University College London (Until 10 April 2020)
QUITTING your job? Then do remember to clear out your locker. One former employee of University College London left a bottle of home-made plum brandy in a drawer. The macerated plum was eventually discovered, mulled over (sorry), misidentified as a testicle (species unknown) and added to the university’s collection.
It is this selection of paintings, prints, objects and medical exhibits that provides the items for Flop, taking place in UCL’s tiny Octagon gallery. This isn’t so much an exhibition as a series of provocations. A notice by the last case asks us to share our failures on a postcard “so we can all start learning from each other’s mistakes”.
What is a failure? Do they exist outside human judgement? A favourite undergraduate philosophy question is “can animals have accidents?”. People certainly can: one of the more gruesome exhibits is a human heart, fatally punctured by a sword swallower’s blade.
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How we define failure depends on changing needs and circumstances.
There was a time, not very long ago, when the plethora of human languages seemed indicative of some deep, historical failure to establish amity across our species. There is a fascinating page on display from an essay by the 17th-century clergyman John Wilkins, whose Royal Society project attempted to establish an analytical language that would let people communicate despite not sharing the same spoken language. It foundered because the Royal Society couldn’t agree how many essential concepts existed in the world.
Now that we have developed artificially intelligent agents capable of translating spoken speech in real time, we find failure in the reduction of linguistic diversity. We bemoan lost languages (3000 have perished since 1900) and mourn the cultural deficit left.
Can objects fail? Only in the sense that they fail to perform an expected action. Silly Putty, a perennially popular toy, was the result of a failed attempt to produce synthetic rubber during the second world war.
If these examples of failure feel a bit tenuous, well, that is the point Flop wants to make: what is interesting is how we deal with failures, not how we define them. As the introductory material explains: “Perhaps contrasting failure with success is the real problem. If every activity has to end in either one or the other, it denies the nuanced and messy complexities of life.”
