Plastic Bottle Tear-Gas Mask

The exhibition Disobedient Objects (2014-2015) at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London displayed objects that challenged conventional definitions of art and design. The objects on display were mostly everyday objects that originated from various grassroots activist movements from the late 1970s to the present. The objects on display were made to change the world.

How to Guide: Makeshift Tear-Gas Mask, Victoria & Albert Museum. Illustrated by Marwan Kaabour, at Barnbrook.

The curators of exhibition, Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, write in the exhibition catalogue: “The objects do not possess agency in themselves, but make change as part of ecologies composed also of other objects, music, performing bodies, technology, laws, organizations and affects." Although this claim is accurate, and indeed meaningful, research in the recent years has revealed a shift towards giving objects agency to think. In this theoretical climate, objects do in fact possess agency in themselves. This quite recent theoretical and intellectual movement is sometimes referred to as new materialism or thing theory (scholars have not yet agreed on a unifying term). Thing theory is a heterogenic theory, and the variations and disagreements are numerous. But a general agreement is that objects are vibrant entities capable to act, whether intentionally or not.

In my blog posts this semester, I will give a short example on how this thought could be put into practice by scrutinizing a DIY plastic bottle tear-gas mask from the exhibition Disobedient Objects. Does the plastic gas-mask bottle possess agency to act by itself? Or is it the network of user, maker, the museum, other objects, music, performing bodies, technology, laws, organizations and affects that make up the agency of this object?