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Heidi Overhill: Museum of Me

“A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
—George Carlin, comedian

We live in a time when reality television offers up a scenario in which a household organizer with an M.A. in psychology arrives at your house with hunky carpenters to help hapless families sort and throw out their messy possessions. The art historian George Kubler has pointed out that while the past can only be experienced as loss, it comes to us in the form of an accumulation of artifacts: the “stuff” that is the extension of our selves. A recent entry in the well-rummaged field of the relationship of museum objects to stuff is Heidi Overhill’s Museum of Me, or MoMe. Her project is to inventory everything in her house using museum protocols. An industrial designer by training, she is attentive to the ways we use and store objects, and to the problems they cause. In her own house she has found more than 100,000 items. Drawing on her design background, she observes that the organization of a house is actually a “scenario design” in which everything connotes an activity. Buying a house, then, is “the ritual acquisition of potential experience.”

Overhill’s first step was to find an appropriate classification system. She discovered that conventional museum and archival accession systems make it impossible to actually find things in a domestic environment. She also thought about the data that show that men do far less domestic work than women, and she hypothesizes that part of this has to do with “categorization problems”—men simply haven’t memorized the “hidden categories” of domestic arrangements. She developed an engineering-style numbering code for tracking things in the house, then yoked it to a revised version of Robert G. Chenhall’s System for Classifying Man-Made Objects—a rigid methodology used by the Smithsonian Institution. She also brings into play the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the 18th-century Linnaean system. This makes for some strange categorical bedfellows: inventory sheets for the family “Canidae” (dogs), of the order of carnivores, include a plush puppy from Santa, a Wedgwood vase bearing a hunting scene, a VHS tape of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, Lassie Come Home and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.

The humour running through this whole project is inseparable from its melancholy. Over each object looms the possibility of its being thrown away—in museum terms, “deaccessioned.” The inventory forms point to the ways objects trap us, enmeshed as they are with evolving relationships, changes in taste, guilt and sentiment. For example, there’s the garish painted-plaster unicorn head that was a gift from a neighbour to Overhill’s eight-year-old daughter, who didn’t want the item in her room. This is the inconvenience of human networks, which override any logic of location (“I can’t find a place to put it”) and potential usefulness. The unicorn head raises collateral questions of how to be neighbourly and how neighbourly to be, of personal taste as a marker of class and of community.

The first room of MoMe, exhibited at the University of Waterloo last year, was a modernist white cube containing only white objects, including a plastic laundry basket with a broken handle, a smoke detector and bathroom scales. As the acronym MoMe suggests, this project deflates the modernist ideals represented by great cultural arbiters such as New York’s MOMA: minimalist whiteness, the notarial documentation characteristic of conceptual art and the pristine machine aesthetic of industrial design. Overhill restores a human factor to objects in use: while the inventory record for the bathroom scales is impressively neutral (“Nomenclature Category 5. T&E [Tools and Equipment] for Science and Tech. Weights and Measures T&E. Scale, bathroom.”), we are told that the item was purchased when Overhill’s husband became interested in following a healthy diet, and the condition report notes a “slight scuffi ng from foot marks.”

A key word in MoMe is “me.” It is what is known in linguistics as a “shifter” term (like “you” or “this” or “I”); that is, a word that makes us look out into the world to make sense of who or what the word actually refers to. The “me” of MoMe points to Heidi Overhill, but also to anybody called “me.” With that word, the linguistic and philosophical dilemma of being both inside and outside a system comes up against the popular culture of Generation Me that permeates advertising and reality, lifestyle and decorating television. An entire history of philosophical analysis of “I” is converted to the stuff accumulated for the gratification of “me,” but that “I” can’t entirely figure out, get to work properly or organize the accumulation. The meanings of things in use are many, and often hidden.

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