David Ekerdt - Downsizing: Confronting Our Possessions in Later Life

C lare Twomey is a British ceramics artist whose exhibits invite members of the public to interact with her work. One such exhibit, titled Forever, was displayed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, my hometown, in 20102011. The artist had earlier visited the museum to view a famous antique pottery collection consisting of 1,345 items that the museum is required to keep in trust and intact forever. The collection gave her an idea.

Twomey selected one item in the collection, a two-handled cup dating to 1720, and had it reproduced 1,345 times. She created an installation at the museum in which the cups were placed in rows on long tables, with numbers beside them. Museum patrons were invited to view the identical cups, select one that they would like to own, and write down the number of that cup to submit in a weekly drawing. Through these drawings, the cups were gradually assigned to people. The exhibit was extremely popular.

If you were assigned a cup, you were notified, and your name was put beside it. You were required to sign a deed in which you pledged to care for the cup, value it, and display it forever, just like the pottery in the museums collection. The entire encounter among artist, objects, and the public was, according to Clare Twomeys website, meant to explore ideas of permanence, responsibility, memory, desirability, and value.

At the time of Forever, I had been conducting research on older people, possessions, and downsizing for several years. This exhibition encapsulated the problem: people think that they must keep certain things forever. The consumption of mass-produced goods is an astonishing phenomenon. Fifty identical sets of fine china came out of some factory one day. One set came to be owned by my grandmother, and one set came to be owned by your grandmother, and each grandmother took the china home and made it hers. Today we can never separate the china from the family because it was hers, and our familys set is not at all the same as the set that your family has.

I wanted to win one of the museums cups and smash it on a YouTube video: Take that, Clare Twomey. Its only a cup! I kept submitting my name for a cup, but I never won. When distribution day came at end of the three-month exhibit, people came in to get their cups and sign the deed promising to care for the cup forever. Thirty of the cups were not claimed, so the exhibit went into a second round. People were now invited to write and submit a full formal museum label of the kind that could be displayed beside a cup. Among the hundreds of submissions, thirty label writers would be chosen to get a cup. So I wrote a label, and finally I got a cup.

To conclude this exhibit, the director of the museum and the artist herself each picked a contributed label to feature on the museums website. The directors pick for the label read in part:

This Cup is a reflection of my dedication of support to our museum and to the ideas of permanence, responsibility, memory, desirability and value as they relate to art and its preservation in our beautiful city. The Cup is displayed here in my home, enclosed in this dedicated cabinet shelf, as a daily reminder of my pledge from 2010, Forever.

Such sentiment was perfectly consistent with the stated intention for the exhibit: to highlight responsibility for the protection and conservation of objects. For her part, Clare Twomey selected my label. I had given the artwork a title and wrote, in part:

Not Forever. For a while. The title for this cup gently disputes the impossible promise of forever. Material goods such as ceramics can endure, but human frailty and mortality put a bound on the commitments of individual lives. For a while is all we can promise.

After I had argued with the entire premise of the exhibit, Clare Twomey picked my label. For this choice, I have to admire the artist, because she knows that I know that she knows exactly what she is up to. She is inducing 1,345 people to behave as though mass-produced goods are entirely special, personal, singular, and inalienable to them. And that is genius!

As for my cup, I do care for it. I display it in a glass case, with the label, because there is a heck of a good story to tell when anyone expresses any passing interest in my piece of salt-glazed stoneware.

This is a book about possessing things both cherished and ordinary. The possessing and the things themselves can be rolled into a termmaterial convoyin order to convey the idea that belongings accompany our lives across time. This book takes a special interest in the material convoy as it crests in size at midlife and its fate begins to become an issue for oneself and othersespecially in later life when, in relocating from larger to smaller quarters, getting rid of possessions becomes necessary. I report findings from research among older Americans who have recently relocated and divested themselves of possessions and among others who are aware that they may someday need to move. This research has taken two directions that diverge from most other approaches to the question of aging and possessions, which tend to concentrate on static and single things.

First, during this experiencepotential or actual relocation in later lifepossessions are metaphorically in motion, on their way to new places and to being viewed in new ways. When things reside or stay with people, when they are kept, they have meaning as part of a human-material bond. Taking things out of their accustomed places to move them creates what Nicky Gregson calls a gap in accommodation. In that gap the human-material bond is exposed to scrutiny. They prompt questions: Why do I have this or keep this? Should I continue to do so?