The Uncanniness of Commodities: Ryan Agnew

Commodities are uncanny. So often we think of them as easily understood objects, as trivial, when in fact they are very complex and strange..."abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." (Marx, Das Kapital)

Commodities are filled with the investments of our labor and design, becoming social things.

Marx takes this uncanny communion of objects even further with his ideas of Fetishism: “…the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities."

This framework of 'social objects' seems a worthy lens from where to view Ryan Agnew's work, Escalating Trousers, in our current exhibition, What Time is This Place.

Take the time to read (below) what Ryan has to say about this piece. Notice how easy it is to view these images as people traveling on the escalator ghost. Perhaps ghosts themselves. What happens when inanimate objects, pants, become the ghosts of people, the ghosts of soldiers and shoppers? How does this anthropomorphizing tie into the legacy of Lazarus and even the civil war? Can soldiers be commodities? If so they are humans that become objects that become uncannily human again.

What Ryan Agnew writes:
The American Civil War began ten years after Simon Lazarus opened a men's tailor shop on the dirt road that was High Street. At the end of the war, one of the first things soldiers wanted was to get out of their uniform. Each soldier went to Lazarus where he would be ushered into the basement to exchange his uniform for store clothes (leaving his uniform behind). One such customer entered the store with $400 in his uniform pocket. He received his new "duds" and left the store. A month later he returned, insisting that he had either lost his $400 or left it in his old clothes. Mr. Lazarus remembered the man. He took him down into the old clothes room and the man found everything except the trousers he had worn. Lazarus remembered then that when the man had changed clothes he threw his uniform trousers into the air, glad to be free of them. Looking up they saw the trousers caught on a nail in the ceiling. A hasty examination revealed $400 in the pocket. Time passed and the store continued as a family tradition. On Monday, August 17, 1909, the family opened a brand new six-story store on the northwest corner of High and Town Streets, just across the street from the old one. The new Lazarus featured the first department store escalator in the country. According to Charles Lazarus, however, "When the first escalator was installed, it evidently scared the daylights out of people. They had to take it out a year later." One Lazarus patron was so taken with the escalator, though, that he wrote a poem in its honor:

What's the crowd a pushin' and a shovin' over there?
Land! It's folks a ridin' up the escalator stair!
Ma's brought all the family in to take a little ride,
Cause they're simply goin' dippy
Bout that Escalator Glide!

This text is paraphrased from WOSU’s online archive of the Lazarus store,
at http://www.wosu.org/archive/lazarus/timeline.php.

Special thanks to Berry van Boekel, Jessica Brandl and Sergio Soave.