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The Materials, The Readymade, and The Counterfeit: Inauthenticity of Objects According to Ingold and Eco

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“The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” courtesy of The New Yorker.

Introduction

We tend to think of our objects as authored: whether they are made according to the drawing of a designer, the externalization of an artist’s emotions, or the disciplinary work of a scientist with a particle accelerator. Objects, as we have been studying, are a kind of media– the study of which is full of discussions around the auteur, authorship, and authorial intention versus audience perception. Both Tim Ingold and Umberto Eco question the assumption of authorship in object creation as a part of their scholarship. For Ingold, Chapter 2 of Making, “The materials of life”, sharply criticizes the hylomorphic model (aka, our understanding of objects as static forms born from a predestined image in the mind of a maker). For Eco, a semiotician, the idea of the counterfeit object relies on a complex ethical system for understanding what qualifies as a falsification. His understanding of objects in the essay “Untruths, Lies, Falsifications” (found in On the Shoulders of Giants), is that their authorship is fleeting and highly conditional. 

The Materials

At the beginning and the end of an object’s life cycle are materials. Ingold introduces a model in Making to help readers reframe their understanding of objects as final products, born from a design and static for all time. Instead, objects are mere “stoppage” points along a flow of materials, just as images are stoppage points along a flow of consciousness (20). The image and the object can correspond, Ingold says, but it is not one that determines the other. To illustrate this point, he gives us two salient examples of how objects transform from their presumed final state: one according to human intention, and the other according to natural forces.

“Householders might think of pots and pans as objects […] but for the dealer in scrap metal, they are lumps of material” (19). The process of regeneration and the value of objects and materials is here called into question. The notion of value in the object and its subsequent replications is also interesting to Eco, as I will explain later on. Human intention is seemingly both a force that informs an object’s creation, and also one that determines the object’s fraudulency. 

Secondly, Ingold provides an example of making as a process of growing and changing by describing the natural form-generating process: “The difference between a marble statue and a rock formation such as a stalagmite […] is not that one has been made and the other not. […O]nly this: that at some point in the formative history of this lump of marble, first a quarryman appeared on the scene who, with much force and with the assistance of hammers and wedges, wrested it from the bedrock, after which a sculptor set to work with a chisel in order, as he might put it, to release the form from the stone. But as every chip of the chisel contributes to the emergent form of the statue, so every drop of supersaturated solution from the roof of the cave contributes to the form of the stalagmite. When subsequently, the statue is worn down by rain, the form-generating process continues, but now without further human intervention” (21-22). 

The Readymade

The world of art and art history has taken major issue with this subject of form generation, in no way more obvious than in trying to define the “readymade object”. What happens when an artist takes something already composed from materials and puts it in a new context? Is this act of human intervention a form of making itself? To this question, Ingold might respond by asking an artist to describe their engagement with the materials in the work (in this case, the readymade object or objects, plus any other mediums used). “Even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials”, he says. “Time and again, scholars have written as though to have a design for a thing, you already have the thing itself. Some versions of conceptual art and architecture have taken this reasoning to such an extreme that the thing itself becomes superfluous. It is but a representation – a derivative copy – of the design that preceded it (Frascari 1991: 93). If everything about a form is prefigured in the design, then why bother to make it at all?” (22). If the evolution of the object only exists in the mind of an artist or a viewer, has anything really been made at all?

The idea of originals and copies is exactly where Umberto Eco’s work comes in to expand Ingold’s ideas and consider what our current normative understanding of creation/ authorship versus copying/ counterfeit comes from. His work is also especially relevant to the art world, where collector’s items, originals, and fakes are fetishized and contentious. In particular, the passing of replica paintings for their originals has had unimaginable monetary and emotional costs. 

The Counterfeit

What is a counterfeit? “The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circum-stances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical  circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun” (183-4). Here Eco starts his argument by assuming the innocence of the counterfeiter. What really gets our goat, he argues, is how a third party– which he nicknames the Identifier– evaluates the original versus the copy. “A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have the pertinent features prescribed in an abstract type. […] Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value”(185). 

This may sound like a simple argument that explains how historical or sentimental value attached to the “original” version of a particular object is reflected in its cultural and/or monetary value. However, Eco’s argument then digs in and questions the fidelity of original works with the following paragraph:

“Sometimes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful  restorations are carried  out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient  works  of  art  that  we  consider  originals  have  instead  been  transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a ‘white’ Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored. But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself”(186-7).

Here is where I believe Ingold and Eco to be taking two different approaches towards the same issue. Ingold would say that a Greek sculpture is undergoing a continual process of growth as time and the elements wear away its colourful paint. Meanwhile, Eco would say that the image in our heads of an “original Greek sculpture” actually corresponds to a counterfeited version. The only difference between counterfeit like this and fraudulent counterfeit, he suggests, may be owed to the human intention behind the act of creating a copy or altering an original. 

Conclusion

“What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed– in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone?” Eco asks innocently, breaking his unending flow of evidence and reference (187). His argument suggests to us that the image of the original is actually ascribed such importance culturally and societally, that no matter how much the materials of an object flow– whether they are renovated and mended, or reduced to ruins and rubble– the image remains fixed at its “stoppage point”. 

Ingold details how we work through and make meaning from materials, and yet Eco supports a theory that we work through and make meaning from images. When our conscious experiences as a society join around these common images, perhaps we understand one another better through a shared culture. Both Ingold and Eco can be “correct” in their dialectical understandings of the object and the image, but who will help us to understand Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, or photos animated with Snapchat AI? The questions of making, re-making, and counterfeiting– and what these processes might entail– feel equally if not more important to media studies today than discussing the death of the author. Their relevance to us both as to makers and consumers of media is exceptionally strong.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “8. Untruths, Lies, Falsifications”. On the Shoulders of Giants, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2019, pp. 170-195. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674242265-009

Ingold, Tim. “The Materials of Life.” Making, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 17–31, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/download/f3935efc-cf5e-4c85-ab70-2e61f46e8689/book/pdf 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown

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The Locket I Never Filled (Until Now): A Heart as Medium for Memory and Intimacy

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❦︎

Introduction


Growing up as an only child, I received a lot of speculation — usually in the form of little jokes — about my parents absolutely spoiling me. The logic being that, since my parents have only one child, all birthdays, Christmases, and even day-to-day gestures of giving were magnified, as they only had to make one child happy via gifts. Although my parents were generous with the gifts they gave me on the two major celebrations per year, they were, above all, thoughtful with their giving; every gift had to have deep emotional meaning and was usually small, in some form of metal. One of the first gifts that I can remember receiving from my parents was a small heart locket. It is silver, engraved with swirls and now slightly tarnished from years of wear. I have worn it since childhood, and initially, my parents gave it to me so I could place photos inside that represented the subjects that mattered to me deeply at the age of five. I always wanted to put my parents inside of it, but alas, I didn’t have a colour printer for the first nine years of my life, and after that point, I had simply just forgotten about it. For years, the locket sat empty around my neck, enduring the hot waters of many showers and the stinging cold of the winters it brought to the metal. Only recently have I filled it with photos of my partner and me. To me, my locket mediates both potential and presence-in-absence. Even when empty, it carried cultural meaning and expectation; when filled, it enacted intimacy, rendering it a rich example of media theory around hypomnesia, anamnesis, and image as paradox.

Description

Describing my evocative object is fairly simple: if one pictures a heart locket in their mind, there is a high chance that the conjured image will resemble my locket. I wear a thick, 15-inch chain, which has replaced the thin, 20-inch chains that came before and broke due to excessive wear. On the chain sits the pendant itself, which is round and heart-shaped, meant to carry images close to the heart, quite literally. Despite the locket being empty for fourteen years, the absence of the photos did not erase the meaning of the locket for me, as the shell of the pendant reminded me of what is missing, and what is yet to come. As I have recently filled my locket with two images of my partner and me, the locket now mediates and embodies intimacy, love, and continuity.

Mediation

When empty, my heart locket mediated potential and expectation, as it was quite literally an object “waiting” for memory, in the form of special images. In terms of cultural and historical significance, heart lockets have been “associated with love, affection, and emotional connection” (Locket Sisters). Lockets bloomed in popularity as early as the Victorian era, in which lovers would store photos, letters, and even locks of hair from their loved ones — even when a pendant is empty, it stages that possibility of being filled. When filled with sentimental items, most commonly images, the heart locket mediates presence-in-absence: in my case, the photos of my partner stand in for him when apart. The heart locket creates intimacy through selection and scarcity, as the two images that are selected to reside inside the pendant are special and limited in quantity. Furthermore, the ritual of opening and closing the pendant’s hinge is a tactile mediation of memory itself. Empty or filled, the locket is never neutral. Rather, the shift demonstrates that this object and its mediation are dynamic and flexible, never fixed.

Theory

Upon thinking of which object of mine I would like to write about as an evocative object, my heart locket came to mind because of its ties to the theories and discussions we have engaged with in class. In Critical Terms for Media Studies chapter 05 “Memory”, Bernard Stiegler writes about hypomnesis, as the technical and externalized forms of memory, such as photography serving as memory externalizations, and anamnesis, “the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence” (Oxford). The former correlates to the locket when it held no photos, as it was already a technical support of memory. Its very design, with the hinge, cavity, and chain, indicates its intended use, of holding images of ones near and dear to your heart. When I wore my necklace as a child, I was very much aware of what it should contain — this cultural script is a form of hypomnesis as the object outsources memory before it is even filled. Its design and cultural script reminded me of the relationships I may one day want to preserve and honour with my pendant. When I finally placed photos of my partner inside, the locket became a coupling of hypomnesis and anamnesis: the images function as external memory supports, but only matter because they call forth embodied recollections each time I open it. In Stiegler’s terms, the locket demonstrates how technical memory and lived memory are inseparable in mediation (Memory 77).
In chapter 03 “Image”, W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images are always paradoxical — they are both present and absent, here and not-here (Image 35-36). My heart locket demonstrates this paradox in both ways: when it was empty, the absence of images was still meaningful as it reminded me of what should be there, consequently staging the absence as potential presence. Once filled, the photos embody the paradox even more clearly. My partner’s face is materially here in the locket, but he is also not here — only represented. Each time I open it, I experience both recognition and loss, the double-moment Mitchell describes where an image appears as both a physical object and a ghostly apparition (Image 39).

Conclusion

As a mediator, a heart locket is certainly dynamic, as they do not necessarily have to be “used” in the intended manner to mediate meaning. Connecting my evocative object to Stiegler’s theories of memory’s exteriorization and Mitchell’s detailing of image’s paradoxical nature reminded me that mediation is not solely about digital technologies — even small analog objects shape memory, intimacy, and identity. This is something that was also revealed to me in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. However, connecting these theories to an object that I consider mundane and wear every day, is even more revealing, as it suggests that mediation includes both what is present and what is possible.

Works Cited

“Locket Sisters.” Locket Sisters, 2020, thelocketsisters.com/locket-stories/the-meaning-behind-heart-lockets-a-symbol-of-love-connection-and-cherished-memories/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 64–87.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “Image.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 35–38. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025

“Anamnesis.” Oxford Languages, Google, 2025, https://www.google.com/search?q=anamnesis+definition. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.