been made in order to obtain such a magnificent jacket. When one looks at an object all they really see is the whole and hardly ever bother to look at the parts. But it is only after looking at the object up close and personal and seeing the parts that go into it that one can truly appreciate the whole for what it really is. No matter how grand an object may be as a whole it wouldn’t be anything if not for the minuscule and sometimes insignificant little parts that make it.

Our body as whole is quite a wonder, but what would it be if not for parts like the skeleton, the nervous system, the glands, the hormones, blood, and the skin. We wouldn’t be what we are now; we wouldn’t have created the civilization that we have at this moment. In short without the parts the whole would be NOTHING.