Noam Toran and Onkar Kular The MacGuffin Library 2008 Text, Polymer Resin, Video
A term attributed to Hitchcock, the MacGuffin is a cinematic plot device, usually an object, that serves to set and keep the story in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance. Famous examples include the statue from The Maltese Falcon , the glowing suitcase from Kiss Me Deadly, the bottle of Uranium in Notorious, and the letters of transit in Casablanca .
Originally commissioned for the exhibition Wouldn’t it be Nice at the Somerset House in London (Sep 17 – Dec 18 08), The MacGuffin Library proposes the foundations for a library of MacGuffins, produced by authoring a series of sixteen film synopses and accompanying objects, addressing themes stemming from a disparate range of interests and inspirations: Re-enactments, unorthodox fantasies, Borges and Carver short stories, forgeries, urban myths, the defining of high and low brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory. The objects are made out of a black polymer resin using a rapid prototype machine. There is an essential, necessary subversion in this approach to production, as an advanced fabrication and manufacturing technology is juxtaposed with the imaginary through the creation of fictional objects for nonexistent films. Through the industrial process, detailing and materiality, the pieces produced sit in an unnatural space, challenging their status as art objects, being neither products, nor sculptures, nor props, but an amalgamation of all three.
The MacGuffin Library is currently exhibiting in the group show FACTORY at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bat Yam (May 25 – September 26).
