A blue post-it note which reads: "Decoy models (military) provokes me. I want to consider the a particular notion of substitution, representation, and a tension between danger and safety but moreover a clever way of foxing an enemy into thinking that your force is superior to your actual strength. Object Retrieval has SO FAR ignored the possibility of any link (however tenuous) with The Military.

Here at Object Retrieval we have two toy cars - the one admitted to the Pathology Collection at Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1963, and another (£2-something from eBay). Neither toy is a decoy - each may be dangerous (the Lone Star [car 2] very likely has the same red lead paint as the Tootsietoy [car 1]). But the one stands in for the other inasmuch as they stand for different possibilities.

It has been suggested (in other words) that the lead paint on car 1 is a re-herring, not toxic enough to account for the boy's blood lead, and that the confiscation of the car a mere gesture towards the much larger task of removing lead-based products from the boy's home. In some sense, then, the car acts in the manner of a decoy. It has been suggested in conversation that this object, foregrounding the recent lead-toy recalls in China, might divert our attention from the yards and yards of lead piping, or the acres of lead paint that surely remain in our own homes (I think this is a spurious argument - although it is pleasant to entertain the possibililty that this project might do some actual direct and measurable good, sparking a debate into legislation, etc, but I am not convinced that this is its' job). In any case the 'decoy' comment begins to suggest an idea of substitution and representation that seems directly relevant to the process and outcomes of Object Retrieval. This notion of substitution is designed, in the case of military decoys, to mislead. I can think of two examples, the result of boyhood fascinations with Military history:

1. In the 18th and 19th centuries, various Amerian campaigns saw the use of "Quaker guns", felled tree trunks pained black and ranked in fake batteries to resemble canon. From a distance, and even with telescopes or binoculars, various commanders were fooled into taking extra caution. The Confederate Army, used the presence of Quaker guns to hide their withdrawal from Centreville, Virginia across the Rappahannock river, in 1862.

2. In World War I the British Forces made lightweight, full-size models of their Mark I tanks pulled into place by teams of horses.

NB: QUAKER GUN PICTURE FROM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker_Gun#Usage_during_the_American_Civil_War

TANK PICTURES FROM: www.oobject.com/8-inflatable-military-decoys/wwii-inflatable-decoy-tank/... AND en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank