Objects have history. The amulet around your neck, the painting on your wall, even the lamppost on your street. They’re all containers for the things they’ve witnessed or the symbolism you’ve put on them.
So the churning Hammond B3 organ in American artist Theaster Gates’s show isn’t just a roaring instrument; it’s a symbol of black jazz, of the musicians who played it, of the time spent listening to the music that has poured out of it.
The whole show forces you to deal with the history of the objects on display. There are Japanese vases and African masks held in wooden structures, stuttering neons of Xs and afros on the wall. Gates is combining Japanese and Afro-American culture into this odd hybrid form. At first it doesn’t make a lot of sense – why combine, appropriate and adapt? – but eventually you realise that Gates is whacking these things together to not just create something new, but to gain a sense of ownership and power over the objects and their histories. Yes, each object holds its own past, but Gates is trying to stop that from being its only definition. He’s trying to give the objects a future.
The exhibition feels like a struggle, like hard, back-breaking emotional work, but maybe that sad, mournful F-minor chord haunting the space will resolve into a major one, given enough time.
