'Nina Simone's Gum' is a book by Warren Ellis. Entitled after the fact that Ellis had pulled the gum off the leg of a piano Nina Simone had played back in 1999, in what was to be Simone's last performance in England. It was twenty years later put on display as a relic; an object of great spiritual value; the book being about how something so small can form such powerful connections between people, it is, as the blurb says, 'a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality'.
I went to see Nina Simone at Birmingham Town Hall in 1969, she was astonishing. Memories of the event still move me, and when she sang 'Young Gifted and Black', I remember hairs standing up on the back of my neck as the mainly black audience rose to her words. It was my first real experience of what it meant to have a very different identity to that of a white, male anglo-saxon. I had just accepted things as they were, but on going to art college, I was finally beginning to wake up and discover that the world out there was a conflicted place and that what I took for granted, was a situation many others would see as a position of privilege. Simone's performance was an unforgettable experience and I could easily see why something as humble as her discarded chewing gum could be so important to someone who had attended one of her concerts.
This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them. This could be, as in the image that opens this post, a saint like Clare of Assisi, who's still golden shorn hair is kept to remind us of her piety or Jesus Christ; the nails from his crucifixion being energised with some sort of spiritual essence of his being.
But you don't have to be that special or saintly, anyone's spiritual essence can be passed on using a relic, the most common situation being when you are given an urn full of ashes after a cremation. I know of several families that keep their grandad's ashes in an urn sitting in a cupboard and every now and again they turn to those ashes and ask for grandad's help in supporting them through life's difficulties. The objects that become relics can also be very mundane, a tooth, a nail, a used discarded chewing gum, but in their very banality, they tell us a story about life, about how the most humble, overlooked object, has the potential to give physical form to spiritual things.
The artist Alina Szapocznikow, used to use chewing gum to make sculptural ideas, and then photograph the results.
These images also tap into the concept of the relic. The artist's traces becoming very like those of a lost saint, Szapocznikow's chewed and hand pulled tiny sculptures, now venerated as high art, become relics not unlike the ones we find preserved in glass vitrines in many Catholic churches. A relic works as some sort of externalised mind. Without their physical presence we would find it very difficult to think about the ideas associated with what relics stand for. The reason we need to make physical objects to carry our ideas, is because of the same reason, each art object in effect operating as an externalised thought, a concept made real, rather than remaining as a thought trapped inside a head.
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