Oliver Payne and Nick Relph “Ash’s Stash”

Gavin Brown's Enterprise

poster for Oliver Payne and Nick Relph “Ash’s Stash”

This event has ended.

I heard something the other day about the comeback of the Nokia brick. Nothing has comebacks anymore, I thought to myself. Today, everything is always ‘on’ at once, simultaneously forever - we’ve simply run out of past. The Great American Text Message has already been written. That ship has sailed. We’ve plateaued. Cultural zeniths and nadirs act like positive and negative electrons whizzing about in the atoms that make us all up. Douglas Coupland calls it the Post Era-Era. The pendulum appears to have come to a complete stop but this illusion is caused by the pendulum moving between all possible points at once.

So how can people be selling Nokia 3310’s for $1500? They can’t be. Surely not?

The Nokia 3310 mobile phone is considered to be one of the best selling phones of all time, shifting 136 million units. According to Nokia’s press release from 2005:
If all the Nokia 3310/3330 phones sold were laid end-to-end, the line would stretch from Helsinki, Finland to Santiago, Chile – over 13,500 kilometers.
It’s a nice image.

A cursory search on eBay leads me to shed loads of 3310’s for about 20 quid each. That sounds about right.

Ash’s Stash was shown at Art Basel: Miami in 2007. I remember that year the fair had a ‘No Cameras’ policy. In the Seven years since, the world has embraced smartphones and Instagram. Sharing photos of stuff is at an all time high.

In 2014, Ash’s Stash looks the same as it did. It’s comprised of objects that are practically designed to live in storage. But maybe the way we view these sorts of objects has changed slightly. We have become completely accustomed to seeing other people’s stuff. And the stuff has caught up with us. The reissues outnumber the originals, giving birth to the ‘original reissue’. Cupboards become catwalks and possessions pose for the camera, waiting to be liked.

Scrolling through a strangers Instagram feed could quite easily create a feeling similar to strolling around Ash’s Stash - vintage trainers next to a dance music 12” followed by a glass of wine before an old Sony Walkman.

One of the pieces uses some shoes from 1997 and it resembles Darth Maul. He was the poster boy for the first ‘new’ Star Wars movie, which is now 15 years old (This forces me to realize that you could have been given a Gameboy on your first birthday and now be 25 years old. It would have been a $90 gift that would go for around 40 bucks today. If it still works, which of course, it will. So the Gameboy has depreciated in value at an average rate of about $2 per year).

But the shoes predate the film by 2 years so maybe Darth was inspired by the sneaker. I can imagine him being based on a shoe.

All this stuff takes a peculiar route to the landfill. From hip to walk and back. People are searching for things on eBay before they think to check if they are still being made. The vast majority of the contents of all thrift stores is ‘crap that was popular about Four or Five years ago’. Ed Hardy, Guitar Hero, Twilight. Nobody has any idea how to price the VHS tapes. Sometimes the landfill can’t hold it all down. Recently it regurgitated all those copies of the Atari E.T. videogame back into the world. We can’t stand mythologies and legends but we do love digging through our trash.

In his 2002 book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning The Next Fifty Years, Bruce Sterling wrote about the Motorola StarTAC cellphone as a Blobject overly concerned with its functionality. He saw it as a friendly, corner-less device that can do more than we could need. All the bells and whistles he calls ‘Function-as-Baroque’. Conversely, Its appeal today in the Post Era-Era comes from what it can’t do. It’s precisely its limited function that would serve as a ‘I don’t even own a TV’ sort or statement. And that 2-Pac had one. As it happens, the Motorolla StarTAC was re-released in 2010 in a limited color. Bright yellow.

Would the Nokia Brick belong in the stash? Maybe. Not because it would have been seen as a future collectors item, it was far too ubiquitous and functional for that. But more that it’s the sort of thing that just came along for the ride. Back then we just weren’t really used to the idea of throwing our old cell phones away.

Media

Schedule

from June 25, 2014 to August 01, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-06-25 from 18:00 to 20:00

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