1975 – Everyday Adornment

Unexpected pleasures, chapter one by Deyan Sudjic:

Quote: “I remember being struck forcibly by the redefinition and deconstruction of jewellery back in the 1970s by an exhibition of Robert Smit. What Smit had done was called jewellery, but all that there was to see was a collection of photographs of people holding cigarette packets. You didn’t have to fold it into the sleeve of your tee shirt James Dean style to use a Marlboro pack as an item of adornment. He caught the way that we hold packs in one hand or both hands. He tracked the way that we put them down on tables. He looked at the colour, the shape and the way that we open the box, the way that we rotate it. He regarded these activities as, in themselves, an act of design”.

Everyday Adornment_1_1975

Everyday Adornment_2_1975

Everyday Adornment,

Robert Smit, 1975, Polaroid sx70 photograph.

Photo: Robert Smit

In the mid-1970s, Robert Smit made a series of Polaroid photographs of himself simply holding two cigarette packets against his body in various ways. Called Everyday Adornment, the results were an intriguing mixture of a performance work and the relationship of body to object. This suggested that any object could be jewellery if it was put forward as such, which was a radical way for a jeweller to work at the time.