Some thinking out loud for the potential of doing a give away of recent text work ‘Recipe For Reciprocity’ at the private view of Inhospitable exhibition in Leeds this weekend, which I have work in. This is the Leeds ‘leg’ of the exhibition which was shown originally as part of Leeds Independent Biennial last month (http://eaststreetarts.org.uk/whats-on/inhospitable…)
I got touch with Bruce Davies the curator last week to suggest doing a give away as part of the exhibition events as I want to do some practice based work around generosity and this seemed like a good opportunity to try/test some ideas out.
The text piece is a riff (with a firm nod to Blast) on ideas I have been processing around generosity: double bind, utopias, power, hierarchies.
My thought was a double sided A5 print, black text on white. Double sided to highlight the ‘double bind’ aspect of the work and to communicate the difficulties around generosity as a cultural statement. I wanted to communicate an opposition, a frustration within the presentation.
I think the piece works well in this format. The problem is that recent reading and reflections ( especially What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art’) are bringing up doubts about doing a generosity act of a print giveaway within an art event context.
I need to make a decision on this today as Bruce has suggested the exhibition opening this Saturday for doing it, and I need to let him know and also arrange some printing if I decide to go ahead.
So here goes, trying to articulate these doubts:
I interviewed Laura Jordan founder of Papergirl Leeds for Issue 1 of my zine ‘Reciprocity’ recently, and have been struck by one of her answers in the context of my rationale for this giveaway experiment:
JM: How have people responded to being given free art? Any particular stories which stand out?
LJ: It can be a little hit and miss when we give out the artwork, as particularly in Leeds, there’s a lot of flyering and advertising. There’s an instant feeling that we are trying to sell something or give away club posters and so on…. there are still people that pretend they don’t see us and it is disheartening when it’s a genuine gesture of generosity and there is no catch, but it says a lot about the world we live in; kindness and the word ‘free’ is seen with an air of suspicion.
Laura’s experience alerts me to the fact that people are blasé about being handed printed material. It happens every day – in the street, in shopping centres, maybe even in museum/gallery spaces. There is a high chance that doing a generosity action at the exhibition preview, people will think its explanatory information about the show, or else a promotional literature. I think however well the piece might work conceptually as a double sided A5 print, because of its size, there is the difficultly of people thinking it is a flyer /leaflet/publicity material and thus the potential for it being not valued, discarded.
A Lewis Hyde quote
“The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.. the disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered”
The problem is, the blurring of symbolic (gift) culture with the market world, means that an apparent ‘gift’ of a free art print can be easily misread for promotional material, and people will be ‘not bothered’.
“Fixed utopias and free-society experiments are susceptible either to attack or incorporation by the larger, spectacular society’
(‘What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art’)
So I need to consider:
– Do I need to make sure people know it’s a gift?
– How to do this? Present the work as a numbered, editioned print? Packaged as an art object? Do I really want to do this?
– Why?
And finally and maybe most key:
– What if people don’t really want it?
