The ‘Objects for an Ideal Home’ series is inspired by a 1999 music album, in the electronica genre, as it was labeled in the mid-90s, by that name.
‘Objects for an Ideal Home’ was produced and released by the Danish musician Opiate (Thomas Knak) on the record label April Records. In 2009, a 20th anniversary edition was released by ‘Bit-Phalanx Music’ in a remastered version.
Jeremy Deller’s exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg
‘Objects for an Ideal Home’ and its Ikea-esque title came to mind yesterday when photographing parts of Jeremy Deller’s exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (his first solo exhibition in Scandinavia).
Deller is interested in items from the early UK rave scene and electronic music more broadly, as well as reflections on their cultural impact.
“I’m not a painter. I don’t draw, I don’t paint, I don’t do sculptures. But I do more or less everything else.” — Jeremy Deller in a 2023 interview with Nanna Rebekka for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Also see: Copenhagen Photographer, Kasper Bergholt
Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens
Thomas Knak might have borrowed the title from the 1991 exhibition at the Serpentine South Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London, ‘Objects for the Ideal Home’, subtitled ‘The Legacy of Pop Art’, with a minor difference between the definite and the indefinite article (‘an’ vs ‘the’).
“Attention all DJs. 45 mins before closing time, please play slow jam, revival, old skool soul to calm the crowd. This is an important notice. This is also mandatory.” — Jeremy Deller, ‘Warning Graphic Content’ poster, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, July 202
Svetlana 5U3C Tube | Object #76
Sea Urchin | Object #1a
Taku Hyodo Tube Amplifier | Object #10
Yixing Clay Teapot | Object #52
Nikon D3 | Object 1
On objects & the present, Mikhail Bahktin:
“Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world-in-the-making and is stamped with the seal of inconclusiveness. No matter how distant this object is from us in time, it is connected to our incomplete, present-day, continuing temporal transitions, it develops a relationship with our unpreparedness, with our present. But meanwhile, our present has been moving into an inconclusive future. And in this inconclusive context, all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its sense and significance are renewed and grow as the context continues to unfold” — Mikhail Bahktin, 1975-1981.
Charles Sanders Peirce on the role of objects
“A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object.” — Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘On a New List of Categories’, 1867.