SALE (of 'A sale')
PS120
Potsdamer straße 120, Berlin
March, 2019
SALE is a two part performance. Originally performed at Brussels Art Week, 2018.
"SALE" is the performance "A Sale" a critique of art as commerce on SALE as the 'original' performance never sold.
The work is a direct comment and critique of commercial fine art fairs and the commercialisation of artists themselves.
The monologue that is delivered and the performative actions and gestures performed reflects the various first person personas
as well as materials that are protagonists in the sale of artwork and in the scene in which the commerce of art takes place.
'A Sale' is the first (pseudo-)commercial artwork I have produced as I am a non-commercial artist. The concept of the performance is a pyramid scheme, an artwork as by-product of commercial circumstances.
You could purchase the concept of the live performance, not the art itself, thus a sale of "A Sale" would produce a repetition of the performance "A Sale", leading to an endless loop of production of
performance, resulting in an endless critique of the sale of performance.
I explore "the economies of performance” through "the performance of economies”.
The monologue is performed through a series of acts.
Each act begins with myself graffitiing the rubric of the act on the wall of the gallery.
A monologue is delivered and the performance moves around the gallery, the audience follows.
Through the acts, performative gestures and actions are performed,
the sculptural bodily shapes represents the bending-over-backwards gestures which we,
artists are forced to perform in a defunkt economy of presensence of persona, with which one's stock rises and falls.
I was selling a basic category, the experience generated material produced by experience generated matter.
I was the item.
I was both the instrument and the environment.
I am still the indefinite article as indisputable presence; a product as the result of a process.
The process was the, at best, half-heard critique.
I went to Brussels to facilitate a particular experience. The particular experience as an ultimate value, acting as promotional tool.
I was the synthesised by-product of commercial circumstances. As a temporary creation, I was an already outdated information artefact.
As my primary purpose, as participant, I performed the sales pitch of the sale of a performance. This work remains unsold.
Now, I am the provider of a second-hand synopsis. The summing up of value, reduced to half price.
How do I determine the worth of what I do? I am active at work as the experience provider.
But what I wanted to say can never be as important as the circumstances that the I, I, singular, experience here.
"Your impotent and ineffective disposition of disregard for the promotional purpose of persona curbs the prospects of having a profitable event."
What sells is not the experience but the experience of the self, through the eyes of others.
Not the knowing of the work but knowing work is the experience of being an extremely high-value viewer.
The visitor desire first-person experiences with other high-value viewers and I desire the experience of valuedness.
But in the current logic of experiencing things, ethics at odds with culture seem futile as intrinsic value.
"Our gesture of generosity comes with expectations of a return of investment, by the capacity of drawing a crowd.
This is a parallel act.
Can you sense this scent? The almost non-perfume? I am a free sample!
The consequential by-product, the unintended but inevitable secondary result. Half off.
I am the representative body. Is it the I or is it the body?
If I perspire from commercial activity it is with the fragrance of this instant. This very intimate instant.
The artist that I represent as the I, is the use-value of this work, this hour is indistinguishable from that work, from life, from life's work.
This ritual, socially rendered, culturally reproduced is a convention, a routine, the habitually conservative.
She is the contorted self. The I, singular, multiplied in shapes, where shifts in tactics and first-person perspectives present her as both the I and the body.
I smile strike even though I am part of no union, calculating the considered worth of my moderation.
I repress replying when I read -
“How many Instagram followers do you have?”
ACT 2 / Bloated ambition
I am the potentially perpetual income, relaxing in the current currency.
I am the so-far unknown cost.
I am the exchange rate of work for work, a labour that is a rarity. I will climb as a finite stock, as prestige on an aspirational index. I am the obscure and the unlikely owned in a market of pedestrian products.
I am an executive toy.
A perpetual promotional tool.
This piece is hard. As it is not a piece.
A piece is a something completed, fixed and consequently dead. The stasis of forms.
I am the soft launch, the limited. I'll unfold as a purchase signalling the aspirational self. I will exhaust the single narrative with rapid complexity, my vast coherent incoherence as antidote to the handheld object.
I am not the I, I, singular, I am the 'I' opposing the neutral experience. I introduce the materially non-existing; base-notes heavy with richness of unbridled independence.
As a figure fixed within a ceremony of fancy fascinations, I am the cult of value and rarity. I am the established taste!
Initiated into the style of society, with material blessings, I am a sparsely decorated private-property; the air refreshed! I am then, could be; a transparency, a carefully considered corruption, the desired discreet.
The fabrication of fetish.
I reflect the raw material of corruptibility.
This, then, is the it of it:It is the artful representation of the marginal I.
It is the imminent desire, desired with the intensity of presence. It is the unique value, the one off, without equivalence.
It is the body just underneath.
It is expectation.
It is the sweet and lacerating being of beings. It is the private perversion.
It is the piece.
The work-stop, sex-stop, self-stop.
ACT 3 / The privilege of it
I am now the shown everything through the non-revealing of anything.
I am carefully woven heavy wool, actually, maybe a cashmere blend. I speak with the privilege of behaving as if I am the privilege of it. Appearing and disappearing with the promiscuity of bloated ambition, excessively wealthy and pampered.
I feel motivated by tax incentives, I am the central group who emphasise their connection to non-profit-making in order to assert legitimacy, the sacralisation of profit through the esteem of art. I give myself a long list of accolades of which I simultaneously nominate and award my act.
That this farce, can remain pending in a secular society where art is a known con, a fluctuating value, an exchange rate, determined, not by the work itself but the circumstances of work shown, known, owned.
I relish in inertia. Here I can safely place my bets until the day of impeachments of the proteges of profiteers.
Until then I gather, I hoard and store and stock my storage with my gambles because I am still the persuasion of merits. I abandon the principles for reasons of expedience. A cause for blind enthusiasm; A bind.
I am the superfluous elegance and the lucrative accumulation of trending tendencies. Manifesting as the presence of a super-essence, my being-the-someone-through-socialising is a lucrative act. The extravagant pay-off of a well-managed system.
Authenticity parasitism.
I am the sensational over the substantial.
This intimate act performed for a pseudo-public audience is a tete-a-tete and in this inside is where I passionately exploit the rituals of machinery. I am the violence, the capitalism of time, work-time, life-time, all time.
I am the triangle that expands our world and reduces it to nothing. A central organ in a complete vacuum.
An advertisement.
ACT 4 / €£$¥
I am the culture of owning things. A no return policy.
It is what is on SALE in the sale, 'A sale'
It is not the author or the actor but the infinite price of unbelievable presence. It is a unique value, the pricelessness, half off.
It is the original impossibility of virtuosity.
It is a slippery narrative but trust in its incomprehension.
A SALE is never the whole-truth. There is no truth in the presence of the presentation of truth. A product is the product of a production.
To be clear - I am selling something - something no one will buy - the work on SALE is the not yet purchased performance. You buy the concept of this performance not the content of this performance. I can't do maths but I'll practice economy at the point of a potential purchase.
And then there is the Artist's statement
ACT 5 / The economy of presence
Confused, angry but pleasing. One wants it both ways.
A presence endlessly oscillation between self-censoring and self-circulating, between invention and negativity. A steal within the economy of presence. Awake to the illusion that one could remain at a purifying distance from the marketable object-hood of self.
It might all seem like anti-market sentimentalism and this is after all the high-period of the manageably, moderately skeptical. The skill of appearing aloof whilst being an urgent object.
My self is codependent on the obligatory circuit of centrality.
I am trying to manoeuvre the booth, but - and - this is the self speaking who comes into the position of the object. Is the vitalism of this performance a superfluous elegance wasted on display?
Is my narrative a long and monotonous effort to advance the dialogue an illusion of interest? This is an exhausting labour to perform, it is a submission to an obsession with the opposition
to the idea of ideal forms. When the scripted turns into a spatial existence, there are immaterial barricades, pitfalls and trap doors in attempting pure performativity without products.
Sex is nothing much, intellect only reach as far as it has a familiar uncanny power within the already knowing, much like art is still claiming a special privilege and behaving as if it had one. We desire value and we value desire but we devalue desire as fetish, the non-trade of transactions.
I can't make a living like this.
Attempting to communicate with philistines posing as patrons. There is no pure form, there is the purely formal which imitates form. But its just the constant rearrangements of things. Things on sale.
A presentation - an artful presentation of the referential archive, rearranged so as to give the illusion of something new, but this is a lack of sensibility which gives the commercial mass the material values of the bourgeoisie culture of worthwhile things.
Attraction is referential, my proposal is the other voice. The parallel narrative. You are not the lack of sensibility in the life-world, I don't critique the players, we are the ones who possess the ability to be logos. The popular reception of works of high culture should arouse skepticisms but we gaze at the other with the gaze of the other. We role play cultural agents of an elite mass. Which is dense and dull and thuds when you beat upon it.
Like the hollow drum pounced on with conservative force.
It is almost the not-performing of a non-performance but then only-sometimes does dialect change a word you knew the meaning of, into the sound you don't recognise.
I don't only perform sometimes; I sometimes only perform.
I surrender myself to champagne, or it is usually not champagne, we just call it what it isn't as we call almost nothing by its name. A scent named heavy musk feels like sweet sickly vanilla so what weight does a name have? If I give myself a name, who calls me? What is the I in the pronoun of they? I give myself the name of richness of focus,
I am a statement piece of jewellery; I am the purely temporary of forms, I am with child in an entirely unsecured employment.
One day something so entirely something and then rearranged, as discreet arts that imitates that which pre-exists them and distract from the abstracted cross marketing of collective infatuation. Through the illusion of individualism you'll recognise my characteristics.
I can tell one black thick rim of acetate from another since materials is the mimicry of capital. Shades of dark blues and black, once a faux pas, now an appropriated code, a known accent for all that is dry clean only.
One way to sell something is to scandalise but this is a provocation which in a contemporary setting completely lacks meaning.
