Leiden University Student Repository

Man, Irene de 2023

The Afterlife of Consumer Culture

Bachelor thesis | Kunstgeschiedenis (BA)

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Especially in our contemporary material culture with mass production and consumer culture playing big roles, a deceased loved one leaves behind many possessions. These possessions can range from...Show moreEspecially in our contemporary material culture with mass production and consumer culture playing big roles, a deceased loved one leaves behind many possessions. These possessions can range from their IKEA bedside table that cousin Maddie can put to good use in her new dorm room, to their last shopping lists scribbled down on a crumbled up, sticky note. Seemingly unimportant objects like these will be a red thread throughout this paper. Still-life paintings have the ability to invert seemingly unimportant objects. By putting the focus of the artwork on the material objects, these seemingly unimportant objects become important. Rachel Grobstein’s series Bedside Tables shines light on the often overlooked aspects of daily life exploring questions related to memory, routine and identity. In this consumer culture we have so many items around us and in our possession, that the importance of many of these is often forgotten. When they are -subconsciously- brought together by a person they can start to tell a story, the life story of an individual. Without the body being present in the artwork, it leaves just the story of a person, the memory of them. When we take a closer look at her work through the traditional Vanitas Tradition these artworks start to remind us of how irrelevant and unimportant these material objects are once we pass; we cannot take these with us anyway. Yet, as these material possessions might not be important for an individual once they pass, these possessions stay important to the people they leave behind, for their process of grief, for keeping their memory alive in this material world. It goes further than our physical world but represents this right through material objects from this very physical world. It is not about the physical presence of the body or corpse, but about the memory of the person. However, it is this memory that is represented through the material objects/possessions of the deceased person. The series Bedside Tables represents something outside of our physical world, but does so through the physical objects of our consumer culture. Can the contemporary work by Rachel Grobstein allow us to combine both the still-life Vanitas tradition and the theories surrounding death, memory and material culture? In this paper I argue that our contemporary consumer culture shines a new light on the well-known Vanitas tradition, focussing on the seemingly unimportant objects produced for consumer culture and their role in memory after death in a western society. At the beginning of this paper there will be an analysis of Rachel Grobstein’s series Bedside Tables as well as the traditional Vanitas tradition and how this tradition has been adapted in modern times through art movements like Pop Art. As a theoretical framework I will be using Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey’s Death, Memory and Material Culture (2001) and Jennifer Owen’s Distancing material effects to reconcile loss: Sorting memories and emotion in self-storage (2020), both of which will help me reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorialising. As I take a deeper look into death and consumer culture and the notion of grief through the theory of Owen and Hallam and Hockey.Show less