Shop Pty Ltd 2012 Catalogue Essay by Chris Bennie

A few weeks ago this shop was empty. In the future it will likely stock designer goods or serve coffee. In the interim Propriety Limited is staging a social experiment that is neither shop nor exhibition. Rather, Shop Pty Ltd. functions as a depository to examine the value of consumables. You, and your body, play an important part in the project’s delivery. It is collaboration at the edge of art and commerce.


Propriety Limited have sourced consumables from local shops, and artworks by some of Brisbane’s finest artists. These ‘products’ are on display and have a newly defined value attached to them. Interestingly the currency of these items are plastic chips, called units. In order to ‘earn’ units, visitors to Shop Pty Ltd. can participate in everything from mental activities to physical labour, or even ‘sell’ a part of their body. This can be anything from hair, skin and nails, to theoretically, more visceral items such as saliva. Shop Pty Ltd. will then assign a unit value to your ‘deposit’ based on the scarcity of that particular deposit. To methodically examine the value of body commodities, Propriety Limited had intended to include items such as urine and the ejaculate of both females and males. A sense of abhorrence shared in both institutional and public realms has led to a compromise in the research that will be conducted at Shop Pty Ltd. and ultimately, the exclusion of such deposits.

By setting up commercial systems, a fake currency and bodily sales, Shop Pty Ltd. implicates consumers in the act of exchange. There is nothing new here. Our body is already devoted to industry and production in diverse and interesting ways: typically physical labour, intellectual property and/or prostitution. Time and labour are the essential elements of our relationship to the world; in particular our implicit exchange value. Here, our effort is measured in currency. Seen in this way, blood, sweat and tears represent more than mere toil but a spiritual union to the world through an intimate, considered and laborious exchange with it.

Shop Pty Ltd. thereby enacts a mimetic paradigm of a larger social system. It examines how value is constructed and applied through the act of exchange. By subscribing to a defined currency you are implicated in an act of Propriety that is determined by capitalist laws of supply and demand. When applied, these laws will value your body and mind, crediting you accordingly. With your credit you can purchase things from a range of consumables whose value can now tangibly be appreciated. The transformative propriety of your body, from its initial sale as a physical element, to tradable currency and then consumable item, enacts a symbolic mise-en-scène of capitalism.

At its heart Pty Ltd is interested in desire: the attraction and appeal that is at the core of the products, objects and artworks on display. Where Shop Pty Ltd. might function best however, is through the observation of transgressive modes of behaviour that a mimetic social environment might spawn. Investment, loans, bribery and theft along with donations and charity are creative and real by-products of exchange. Their deployment has the potential to disrupt conventionally accepted standards of behaviour or morals. As Shop Pty Ltd. unfolds during the course of it’s opening, the imaginative use and misuse of propriety will likely steer the experiment. Whether mild anarchy ensues or a collaborative and community oriented use of currency is developed is anybody’s guess.

Shop Pty Ltd

There comes a time in many art students' lives when they reflect upon where they are and what they have achieved and think to themselves, "What the fuck have I been doing?". It can be the incentive for a much needed shift into gear, and for some, it is the beginning of a prolific career.

I am not one of these. To my surprise, it wasn't guilt or fear that motivated me to swim outside the placental waters of QCA, but something I think is far more interesting. A simple conversation, an exchange of ideas is sometimes all it takes.

I have spent the past two months working with two of my classmates, developing an idea born out of our frustration with the dime a dozen art shows that the industry is rife with. You know the ones I mean, your inbox is flooded with invitations to them. My relationship with them is similar to my relationship with felafels. I used to like them, because they are cheap. They are extremely easy to find. As far as I know, they are good for me. But there's only so many felafel kebabs you can eat before you realise they are dry. There are boring. And no matter where you go, felafels are always the same.

I think I speak for both myself and my collaborators when I say I would rather eat a thousand felafels than put my name on a show where the expectation is passivity. We thought about this word, 'expectations'. We wanted to list all the expectations that someone who attends an art show might have, and then we listed the opposite. What we came up with was a show that did not have free alcohol, passive engagement was replaced with active participation, and 'participants' could stop pretending they were looking at art, because art, per se, was excluded from the show. It was hoped that the removal of these structures would create an environment where social relationships could be interpreted with the same level of interest and analytical rigour as more conventional forms of art have been in the past.

When looking for a model for human interaction, the social and economic principles of capitalism present a fascinating template for a new way of engaging with art. In the first place, it is a model with which almost every person on Earth is extensively familiar with. For some time it has been the topic of contentious discussion. It is important for me to recognise the evolution of thought that has led my collaborators and I to our specific area of investigation.

Since the end of the 19th century, the zeitgeist of critical thinking has been one of lofty ideals of brotherhood, whose proponents were of the catchcry that money is the root of all evil. Modernism ushered in the advent of communist and even anarchist thinking within the realm of art and by the end of the 1950s, performative and interactive work such as Fluxus and Happenings had almost succeeded in completely expelling art from the sphere of commodification. But it wasn't long before the hippie movement ran out of steam. Vietnam was over. The hippies had spent all their money on placards and suede tassels - they went back to mom and dad in upstate New York, Kusama went back to Japan. 

Less an umbrella of thought, and more an arsenal of everything from b-b guns to booby traps, postmodernism has long been the voice of subversion. There isn't a facet of human existence which has not in some way been consumed by postmodernism and, once excreted, is somehow sillier, less frightening, ultimately changed. By the end of the 1980s, the global economic boom had well and truly soaked up the snake oil of the communist utopian dream. The Wall had come down and artists like Koons were selling absurdity at prices well into the millions. Was he critiquing the capitalist tendency to apply (astronomically high) value arbitrarily? Is that a capitalist tendency? Perhaps it is an explicitly human one, bound up in centuries of social mores and codes of behaviour that have existed within, and even in spite of capitalist systems.

It is this question, which my collaborators and I hope to better understand. By applying a formula - that of supply and demand - and activating it in a controlled environment, we mean to infer whether money truly is the root of all evil, if we really are our brothers' keepers or if we are simply the benefactors of an evolutionary code that ensures our capacity to continually surpass our existence.