Next to Nothing: On the Price of Nothing and the Value of Everything
(contniued)
The relationship between the strategies of art and display is also brought out in Charlotte A. Morgan’s works, in the context of physical structures and social processes that evolve over time. In particular, Not only the city #4, billboard support structures, a photograph that depicts blank billboards next to a railway track, considers what a space represents when its function ceases. While the works were intended to create resonances with the first exhibition site in Leeds, the display of this work at SWG3 and the considerations of time and location take on new meaning. Similar to the photograph, SWG3 sits next to a railway track and uses an old customs warehouse for artist studios and the gallery. In light of an ongoing effort to redevelop the area, one is reminded of the way cultural production restructures spaces, while becoming a tool for larger societal and economic processes that emerge through concepts of decay and regeneration.
The notion of time within the context of knowledge acquisition and value is the subject of Harriet Bevan’s laborious effort to burn holes in each character of Harmsworth History of the World, a hardcover book published at the turn of the 20th century with beautiful illustrations and images to accompany descriptive historical accounts of geographical regions. The work seems to present a paradox, of seeking to undermine the value of the book as a means for knowledge acquisition. Yet, in the process, across the duration and painstaking labor of boring holes, what emerges is a compelling sense of dedication and commitment in the task at hand – values that have been submerged in a digital economy where knowledge can be easily searched for and rapidly consumed yet without a seeming end.
Bevan’s work is one which strives not just towards a critique of the complicit relationship between art and the economy, but also suggests how the qualities of art as a process and practice, is by itself an alternative to considering what value is and could function, outside a capitalistic order.
Another alternative is also envisioned in Alice Bradshaw’s University of Incidental Knowledge, a project devised to encourage learning through unexpected occurrences, accidents and improvisations. Though structured in the guise of a standard educational format with entry requirements and an application process for programs from a BA (Hons) in Cut ‘n’ Paste to an MPhil Mistakes, the project reveals the ironies present within education systems that seek to cultivate ingenuity and creativity yet create a regularized way of considering what art is and ways of producing art.
http://dailyserving.com/2011/11/next-to-nothing-on-the-price-of-nothing-and-the-value-of-everything/
