%0 Journal Article %T Technologies of Romance: looking for ‘object love’ in three works of video art %A Paul O'Kane %D 2019 %V %N Autumn 2019 %K Fetish %K History %K Museum %K romance %K Technologies %K Technology %K Video Art %K Vitrine %X In this paper the author discusses three works of video art featured in the Technologies of Romance symposium held at the Science Museum, London, in 2018. The author searches within video art, as a genre or medium, within its technical apparatuses and within the three particular works, for contributions to the particular notion of ‘object love’ as drawn from a paper by Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess (2014). The author interprets the three video artists’ works with the aim of gleaning comparative examples that might illustrate or extend the ‘object love’ concept. Mathilde Roman’s book (2016) on the ‘staging’ of video art is an influence on the text, as are two short but profound statements by Walter Benjamin, one from his Theses on a Philosophy of History (1940), another from his essay on Surrealism (1929). History, ‘the past’, museology and ‘object love’ are all woven into the core of the article. As it moves towards its conclusion the author is inspired by the image of an empty, machine-made stocking (a classic symbol of Freudian fetishism) in Elizabeth Price’s video K, in such a way that the article ends by skewing both the idea of ‘object’, and that of ‘love’ in the direction of the fetish, while concluding that the past – just as much as any particular object from or of the past – tends to be subject to fetishisation. Meanwhile, video’s relative immateriality as an art medium, and its current use by artists, is seen as representative of an age of image-based archival practices that, assisted by digital technology, might now divert traditional, object-based processes of the museum – a shift that might be summed up in the phrase ‘screen becomes vitrine’. This shift, from vitrined objects to screened images might then, in turn, have implications for the ‘object love’ that initially interested Geoghegan and Hess and which began the author’s article and this dialogue with the Science Museum. %Z Hilary Lloyd, shown at the Raven Row Gallery, 2010, see http://www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/hilarylloyd/ (accessed August 2019) %Z Here I am referring to Chaplin (whom Song has invoked elsewhere in her works) as a ‘diaspora artist’, in the way that he migrated from England to America in search of success, while also ‘class-migrating’ from poor and inauspicious beginnings in South London to substantial wealth and status and worldwide fame in Hollywood. %Z Rosie Carr, The Photocopier Who Fell in Love with Me, first shown, Whitstable Biennale, 2018 https://www.whitstablebiennale.com/project/the-photocopier-who-fell-in-love-with-me/ (accessed September 2019) %Z Bada Song SEND-IT, first shown as part of a solo show ‘This Way & That’, Asia House, London, 2014 %Z The concept of the diaspora artist is fairly well established, for example, the term appears in the Tate Art Terms website https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/diaspora (accessed September 2019). %Z Here I am referring to Chaplin (whom Song has invoked elsewhere in her works) as a ‘diaspora artist’, in the way that he migrated from England to America in search of success, while also ‘class-migrating’ from poor and inauspicious beginnings in South London to substantial wealth and status and worldwide fame in Hollywood. %Z At this point we might also recall that Charlie Chaplin had his own mother transported to Hollywood to spend her last years close by him and with constant access to the best available medical attention. %Z Elisabeth Price K, first shown at the Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam, 2015 https://grimmgallery.com/artists/elizabeth-price/ (accessed September 2019) %Z See Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927, 20th Century Fox) in which (at about 59 minutes) a young newspaper seller gazes into the lens of the camera and thus appears to momentarily and perhaps eternally link our time to his without interruption. %Z Chris Marker’s video artwork La Jetée might also be said to encapsulate these claims. It is constructed at a threshold between the still photographic and moving image and relays the arcane tale of a man sent back in time to transform the future. But it is also a love story that places the image of a museum at the heart of its dream-like narrative. See: Marker, C, 2003, La Jetée & Sans Soleil – two films by Chris Marker (France: Nouveaux Pictures) %Z ‘Popular Past’ is a phrase repeatedly used by the author in other recent and relevant writings and publications, including ‘Forever Young: Juvenilia, Amateurism, and the Popular Past, 2019. %Z Bar those crepuscular environments contrived for Mark Rothko’s late and most grandiose works. %Z It is perhaps worth remembering here that Freud’s own house is today a museum, replete with Freud’s own extensive collections, which surrounded him with images and objects of the past while he created his psychoanalytical theories of modernity. %Z ‘Age of the archive’ is a phrase repeatedly used by the author in other recent and relevant writings and publications, including Forever Young: Juvenilia, Amateurism, and the Popular Past, 2019. %I The Science Museum Group %@ 2054-5770 %B eng %U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/looking-for-object-love/ %J Science Museum Group Journal