Significant Objects
A wonderful weblog presenting curious artifacts and the stories behind them. It only goes to show that we aren’t the only ones with lives, stories, consciousnesses. Objects outsource their cognition to humans, amongst other technologies, to do their storytelling for them. When I tell you about the significance of this thing, it is the thing telling its story through me, just as the flower reproduces by way of the bee.
“Among the many misconceptions that prevail about my great-grandfather, Hartford Townes Hastings, the most infuriating is the idea that he was a disinterested playboy benefactor, squandering the family fortune on “women and dreams,” as the New York Sun obituary put it. He was reserved, but kind and idealistic, a vegetarian since childhood. I never saw him drink or cuss or eat more than a few bites of anything. I believe history will redeem him as a frustrated artist, rather than a failed businessman.
After Amherst College, rather than a position at the family surgical dressings business, he went to Paris to create “surrealist craft art,” elaborate wood carvings and collage. None of his work survived the return back over the Atlantic, although he salvaged parts of “Birds Nesting in Quilted Landscape.” He stored the ceramic eggs and mushrooms, dried flowers, and bits of grain in an old pill box and preserved it in glass. My great-grandfather kept the “little grain thing” at his bedside for twenty years, as a reminder never to give up on art.”
(via Tomorrow Museum)
