WOOLWORTHS

Dionea Rocha Watt

I In December 2008 Britain's best-loved store, Woolworths, went into administration. A nation mourned the loss of this high-street institution1 Loss comes from Old English los, destruction, and can indicate deprivation of a possession or the grief felt after losing something of value. Woolworths was the place for acquiring not so valuable possessions and by offering such plenty for so little, etched a place in the nations heart. The loss of something we love triggers mourning, which Sigmund Freud discussed in the essay Mourning and Melancholia,2 published in 1917. We mourn to deal with the loss. Freud explains this as the work of mourning, a process that involves an attempt to sever the attachment to the lost object and includes approaching representations of the lost object from many different positions. The work of mourning has both a temporal and a spatial dimension. It is a long and gradual process, performed over time and through memory. Memory is both a looking into the past from a position in the present and the place where things are remembered as representations. The psychoanalyst Darian Leader notes the importance in mourning of selecting representations for the construction of a symbolic space, where things can stand for loss and memory, where representations of the lost object are represented as representations. In the famous example, Marcel Prousts taste of a Madeleine dipped in tea or sight of a cracked paving-stone in Venice acted as conduits for overpowering sequences of feelings, ideas and emotions linked to a lost love.3 For so many, the attachment to Woolworths goes back to childhood, to memories of picnmix sweets, of toys and games. Sweet memories of entering a space where little pocket money was in inverse proportion to the excitement of their first shopping experience. For adults, the store was often the place to go for everyday items, the mundane that nevertheless offered the comfort of the familiar. Woolworths had become, in effect, a symbolic space, augmented by its demise. A place of nostalgia, of remembering and re-telling stories, even, or especially, for those who had not been there in years. In a strange
1 2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jnkg8 (last accessed 04 March 2010). Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, Trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1958, pp. 237-58. 3 Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, London: Penguin, 2008, p. 103.

way, it had already been lost. Or perhaps it was never there, as suggested by Susan Stewarts description of nostalgic narrative in her book On Longing: By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it can achieve only through narrative Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.4 Perhaps, the mourning was not so much for Woolworths, but for everything we have lost, including childhood itself. II Loss unfolds itself in time and space. It is sensed for what is no longer possessed, what is not seen, what is not present, what is absent. The recognition of loss is brought about by the registration of the absence of what once was there or what will not be there at some point. The imminent absence of Woolworths from the high street made its loss felt, and triggered the Reworthit! project a creative response to the loss of a store of material and immaterial goods; a source of cheap raw materials and objects, and of memories. Psychoanalysts have examined the link between loss and creativity. Hanna Segal, for example, develops Melanie Kleins ideas about symbols and writes that loss gives rise to symbol formation: a creative work involving the pain and the whole work of mourning. If psychic reality is experienced and differentiated from external reality, the symbol is differentiated from the object; it is felt to be created by the self and can be freely used by the self.5 The artists taking part in this project selected objects from the dwindling stock of their local Woolworths and transformed them into symbols of memory and loss, and of the possibility of renewal. It is interesting to note that the commonly held notion that using found objects gives them a new lease of life implies, in a veiled way, that they are already dead. If the work of mourning necessitates a second killing, a symbolic laying to rest,6 perhaps using found objects is a kind of killing. A killing of the dead.
4

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993, p.23. 5 HannaSegal,APsychoanalyticContributiontoAesthetics,InternationalJournalof Psychoanalysis,1952,quotedinSegal,Hanna,IntroductiontotheWorkofMelanieKlein,London: TheInstituteofPsychoanalysisandKarnacBooks,1988,p.76. 6 Darian Leader, op. cit., p. 117.

According to Freud, when the work of mourning has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object.7 This suggests that the ego will be free to form new attachments. By making work in response to the demise of Woolworths, the artists participating in Reworthit! have created new objects to be loved, sometimes tinged with melancholia, sometimes playful. Demonstrating, above all, the ability to create something out of loss.

Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 252.