1 object
explored for 7 days
24 hours a day
by a rolling team of researchers from the arts and sciences
Object Retrieval was a mass participation art project that took place from 15-21 October 2009 on a converted Routemaster bus in the main UCL (University College London) Quad on Gower Street, London. A single object from the UCL Pathology Collection was exhibited on the bus and explored by thousands of people from their own personal or professional perspective for 7 days, 24 hours a day. The response was extraordinary. Contributions ranged from the hyper-scientific to childhood memories via the Gospels, Jack Kerouac, Psychoanalysis and pretty much everything in between.
Object Retrieval had a simple premise: to uncover as much information as possible about one object from UCL’s Museums & Collections in the space of 7 days.
By inviting as many experts from as many subjects as we could muster as well as members of the general public to explore the object, we hoped to amass a huge, potentially limitless biography of the object. Contributions included scientific analyses of the object, personal anecdotes, drawings, anthropological accounts and many more types of information.
The selected object was a toy car that was central to a case of ‘lead poisoning in a child’ from 1963. The object was kept as a teaching aid by Great Ormond Street Hospital and is now part of the UCL Pathology Collection based at the Royal Free Hospital. In a sense it is not important what the object was, as we are confident that any object put under close scrutiny for a week would accrue a large and fascinating biography.
Object Retrieval sets out to explore 3 main ideas:
- the possibilities of interdisciplinary research in a 21st century university and beyond
- the challenges faced by museums to interpret objects in a constantly shifting society
- art as a means to allow people to stand outside of their own personal and professional bounds and take a fresh look at something they thought they already knew about
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