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.
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