title. Work it out for yourself

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Work it out for yourself.

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Harry's exceptional talent for depowering symbolically powerful objects is complemented by his ability to collect what appear to be more or less innocuous gizmos or objects, and tum them into something much more meaningful by providing them with an explicit context. In Work It Out For Yourself (1993), forty four individual objects are amassed into a large scale assemblage in which their referential meaning or significance extends far beyond their semi-degradable lifespan.

 

Work It Out For Yourself was first assembled for a survey exhibition called Visualising Masculinity, in1994. It is made up of two parallel rows of twenty two small boxes. Each box features a letter stenciled onto the glass cover of the box and an object inside. The lettering contains two hidden messages alluded to by the title of the piece whataloadoffuckingcrap and whatacrappyfuckingload.

 

Encasing is vitally important to the function of the objects. The clinical boxing, like museum casing, invites scrutiny, and dignifies these trashy objects into a realm of near scientific significance. The stenciled messages provide the overall context needed to tie the objects together, yet simultaneously create an interference in the process of studying the objects in detail. The objects are divided between masculine (on the top row) and feminine (on the bottom row). The dividing factor between them has much more to do with their shape and texture than their 'meaning'. For example, an umbrella handle is seen to be as masculine in shape as it is 'unfeminine'. And when placed in a row containing such objects as a beer can and a knife, it adopts some of the 'shape constancy' of a phallic object. It is contextualised amongst shiny, sharp, pointed or cylindrical objects, drastically contrasting with the round, circular, soft objects contextualised in the feminine row. Thus, very object reflects some aspect of a gendered body, and derives some meaning from a gendered body.2

 

This piece comments unemotionally on the way we read objects and on the way they, in tum, come to possess a power and meaning that extends beyond their futile form. It is an ironic representation of things as they really are, a mixture of gender equality and gender discrimination, revealing the world as a place where meanings are transmitted to the viewer on the smallest of scales, on the level of the individual objects of everyday life. Work It Out For Yourself describes a situation of gender stereotyping that has fully permeated our visual culture, an inescapable reduction of the objects surrounding our everyday life and the alignment of our genders to the level of the body.

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Public Objects and Private Parts in Harry Hummerston’s Recent Assemblages

Anna Herriman

 

Footnotes:

1. Robyn Taylor Tickling the Male Psyche, Visualising Masculinities’, Artlink, Vol 14 No 3, p 84