Artist and Visiting Lecturer on the MA Contemporary Art Practice programme, Andy Holden, examines our engagement with the world through the physics of animated features in his work Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape.2 Rules such as ‘Everything falls faster than an anvil’ and ‘no artist can enter the space of their own representation’ are exemplified by the likes of Popeye and Wile E. Coyote. By unpicking the seemingly illogical, an understanding of how personas react to the physicality of space are given rationale.

These animated worlds highlight how slippery thinginess can be. While objects tend to have structure and function, things can be both concrete and abstract, moving between form and concept. They ‘become’ based on how they are interacted with or where they are placed. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes that;

‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.’3

The object doesn’t simply exist, it does something to the people around it. It is this doing that builds our relationship to the physical realm. These relations are based on learned ideas rather than an innate sense of knowing. Sônia Guajajara, Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, has previously described how she found it difficult to understand the term ‘nature’ when she learnt it, because for her indigenous tribe the term doesn’t exist.4 Humans and their natural surroundings are one and the same rather than distinct entities.

Students here are working with this uncertain sense of thinginess. From monuments to ephemera, the natural to the manmade, students here are particularly interested in stuff, materials, bits and bobs and the contexts they both create and brush up against. For what is a cat without a hat?

1. Dr Seuss, Random House/Houghton Mifflin, 1957, The Cat in the Hat
2. Andy Holden, 2011-2016, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape
3. Hannah Arendt, University of Chicago Press, 1958, The Human Condition as cited in Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press, 2006, P 80, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
4. Sônia Guajajara, Fórum do Futuro, 11 April 2019, The Struggle for the Territory and the Destruction of the Amazon (talk)