Thingamajigs

 

Thingamajigs, by Daniel and Emily Kimbell

The last time I was visiting my grandchildren, I came across a comic strip they were looking at called 'Thingamajigs' by Daniel and Emily Kimbell. The strip appears in 'The Phoenix' comic and in it characters are animated versions of everyday objects. 

From: 'Thingamajigs'

I was fascinated to read a comic whereby my thoughts on animist practices were being played out as children's entertainment. The use of anthropomorphism, the act of attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things, such as animals or inanimate objects, is an old one, and it has been revived for each generation in slightly different ways. 

The Thingamajigs' comic strip

In my day I first encountered human attributes in non human form in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', which was already over 10 years old by the time I first saw it in the 1950s. 

From 'Fantasia'

In the scene above a flower becomes a swirling ballet dancer, spot-lit in the dark as if on stage. Also in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', Micky Mouse, another product of anthropomorphism, is seen in action as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a 20th century version of an 18th century tale. 

From: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

In the animated cartoon, Micky is seen giving life to a cleaning brush, that he then directs to carry buckets of water for him.  The film was in turn based on a poem by Goethe, written in 1797.  The poem tells the tale of an old sorcerer leaving his apprentice with cleaning chores to do. Tired of fetching water in buckets, the apprentice then enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic that he cant really control. The apprentice soon realises he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the right spell with which to stop it. The apprentice tries to stop the broom by attacking it with an axe, but each piece chopped off then becomes a whole new broom that takes up a pail and continues fetching water, but now at twice the speed. The entire room then begins to flood, but when all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. This story is in turn based on one written 2,000 years earlier by Lucian. In the story, 'Philopseudḗs', literally, 'Lover of lies', the narrator, Tychiades, visits the house of a sick and elderly friend, Eucrates, where he has an argument about the reality of the supernatural. Eucrates and several other visitors tell various tales, intended to convince him that supernatural phenomena are real. Each story in turn is either rebutted or ridiculed by Tychiades. In this Greek version, the sorcerer is an Egyptian mystic and Eucrates his companion has learnt the spell for animating the inanimate by eavesdropping, but the basic structure of the story is the same. 

This magic is concerned with the transfer or release of 'Élan vital', the vital life that Bergson argued was within all things not just the biologically active. The Animation Spell is in many fictional stories, a spell that enables sorcerers and sorceresses to bring any object to life.

Another story from my childhood whereby things were given human attributes was the fable of the North wind and the sun. This was one of Aesop's Fables, whereby persuasion triumphs over force. In the fable the sun and the wind argue over who can get the coat off a young man, the wind of course tries to blow it off, but the young man simply wraps it closer and closer around himself the harder and harder the wind blows. The sun and the wind cannot begin to argue with each other, unless we give them the power to do this, and I in turn would argue, as we do this, we release the mystical power of anthropomorphism.

The sun raises the temperature and the boy takes his coat off

We are social beings, and therefore we spend a lot of time building up connections between other people. This quality depends on trusting that others might in many ways act and think in a similar way to ourselves. But we do have to 'trust' in others, as we have no way of knowing what goes on inside other people's heads. This 'trust' can also lead to the anthropomorphising of non-humans. Just as we assume that other people are going to join in with us in the game of life, we can also have a belief that non humans might be able to operate in the same way. We give our pets internal voices, we talk to them as if we expect them to understand what we are saying. We also do this with inanimate objects; we implore our car to keep going, even though we know it can't hear us; we put trust in old tools and talk to them as if we were working with a dear friend. We attribute human-like qualities to inanimate objects, animals as well as our environments and the wider landscapes we inhabit. This can help us feel as if we are better able to understand and relate to the world around us. We are in effect always trying to socialise our experience, because being alone and unconnected to others is for a social animal a terrible thing. This way of understanding the world is something other social animals also possess. Young chimpanzees often carry around sticks and seem to play with them as if the sticks were other small chimps. This stick-carrying is a playful expression of cognitive abilities found in both chimps and humans, but in order for it to be meaningful there needs to be a capacity for imagination, or forming a mental image that is not real but which nevertheless represents reality. Anthropomorphising may be something that improves our wellbeing by creating a sense of connectedness.

The Pont des Arts that stretches over the Seine in Paris has long being used for lovers' pledges made in the form of locks. It was here that attaching padlocks became synonymous with everlasting affection. It is as if the locks can lock in or hold onto the love between people. 

So many locks were attached to the bridge that eventually their weight brought a section down

The bridge is a testimony to the power of our ability to invest human meaning into objects and place externalised thoughts into inanimate things. It is now a very common ritual for couples from all over the world to declare their undying affection for one another by placing their initials on a padlock, fastening it to something and throwing the key away.

The practice has now entered the attentions of academia and it has been thoroughly researched and its history documented. An article in the Journal of Material Culture has traced the practice to a particular source. 

'It was not until the 2000s that the structural deposition of a padlock took on widespread romantic significance. The likeliest trigger was an Italian teenage romance novel: Federico Moccia’s (2006) Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You), a sequel to Tre Metri sopra il Cielo (Three Metres above the Sky), in which characters attach a padlock to a chain on the Ponte Milvio, Rome. ‘This is “the lover’s chain”’, explains Gin, the main female character. ‘You have to put a padlock on this chain, lock it and throw the key in the Tevere.’ ‘And then?’, Step, the male protagonist, asks. ‘You never break up.’1 Step obligingly attaches a padlock and deposits the key into the Tiber. The phenomenal success of these novels and subsequent films, in Italy and Spain, led to Moccia’s (primarily teenage) fans imitating the custom, in a form of imaginative play that sparked a transition from popular culture to popular custom. By 2007, an assemblage of love-locks was fully flourishing on the Ponte Milvio, and tourists so readily adopted the practice that it became predominantly a tourist practice (Houlbrook, 2021).

From: Houlbrook, C. and Parker, A. (2020) Finding love: The materialities of love-locks and geocaches: The Journal of Material Culture: September: Volume 26 Issue 1

It is interesting therefore to find the same type of locks attached to contemporary Voodoo figures and African fetishes.

Mpungu figure. The Tervuren Museum

A contemporary ritual figure recently found being used in the Zaïre area, is locally called a mpungu, and is used by a nkanu or spirit worker to ward off evil forces. The object was collected recently from the frontier region between Lower Zaïre and Bandundu, near Angola. Padlocks accompany cloth, iron, cowries, herbs and mirrors. The figure was used to protect its owner from spells, curses or other maledictions. The padlocks and knots being symbolic barriers, barring all psychic routes to the owner and diverting or confusing the enemy. 

In both cases, whether affirmations of love or ritual protection, inanimate objects are invested with psychic agency. Proof for myself that the making of art is somehow deeply interconnected to our need to use inanimate objects as intermediaries between the everyday and an invisible spiritual world. 

Votive objects designed to deflect pain

From: Immaterial Disarray

The (im)Material Disarray exhibition gave me an opportunity to develop these ideas more fully and for the first time I was consciously trying to make objects that were animist in intent. These concerns were then developed further in the short story, 'Nest'. 

An earlier post on why I have been making animist images focused on my use of a boyhood relationship with a Sooty puppet, but I'm now concerned to find more universal forms that can have a similar agency, so have been looking at ancient religious forms, especially those associated with 'magic'. For instance, the ancient Mesopotamians performed magical rituals to purify themselves of sins committed unknowingly. One such ritual was known as the Šurpu or "Burning", in which the caster of the spell would transfer the guilt for all their misdeeds into various objects such as a strip of dates, an onion or a tuft of wool. The person would then burn the objects and thereby purify themselves of all the sins that they might have unknowingly committed. It is the transfer of sins into inanimate objects, and the fact that once externalised they can be removed, that fascinates me and helps in the shaping of the wellbeing potential of the objects I have been making.

Ritual objects based on scorpions from pre dynastic Egypt

The objects above were used to help overcome pain. Because a scorpion had a sting in the tail, it could symbolise pain. It could also be used as part of a sympathetic magic ritual. The objects I have made allude to this, but I have also upped the intensity of the colour, making it 'more painful'.  

'Thingamajigs' is a word that sits in my mind not that far away from the word 'tranculments'. Tranculments are things that we collect around us, like ornaments and the bric a brac that sort of mounts up gradually around the house, things that sit on top of furniture, that cluster around shelves and is a Black Country word from my youth, a word I got to know because we had a lot of tranculments in our house. We had horse brasses, ceramic Goss crested ware that consisted of souvenirs from seaside towns we had been to, Wade models of tiny dogs, Capodimonte figures and similar sorts of things such as framed sets of cigarette cards. 

Horse brasses

Goss Crested Ware

Wade figurines

Capodimonte

Cigarette Card

I now find these things full of psychic energy and if I come across them in junk shops they talk to me with Black Country accented whispers. I now associate these things with my long dead parents, who collected them I believed at the time, as some sort of protection from the reality of life. 

Perhaps my then intuition was not too far away from the truth. Perhaps these objects did have some sort of magical aura that blessed the house and protected those within it from harm. I spent many hours cleaning them, ritually laying them out on newspaper sheets on a Sunday morning and washing and polishing them so that they never became drab or dusty. Originally horse brasses had been used as charms or amulets to ward off evil and to bring good luck. In my parents' house they were hung on walls instead of on horses, but something of their original purpose somehow remained and worked to ward off evil, whatever that might consist of. When I was designing charms, I had these sorts of things in the back of my mind, the design below of a charm to ward off foot pain, is in effect similar to a horse brass.

Metal low relief foot charm used to ward off bunion pain

See also: 

Kaws, Disney and the aesthetics of babies

Garry Barker exhibition

(Im)material disarray exhibition

Why I'm making animist images

Wearable objects and curative things