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.
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