Thinking about how to record and apply the reading, conversations, ideas and reflections on generosity over the past weeks.
It all seems a bit of a tangle at the moment, swimming around in my head, waiting for some order. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by this. There is so much ‘stuff’ which seems relevant I hardly know where to begin. Part of the problem is that I haven’t been documenting as I’ve been going along because my focus over the past weeks has been putting Issue 1 of my zine ‘Reciprocity’ together in time for Leeds Zine Fair last weekend.
I decided to publish my research via a zine series as well as this blog for several reasons. Zines form a key part of my practice, and I am using them much more these days to document work – as adhoc self-published sketchbooks – and finding this an interesting means to record my practice. Publishing in this (print) way also opens up new potential conversations with a wider range of people. People who frequent zine fairs or buy zines online are a diverse bunch with a wide cross section of social/political/personal/niche interests – zines, after all, can be and are about anything – and I’m interested in engaging, particularly with this Reciprocity project, with the widest ‘audience’ possible. I also like the idea of this research having a physical, and aesthetic manifestation, and the discipline of committing my findings to a regular publication, which I hope will find an interested readership.
The process of making Issue 1 in such a short space of time ( 2 weeks) has concentrated my research activities on formats/features which are vernacular to zines: interviews (which I carried out via email with artist Kate Murdoch and Papergirl Leeds founder Laura Jordan) personal stories (of giving and receiving, collected via open call from my Facebook and Twitter accounts) a contributed article (“Gift Economy: The Price Paid for Free Culture’ by artist Andy Abbott) quotes, as well as selected excerpts from this blog.
Leafing through the zine, after a week ,with a more detached view of the material, what speaks to me most is the ambivalences , complexities and uncertainties expressed about giving and exchange. This is particularly from the personal stories people have contributed – many of these anecdotes involve an unsatisfactory or negative experience of giving, in which gift is utilised or interpreted in a less than positive way. Some of these accounts are comic, some more unsettling. One account tells of a book token to a step brother as a revenge strategy (‘If I really wanted to f*** him up, it would have to be genuinely nice’) another of a mother ‘s consternation on given a vacuum cleaner for Christmas by her uncomprehending husband.
These kind of ambivalences fascinate me. Lewis Hyde in ‘The Gift’ – (a key text for me in the last weeks) talks about giving and gift as a means of achieving personal change and spiritual/social cohesion;
‘it is when someone’s gifts stir us that we are brought close, and what moves us, beyond the gift itself, is the promise (or the fact) of transformation, friendship, and love’
While I am uplifted and inspired by Hyde’s gift utopias, I also am attracted to the doubts and the questions around the realities of generosity, particularly as a cultural statement/ art practice. Reading ‘What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art’ (Edited Ted Purves, SUNY, 2005) has illuminated many contemporary generosity projects and discussions around them.
This week I hope to sort and sift through the muddle of generosity material in my head and begin to make some kind of sense of it by unravelling it here. Linearity is unlikely!
Meanwhile I’m very interested in hearing about where generosity/exchange/reciprocity fits into the experiences practices of other artists – and I would welcome your comments!
More information about, and to purchase Issue 1 of ‘Reciprocity’ zine here http://jeanmcewan.com/2012/11/05/reciprocity-1/
