Object Analysis of the 'Master' - A Humble Acoustic Guitar
It is sometime in 1990 in the remote mountains of India. My uncle walks into a primitive music shop and buys an acoustic guitar for a price in rupees that roughly equates to £13; the guitar would soon be dubbed the ‘Master’ from the black handwriting label printed on the soundboard of the instrument. The Master was one of many instruments in the shop, which was filled with dozens of sitars and other guitars; the possibilities of the stories and travels that these other instruments experienced are endless.
We can find an unusual analogy for examining these musical objects in the work of the French artist Fernand Léger. Léger was known for a painting technique called ‘Tubism’ whereby he ‘isolated elements of the image and fragmented it to show different viewpoints’[1]. More significantly Léger is quoted by thing theorist, Bill Brown, as explaining ‘when you isolat[e] a thing… you give it personality’[2]. With these thoughts in mind, we can view the Master as one element in the larger picture that is the music shop, an object with a personality that comes in its striking physical appearance and affiliations with both Western and Eastern culture. Though it was purchased by a Western individual, the Master is not branded or mass-produced as it may have been had it lived its life in the consumerist Western world; it is undeniably a unique object.
Though the Master inevitably gained sentimental value as it travelled across the world with my uncle, its status as an Eastern object instils in it a sense of humanist value too, as Arjun Appadurai explains: ‘things in India never lose some of the magic of their human makers, owners, or handlers’[3]. Here we see a portrayal of the importance of human-object relationships, and how a kind of cultural magic ties humans to the objects that they hold dear. So despite my uncle’s growing attachment to the guitar over time, it is intriguing to consider that the Master already possessed sentimental value in its Indian heritage.
Returning to the idea of the Master being a unique non-branded instrument links us to some further comments from Appadurai, as he explains that Indian ‘objects are not yet seen primarily as material repositories of monetary or exchange value’[4], in other words they have yet to become commodified and that India is lacking a culture of consumerism and capitalism that is so established in the West. This is certainly very true when we consider the purpose of the Master. My uncle learned to play guitar as he travelled across Asia, with a budding obsession for the Haight-Ashbury music scene of the 1960s, the birthplace of a new left-wing hippie culture. Therefore the Master can be seen as a political object with a musical voice that speaks in similar terms to its anti-consumerist origins.
However, the most distinct feature of the instrument is that it is decorated with stickers, so many that almost the entire body of the instrument is covered with all sorts of images, logos and advertisements. In opposition to Appadurai’s comments, this becomes perfect symbolism for the suffocating nature of Western consumerism. The Master features advertisement stickers: one advertises Harold Stern’s rock ’n’ roll radio show, another a brand of Scotch whisky, two more the Italian World Cup of 1990, and another three stickers advertise the tyre company Michelin through depictions of the famous ‘Michelin man’ logo. Other stickers are warning signs: one that presumably came from Australia warns of ‘kangaroos next 25km’, another one reads ‘no smoking’ and depicts a nude woman wearing heels and a cowboy hat curling herself round a cigarette. The erotic nature of this sticker corroborates Edmund de Waal’s idea that ‘erotic objets complemented other Western objects tor male pleasure’[5], turning our eyes towards a sexual dimension of Western consumerism.
Quite contrasted to this, many stickers on the instrument are reflective of Eastern culture and religion that oppose the Western debauchery depicted in the sticker of the nude woman. Two stickers are Nepalese depictions of Buddha and one more is labelled ‘Kathmandu kingdom’, another sticker from Tibet is of the Dalai Lama. But perhaps the most striking is the large Chinese dragon which adorns the back of the guitar. The wide range of stickers that we see decorate the Master signify a blending of world culture, and an insight into Western and Eastern ideas of image and society.
We have seen how the Master can both be seen as consumerist in its history and advertisement stickers, yet quite the opposite in its origins as a unique instrument from a remote India, far removed from a consumerist economy. The instrument is therefore is ingrained with an Eastern heritage, despite having gathered deep sentimental value for a Western owner and a musical voice indicative of the Western politics of the hippie movement.
About five years ago, the guitar was passed down to me from my uncle, and hence became a family heirloom. And now, this fascinating musical instrument will continue its experience of the world in the hands of the next generation.
Citations:
[1] ‘Five things to know about Fernand Léger’, Tate, accessed November 6, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/fernand-leger-1488/five-things-know-about-fernand-leger
[2] Quoted in Bill Brown, ‘Introduction: The Idea of Things and the Ideas In Them’ in A Sense of Things : the Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8.
[3] Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Thing Itself’ Public Culture 18, no.1 (Duke University Press, January 2006): 17.
[4] Ibid, 18.
[5] Edmund de Waal, ‘A box of children’s sweets’ in The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (London: Vintage, 2010), 60.
