fetish objects

The celebrity souvenir is the document of copresence, the embodiment of a mode of association that animates how we demonstrate authentic connection while simultaneously mediating our relationship with death. Memorials to a person inevitably come to objects of personal worth, objects that spent time on or around someone, more solid than they but slyly imprinted by their transient touch. We seek out objects of our heritage because they embody something that survives, that imprints our identity onto a linage stretching backwards and a future stretching indefinitely forward. The associations we make to specific people through objects derive from the power of being there in communication. We imagine that a more authentic connection comes as we approach each other physically, and owning Elvis’ hotel towels tell us that we have brought ourselves all the closer to some form of communication that defines intimacy. Not only are there less of the memento we seek, but they also signify something like a conversation with the king. Just as email or phones mediate an irreconcilable distance, the mass produced object implies a gap formed by the death of someone we with to memorialize: the objects don’t require the body of the idol and in fact hint at their death in their finitude. It implies a subtle contradiction between the need to embrace the finitude of one person, at one time in a unique connection produced by co-presence. Alongside this there is a need to exceed death by tying memory to a stable object, embodied in a photograph or similar fetish object.

Duncan