John Carney is an artist living and working in Manchester. Working across sculpture, performance, public interventions and digital media, his work investigates the materiality, agency, and ideology of objects and images, as a means of understanding the power that they hold over us. However. It is by viewing this agency as a sacred power, and by exploring the potentials of this affinity, that has led him most recently to study the phenomenon of fetishism. These interests have culminated, in a practice-led research project at Manchester School of Art titled ‘Concretizing God – Fetishsim, Dematerialization and the Social Construction of Objects’ which was completed in January 2020.
Fetishism describes a process by which ordinary objects are imbued with a power that is somehow inordinate, misplaced or inflated, resulting in our submitting to our own creations as if they were alien powers, or as anthropologist David Graeber describes, ‘falling down and worshiping that which we ourselves have made’.1 In this sense, fetishism describes an attempt to concretize the sacred and enshrine it in a material thing - a condition whereby the material and the immaterial becomes entangled. Under this condition, a fetish doesn’t merely represent a deity or other sacred power, but rather it embodies it – animated by the perception of the devotee. In this sense, fetishism constitutes a social theory of objects – a condition wherein the object is elevated to become a social agent in its own right. By exploring the affinity between art objects and sacred objects - or fetishes as per his line of enquiry - it is Carney’s objective to investigate the agency that these objects possess, how that agency is generated and how this might be harnessed within his practice.

However, the impetus to fetishize is not only limited to the various material cultures and practices within the belief systems of indigenous peoples, but rather its effects are evident - and well-documented – in our everyday entanglement with objects, from the potent agency of commodity products to the sentimental attachment we feel to our or our loved ones possessions. Carney’s practice is positioned around locating and investigating these everyday examples of fetishism, in order to draw attention to the universality of a sacred experience of the material world.

1Graeber, D. (2005). Fetishism as Social Creativity. Anthropological Theory, 5(4), p.412