Text/Object 2008 - An exhibition of collaborative and interdisciplinary works by staff of the CSU SVPA

Text/Object 2008

On Text/Object : A brief survey of some text/objects in and around Melbourne, as a means of considering what exactly a "text/object" might be…

Anna Poletti

When you encounter the free, weekly zine YOU you meet a text/object head on. A small bag, sealed with a row of staples, inside which is a photocopied letter addressed to ‘you’. To access the letter, you need to negotiate the sealed bag, which every week is hand decorated with stamps, spray paint, found ephemera or photographic prints. The zine, made in Melbourne and distributed nationally and internationally, plays with the textuality of the object, and the materiality of the text, in a simple yet provocative way. An encounter with YOU is an invitation to collaborate: the reader / viewer is invited to unpack the object in order to access a narrative which has been unfolding every week for five years (see You). If you choose not to participate, the bag remains sealed – a silent object.

In May 2008, The National Trust and the Heritage Council of Victoria launched an appeal to raise $30,000 from public donations to help restore the animated neon Skipping Girl Vinegar sign. In a report on the appeal, ABC Melbourne claimed that: “Neon signs like the skipping girl and the Nylex and Pelaco signs, also in Richmond, are special because they’re a visual representation of our industrial past” (ABC, unpag). The broken Skipping Girl sign becomes a text/object among a small collection of remaining ‘electric sky-signs’ which are read as historically important; they ‘speak’ of a time in the city’s recent past and are considered to be of value: the remaining signs (Pelaco, Nylex and the Girl) are all listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

In the State Library of Victoria, Manuscript Accession number MS 13420 refers to a collection of documents once belonging to the Australian author Peter Carey; the catalogue description reads as follows: Comprises drafts and

proofs of the novel True History of the Kelly Gang; papers relating to research into Ned Kelly; correspondence from editors and publishers; and articles about, and reviews of, the novel. Also, drafts, proofs and papers relating to 30 days in Sydney: A wildly distorted account, ‘A genius cat’, ‘The locked room’ and Jack Maggs. Also, general correspondence from publishers, editors and agents, organisers of conferences, writing festivals and literary awards, and artists, researchers, translators, fans and friends. Includes photographs, programmes, invitations, certificates, book cover designs, catalogues, video cassette, theses and laptop computer used by Peter Carey during the writing of True History of the Kelly Gang. The collection reflects Peter Carey’s writing processes and the development of True History of the Kelly Gang, his professional activities other than writing, and life in New York’s literary community.

Archives are perhaps the most obvious places for text/objects to reside, but the inclusion of a laptop computer in a collection of author’s papers is relatively new. In the future, we imagine, the experience of working in the archives will be radically different, as scholars log on to Carey’s laptop rather than “opening old, yellowed letters” or encountering “pressed flowers and handwritten recipes” and “worn newspaper articles” with which to begin an imaginative, material engagement with the author (New, 12). Is a laptop computer a text/object?

Self-published art works, neon signs, laptop computers: three kinds of text/objects located in Melbourne which, when taken together, illuminate and suggest how it is that an object can share some characteristics of a text, and a text can demand an engagement which recognises its status as an object.


The perceived material connection between the artefact and a specific moment or person in time is the first noticeable thing these objects have in common (see Benjamin). Unlike mass produced items (even in the case of the laptop, which is mass produced), these objects become texts because of their claim to an association with the specific: Melbourne’s industrial past; the anonymous Luke You who mysteriously labours over photocopiers and paper bags; the working life and writing process of an acclaimed Australian author. These objects can function as texts – as vehicles of narrative or fragments thereof – because they can distinguish themselves from the undifferentiated mass of consumer items we encounter every day. While any given edition of a Peter Carey novel is also a vehicle for a story, the particular copy is unlikely to be valued for its object-hood; unless of course it has the author’s signature in it, in which case it joins the realm of artefacts.

What precisely is the nature of this material connection? The first thing to note about it is that it is almost an entirely imaginative one; the object becomes text in the mind of the beholder. The Skipping Girl neon evokes – even in those with a tenuous understanding of or interest in Melbourne – an imagined industrial past; where workers lived within walking distance of their factories, and Australia (as Prime Minister Rudd likes to remind us) made things. The specificity of what was made (are we nostalgic for vinegar when we look at this sign?), by whom, and in what kinds of conditions, are not the focus of this imagining. It is the muted sense of passing time and the inevitability of change which animates the neon as text/object; just as the imagined working bodies of Carey and Luke You animate our engagement with the tools and products of their labour.

The power of the object to inspire narrative in the viewer is one element of what Walter Benjamin famously called “aura”. Benjamin saw “aura” as a key problem for the politicisation of art and culture, as it was “aura” which fed the bourgeois romantic imagination as it sat in quiet contemplation of objects and basked in the glow of their uniqueness. It was “aura” that locked art into a specific relation to ritual, and individual objects into an economy of authenticity; authentic and inauthentic objects are valued differently and, as the daily transmissions of Antique Roadshow remind us, authenticity trumps use value in terms of determining the monetary worth of objects. For Benjamin, the revolutionary potential of art began with photography and film, mediums from which no original, authentic print is possible (Benjamin, 218); these mediums, by definition, refuse to be fixed in time and place, and therefore resist being read in terms of the romantic (and for Benjamin anti-revolutionary) potential of “aura”

However, the text/object does not operate solely on the mind of the viewer / reader through its aura; it engages the viewer through the body. The experience of scale, dimensions and tactility are key to our sense of the object and its narrative potential. We stand before, we sit in front of or with a text/object: we perceive it through our bodily relation to it. The staples in the YOU bag call out warnings to your fingers; the keyboard of Carey’s laptop seems to shine faintly and smugly with the oil of the authors fingers. A text/object is always calling – or whispering – to the body of its viewer: making us feel smaller or larger, sensitising the ‘skin of our teeth’ or making our feet tingle in recognition of the size of a stride. Standing on the street beneath the Skipping Girl Vinegar sign, or before an object which manipulates scale, we find ourselves thinking through spatial relations: that is, the object asks us to think of it as a text concerned with scale.

We experience scale and an embodied reaction to a text/object in this exhibition, in Smith Says: the point where the fingers meet the rough edges of the paper activate my own finger tips. It is not that I can imagine those fingers in the picture holding the object – it is that my own fingers are remembering rough edges, the experience of reading / viewing becomes a material encounter (and this is where, of course, texts can function as objects and so become text/objects).

So, extending beyond Benjamin’s concept of “aura”, a text/object is something which carries narrative – either literally or in its potential to inspire it – in or through its material qualities which are only partly constituted in its authenticity. Text/objects are also concerned with the narrative potential of bodily encounters; authentic or not…

Dr Anna Poletti
October 2008


ABC Melbourne, local stories, ‘Skipping into cultural history’ May 13 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2008/05/07/2238233.htm

Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations trans Harry Zohn. London: Fontana Press, 1992. Page 218

New, Jennifer. Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

You, Luke. You: Some Letters From the First Five Years. Melbourne: Breakdown Press, 2008.