RITUALS AND FUNCTIONS
Although jewelry is largely ornamental and aesthetic as we know it, it also has social, economic, magical and ritual functions. As a fetish object, amulets, talismans and charms (which can also take the form of crosses, rosaries and healing gewgaws) are used to ward off the evil eye. One cannot separate jewelry from the magical beliefs it carries and attracts, even if we want to dismiss these uses as esoteric or “primitive.” If you think about it, jewelry actually plays a part in the milestones of our ritualized lives — from birth to weddings to death. There are memories and meanings attached to special pieces that we acquire or that are given to us, materializing the important stages of life and sealing various relationships among members of society, from the religious and secular to the societal and familial.
In contrast to “magical” jewelry is “functional” jewelry, portable versions of a wide range of instruments for domestic and personal care or pleasure like the 18th c. chatelaines hung from the waist with perfume flasks, sewing kits and watches with keys; pendants with smelling salts during the Victorian era; and a Buccellati cocktail ring that opens its dome to reveal a clock. More recently, jewelry has come to adorn the gadgets we treat as extensions of our bodies like smartphones, headphones and smart watches. We imbue them with the very human desire for beautification. Other pieces like those of Dominic Elvin are created out of cyborg fantasies that use the human as project and the body as worksite.
The curator notes that jewelry today plays a role in the mutations and constant monitoring of our connected bodies: “As a technological accessory, it forges a new relationship as an active, almost embedded partner, augmenting the body and becoming a sign of its programmed obsolescence.”