Why did Meret Oppenheim twice sketch a green cord on the body?
Why did she draw these in 1936-37, just before her “crisis”?
Did she ever make one?
Did she wear one?
Why did she keep the sketch and put it in her album? [i]
Why an object so simple?
What does it mean?
Restriction and restraint?
A reminder?
A lead to something?
A forensics test to see if there is any life left?
Or is it a sign of strength and survival?
Could it be?
Could it ever make things better?
Tie us together?
So we don’t drown?
So in death we might be found?
Or it is for me?
A reminder to be unrestrained.
To avoid my own “crisis”.
A confirmation that I am still alive.
[i] Lisa Wenger and Martina Corgnati (Eds.), Meret Oppenheim -My Album. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2022 [1958]. Facsimile and English translation of her original album, The Album from Childhood until 1943; Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Meret Oppenheim: Book of Ideas; Early Drawings and Sketches for Fashions, Jewelry, and Designs, (Bern: Verlag Gachnang Springer, 1996).
Thirty years ago, Gabriel Orozco placed an empty shoe box on a gallery floor – a space to hold ideas within an impersonal space - and called it art. The public kicked it, not knowing it was supposed to be art. The art world was skeptical, but accepted it as art.
Artist's body, blue shirt, silver brooch
Newman said of his zips: “My work, in terms of social impact, suggests the possibility of an open society, of an open world and not of a closed institutional one.” This is what jewelry does. It's not locked away or part of the closed institutions of the art world – but out, open in the world, with all of the freedom and lack of control this entails.
