Life writing and the making of companionable objects: Reflections on sunaryo's titik nadir

This essay explores some of the cultural, political, and ethical work of life writing that goes on in national and transnational art worlds. We commonly think of life writing as forms or fragments of discourse that depict the lives of human actors, and that give actors' experiences intelligibility, purpose, and recognition. But life writing also plays a part in the making of what I call "companionable objects"-those things with which we have ethical and affective ties. Things, too, can be actors, and mingle with us in our everyday lifeworlds and publics. They, too, gain intelligibility and purpose from life accounts, and may even be the central figures in such stories. I think this is especially so in our contemporary art worlds, with, of course, their institutional and market demands for artists' reputations, but also with their fraught politics and cultural aspirations. To capture this intermingling of things and life writing, I will discuss a work presented by the acclaimed Indonesian artist, Sunaryo: a 1998 installation called Titik Nadir ("The Low Point"). Part of my effort will be to temper the sociological views of Pierre Bourdieu toward art biographical discourse, and to recuperate life writing as an ethical venture that is crucial to the way we dwell with and understand the things we call art. That, I hope, will lead us to a broader appreciation for the place of things in life writing. In keeping with his other critical accounts of cultural power and the economies of symbolic capital, Bourdieu argued that fields of artistic production require not only networks of artists, dealers, critics, and connoisseurs, institutions of consecration and sanction, and places of exhibit, but also and above all, forms of language that make it possible to speak about art, artistic value, and artists (260). In his account, biography and related genres of life writing satisfy a market need for creative reputations, commercial classifications, and romantic ideas about artistic genius. In short, today's national and transnational art worlds have summoned biographical discourse, and with it have supplied and marketed artists with narratives of their politico-aesthetic arrival and destiny in the galleries around the globe. Bourdieu also observes that life writing appears basic to art historical discourse-if problematically so-and lends itself to claims about appreciating and interpreting works. Although looking at a work of art and telling a life story are fundamentally different sorts of activities, they commonly get played off one another. We expect works of art to reveal how a life has been lived, and life writing or biographical discourse to change the way we look at a collection of art objects. Indeed, it is common for contemporary art works, performances, and installations to include life writing-often in the form of an artist's statement-as part of their expressive material and critically reflexive framework. Nonetheless, the biographical approach to interpreting works, as art historian Thomas Crow reminds us (1-5), has lost a good deal of authority and has come under suspicion for serving the demands of a marketplace and promoting an outmoded cult of genius. To my knowledge, however, that suspicion has diminished neither the practical appeal nor the reflexive functions of life writing or lifestory materials found in installation and performance art. The marketplace, of course, is but one precinct in which art biographical discourse functions. It is important to remember that the marketplace does not define or characterize the whole of the public sphere, nor does it sustain ceaseless and hegemonic sway over the intimacies of our individual lifeworlds and conscience. Art biographical discourse is also a scene of ethical accountability and creativity (cf., Butler; Ricoeur), and a crucial place for understanding how companionable objects become companionable-that is, to see how people and crafted things form and sustain social relationships. Things, too, are social beings-though not human beings-and as we dwell together with them we become vulnerable to them, and they to us. In that mutuality of influence between people and things there is both care and violence. An ethical realm stretches between human actors and things, and palpably so in our contemporary art worlds.