AESTHETICIZED

ECONOMIES AND ADMINISTRATED ART Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts by Elizabeth Flyntz Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo June, 2012

Thesis Committee: Tony Conrad, Professor in Media Study, SUNY Buffalo; Teri Rueb, Professor in Media Study, SUNY Buffalo; Jonathan Katz, Professor in Visual Studies, SUNY Buffalo Readers: Mark Shepard, Associate Professor in Media Study and Architecture, SUNY Buffalo. Gregory Sholette, Assistant Professor in Sculpture, Queens College, CUNY Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Tony Conrad for his continued help and support in this project. Thanks also to all participants in interviews and dialogues and my thesis committee. I am also grateful to Anna Scime for being my collaborator in this ongoing exploration of erotic economies, and to Aimee Buyea for introducing the SOUP franchise to Buffalo.

Abstract The seemingly disparate worlds of economics and generosity are meeting in new forms of art making and cultural production. These forms combine the alternative and resistant economic models of utopian communities with productive methods borrowed from recent network-based, relational, or social-performance art. This thesis looks at two representative collective cultural producers engaged in the creation of new economic structures. Chicagos InCUBATE eschews the non-profit model, and instead uses a democratic franchised voting model (Sunday Soup) to make micro-grants to a variety of local artists. New Yorks e-flux produced a currency-free network model (time/bank) to enable goods and services trading between art workers. These groups are discussed in terms of their relationship to a genealogy of conceptual art and immateriality, as well their connection to gift economies, internet culture, networks and administration. This inquiry is intended to provide insights and raise questions regarding intentions and outcomes of producing, promoting, and using emergent economic structures as both funding alternative and aesthetic practice. Keywords: Gift economy, value, internet-mediated distribution, emergent networks, alternative economies, administrated culture, time bank.

Contents Acknowledgements...2 Abstract..3 Introduction5

Chapter 1 Generosity and Culture: Subject and Object of the Market.7-25 Whither the Gift Economy? Is Art a Gift Economy? Intersections of Market & Generosity. Art as Market Irritant & Exchange Facilitator Chapter 2 Aestheticized Economies28 Shares & Bonds Online Soup Structures Visible Time Conclusion..43 Bibliography.....49 Appendix A: Illustrations54 Appendix B: Further Resources59 Appendix C: Erotic Economies...64

Unlike most other commodities traded on the market, art is very difficult to precisely price. The visible commodity function of artworks sold in galleries or speculated upon in the secondary auction market represents just the tip of the value iceberg. Beneath the leveling surface of the market - in which sale price is a reasonable indicator of persistent value with clear rules of return - is an enormous quantity of value-producing mechanisms that lend credence, labor, attention, education, and analysis to the functioning of the relatively small commercial fine art world. Often this beneath the surface activity takes the form of a gift economy, in which networks of individuals grant and ask favors, loan tools, and perform other services for others with whom they share strong or weak bonds of friendship or professional obligation. The first part of this paper discusses the concept of gift economies and examines how they relate both culture and the broader market. Many aspects of cultural production can be envisioned in terms of a gift economy precisely because of this marked market incommensurability or exceptionalism of art. Because art deals in fetish value, or auratic value, and meaning, rather than purely in exchange or use value, its value can never be entirely contained by the market economy. In particular, I discuss how new forms of immaterial, distributable, or relational artworks are particularly notorious for problematizing value. At the same time enhanced distribution and networking technologies, including crowdsourcing and internet-mediated barter, make novel methods of cultural value production possible within

Introduction

communities of artists. These methods may be used to sustain professional practice and fund the production of art objects or projects in the (increasing) absence of, and competition for, traditional structures of support. Concepts provided by contemporary cultural economist Russell Keat are particularly useful in describing the how value is perceived both from within a discipline and by the broader culture. The understanding of economics, whether of the gift or commodity variety, as system available for artistic investigation and interpretation is not purely a product of the recent fiscal situation in the US and Europe. Rather, this use of systems and networks as creative medium can be traced to art historical movements which elevated concept and process over product. I discuss the genealogy of a few of these associations, specifically conceptual art, whose advocation of immateriality and interest in systems theory, appears to be a major influence for contemporary artist groups engaged in the production of new forms of networked distribution and valuation. Given the considerations of gift economies and their relationship to media art production,

specifically new media art production as discussed in chapter 1, the following chapter discusses some representative alternative economic structures produced by artists. The answer to financial dilemmas presented by failure of traditional models of support has recently been to directly produce micro-economies, fundraising models, and mediated exchange systems that exist outside of the traditional supports of university, gallery, or non-profit model. While not entirely adherent to the structures of a traditional gift economy as Mauss described it, the network logic and bonding intent inherent in generosity is influential here. These structures purport to serve several purposes: providing a means of support, engaging and drawing together an existing community, and articulating the value that was already being produced, in order to form positive feedback for the community at large. While these goals are often met by the groups activities, I

argue that the networked economic structures themselves also form a new aesthetic practice that is not purely utilitarian. I chose the two groups that I discuss here (e-flux and InCUBATE) because each has been innovative in terms of developing and promoting a specific new system of valuation and exchange amongst a community of artists and cultural workers. InCUBATEs Sunday Soup model is now globally franchised, and e-fluxs time/bank is widely discussed and exhibited all over the world. Each of these groups is also representative of a specific type of resistance to existing art institutional structures. Both are distinctly oppositional to the contemporary non-profit funding model, and each is reliant on a media and technology literate network of participants whose utilization of the new systems is essential to their existence and efficacy. An analysis of the Time/Bank, a project of international artist and entrepreneurial group e- flux, which they describe as a platform where groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value1 is used as a template for a discussion of the mediated gift economy. Other examples of artist-produced alternative economies, such as the Sunday Soup fundraising program produced by Chicago-based collective InCUBATE are presented in order to suggest additional aesthetic motivations for production of, and participation in, these structures. While there is a long history of intentional parallel alternative economies as a method of protest or community building, there is very little discussion of these projects as form. In drawing parallels between these artist-produced alternative economies and contemporary technologically mediated networks for cultural exchange and previous art movements which investigated systems 1 e-flux, time/bank, http://e-flux.com/timebank/.

of communication (economic and otherwise) I hope to place these new projects into perspective. By looking closely at of these particular projects, which exist within an art context, and focusing on the structure as it promotes aestheticized exchange between participants, I hope to illustrate, in conclusion, what I see as an emergent form: the aestheticized economic structure, made up of many instances of administrated exchange, as a new form of art production. Chapter 1 - Generosity & Culture: Subject & Object of the Market Whither the gift economy? A gift economy is a system in which objects or services that contain value are exchanged without either currency or the explicit condition of a specific reward. The exchange of currency for a particular service or object usually suggests a market economy, although currency can be present in a gift exchange as well (as evidenced by those mass printed birthday cards that also function as money envelopes). One of the notable aspects of a gift economy is the lack of precision in its terms. While goods and services exchanged in this way must contain value to function as gifts, that value is the means to an end (the bonding exchange), rather than the end itself. For instance, a clear agreement between an exchanging dyad as to a specific reward, even when currency is not involved, suggests a barter, rather than a gift, economy. Gifts, generosity, and gift economies are discussed in the social sciences in terms of their use as social bonding agents and as methods of

creating or solidifying status. Within this web of reciprocity givers and receivers are morally and socially obligated to return acts of generosity, although not always from receiver back too giver. The structure of gift-giving and receiving is a complicated web in which goods and services flow in socially prescribed patterns which enforce both community identity and the social status of individuals. This is what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, writing about pre- development Polynesian societies refers to as a system of total services a system in which any item of value, including immaterial goods such as labor-time, and banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances festivals, and fairs 2 can be used as social contracts between individual nodes in an interweaving of a community, or as a means of meshing two communities. The tension between free will or voluntarism of the participants in this web, and social compulsion with real consequences (on pain of private or public warfare3), makes clear that these very specialized kinds of interactions have an integral part in the functioning of societies. Mauss text, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies is a colonial anthropological study of the functioning of an archaic or indigenous society, and intends to show how the gift economy functions in a society without a developed capitalist commodity structure. Contemporary anthropologists of the gift, who discuss the gift economys function in developed, capitalist culture, such as David Cheal, tend to see these operations as existing in a realm between shadow-economy and ritual. For Cheal, gifts are no longer principally used as a practical means for mutual aid, but instead they are symbolic media for managing the emotional aspects of relationships.4
2 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls.

(New York: Routledge, 2000), 5. 3 Mauss, 5. 4 Cheal, David J. The Gift Economy, (Routledge: London, 1988), 5.

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In this space socially positive procedures such as reciprocal bonding and mutual aid are carried out, but so are maneuvers and manipulations of power, prestige, and control. Tied, as it often is, to life-rituals such as birth, death, kinship ceremonies, and marriage, the power implications created by obligation and bondage in the social function of the gift cannot be overlooked. Both power and generosity are expressed in relationships in the realm of the gift because capitalism deals so little with investments into emotional relationships and bonds. What Cheal describes as a sequestration of sentiments5 exists in order to confine the symbolic and the emotional into the private family sphere. In the regular capitalist commodity economy individuals are forced into a relation of indebtedness to one another, and to institutions by virtue of their ambitions and their human needs. In order to get food, one must work for money, and pay the grocer and so on. Ones indebtedness to ones employer is paid for by ones labor/life hours, and ones indebtedness to the grocer who has the food is paid for by real currency one got from the employer. In Marxs terms, workers exchange their commodity, labour, for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and this exchange takes place in a definite ratio.6 The worker has only his labor to sell for all the products and services that constitute livelihood in the world, and wages are the only acceptable form of exchange for that labor. The tacit agreement in a commodity economy is that all ties of indebtedness are discharged as soon as the goods and money change hands. The situation of indebtedness will reoccur the next time a need arises that can be fulfilled in exchange for currency, but there is no obligation to return to any previous partner in exchange in order to satisfy ones needs. Cheal discusses
5 Cheal, 9. 6 Marx, Karl, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1977), 249.

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Mausss conception of the fetishism of gifts to mean that commodities and gifts are essentially different forms of property. Commodities are alienable, that is to say all rights in them are given up when they are exchanged for other commodities. Gifts, on the other hand are thought to be inalienable.7 The freedom of the individual in a capitalist system is license to exchange and amass value promiscuously, without accumulating social bonds and obligations. Thus the grocer and the employee/customer have no bond, and are not obligated to one another in the future. If the employee/customer chooses another grocer, or the grocer goes to law school and starts working as a real estate attorney at the his old customers firm and becomes a tyrant boss, that is entirely their prerogatives. However, in a community based on gifts or social obligation rather than market exchange, a bond is produced with every interaction. When a gift is given, there is an obligation to reciprocate. And if that reciprocation is produced, the bond and obligation is not discharged, instead there is an ongoing iteration of the bond, which creates a relationship between the two parties. Additionally, the obligation to give and receive does not necessarily have to be one to one. Capitalism (and indeed, any currency based economic system) requires the social value production of the gift economy to survive. This social value production can take many forms but it includes the basic act of reproducing more labor, and more consumers, by the reproductive act of rearing children, and the productive acts of engaging in the social relations of the economy during ones surplus labor time.8 In the introduction to Mauss text on the gift, anthropologist Mary Douglas goes so far as to compare the gift cycle to Adam Smiths invisible hand: gift

7 Cheal, 10.
8 Marx, Selected Writings, 496.

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complements market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent. Like the market it supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the pattern of exchanges.9 The system of reciprocation and networked bonding inherent in the gift economy is often thought of as being purely altruistic. However, the gift economys system of reciprocity always has the goal of creating and strengthening social bonds and status, often using potentially destructive feelings of social guilt and indebtedness tools. Where generosity is present, there must also be largess, superfluity, and excess, or a situation in which the giver is harmed by the loss of something valuable. Either there is a net loss for the giver, or the giver is (as in a potlatch) proving his or her superiority by being able to provide for the wants of others. The potlatch, or the extreme act of generosity, can be a destructive, warlike act where the pressure of reciprocation can enact heavy emotional or financial tolls. Mauss ends his description of the potlatch with this analysis: It is essentially usurious and sumptuary.10 Is Art a Gift Economy? Intersections of Market and Generosity. The intangible goods being produced by the function of this network of exchange and generosity include the social bonds which create reproductive labor, such as erotic love and child rearing, in which the cultural norms expect full separation from the market, but also cultural interactions that are more integrated into the market, such as charity, academic research, and other forms of intellectual commons.
9 Mary Douglas, introduction to The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, by Marcel

Mauss, trans. W.D. Halls, (Routledge: New York, 2000), pxiv. 10 Mauss, 6.

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The gift economy functions as a sort of invisible glue that provides the unseen source of stickiness that cements social relationships and conventions, which in turn hold the more visible market economy together. This special bonding status of the gift economy is especially visible in the internet-based distribution of creative goods. The projects that I discuss later in this paper, which combine the production of systems for networked distribution of goods and service with engagement in the art market, operate in the interstice between gift economy and market economy. Culture, and in particular high culture, is often treated as a public good, like a vaccine with which everyone in a society must be inoculated in order to negate the risk of spreading the disease of an uncultured citizenry. The cost of cultural inoculation is rarely offset by any direct economic returns, and must be subsidized by the citizenry themselves, by a variety of methods. There is a muddled sense that arts function is to present truth, or idealized potential, or to provide a location for scrutinizing the sublime. The publicly presented or publicly held (or even publicly discussed) art object, unlike other commodity items, can simultaneously fulfill its duties as a source of aesthetic pleasure and as an object of commercial speculation. This is precisely because art does not have a clear use value, and in fact is often defined in terms of its lack of use value. Early on in my copy of Capital, Marx states the usefulness of a thing makes it a use- value.11 He goes on to state that this property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities.12 The traditional art object, such as a sculpture or a painting, has seemingly very little use value. It does not provide any necessities of life, nor
11 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. (Random House: New York,

1977), 126.

10 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 126.

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can it be put to work providing these, and while these types of objects may be more or less decorative or more or less representative, they are not currently required to fulfill either of those duties. The non-traditional contemporary art object in the form of a happening, a performance, a video, or a page of instruction provides even less decorative potential. The use of these objects can only be presumed to be either their speculative potential to rise in price on the market, their value as status symbols, or their value as items of intellectual exchange amongst a cognoscenti who encounter them. Perhaps all three of these are the case. Certainly, measuring the labor time required to produce a particular art object is no help in determining what Marx would consider its true value, because the amount of time to make an artwork can vary so wildly in terms of its commodity value, or sale price. The Dutch cultural economist Arjo Klamer, in writing extensively on public subsidies for culture in the Netherlands, complete with multi-year graph comparisons to the United States, also claims not to have any authority to speak on art.13 He feels that Art happens in the sensation of a problem, that is, a problem of meaning. 14 He further states that any imposition of currency and commodity into the problematic sensory world of art is potentially harmful to the art, or rather its reception. Klamer envisions the intervention of currency in its capacity as a value-measuring device as producing a sort of observer effect on culture, where the outcome of a process is altered by the act of quantification. The mystifying effect of measurement in money terms has on the thing measured15 forces the measured item into the commoditized realm of exchange, where it must of necessity be compared and comparable to all other commodity objects. When this
13 Arjo Klamer, ed.,The Value of Culture : On the Relationship between Economics and Arts. (Amsterdam

University Press: Amsterdam, 1996), 21. 14 Klamer, 21. 15 Ibid., 22.

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happens, the experience16 of art is devalued, while the object or item in question may raise or lower in terms of monetary value. Klamer compares the devaluing effect of money on art to its similar effect on interpersonal human relationships, where the preferred mode of transaction is reciprocity and the imposition of currency can be damaging to relations. This kind of reciprocal exchange is, as with the gift economy, un-quantifiable. Klamer views both the emotional interpersonal relationship, and the art experience as beyond measure 17 and thus beyond the usual scope of economic theory. Klamers unwillingness to discuss art or culture in terms of its meaning and his insistence that market forces have the potential to devalue the essentially experiential function of art is indicative of a common perception of cultural works as more closely aligned with the spheres whose internal goods and values are often protected from market considerations: namely spirituality and intimate family life. One classic technique of economists attempting to explain a phenomenon is to pinpoint motivations for individual actions that help explain the behavior of a market. Motivations in culture become difficult for the economist to explain because the motivations stem from shared values and tastes, rather than individual choices. Attempting to determine the value of art and culture is difficult because there are a number of levels at which cultural producers operate in the marketplace, with only a very limited number of cultural producers gaining all of their wealth from market exchange of their labor/products in the usual way. Supply/demand economics do not generally fully explain the functioning of culture in the marketplace, since culture also tends to produce value for a number of other sectors of the economy, and is often supported through
16 Ibid., 22. 17 Klamer, 24.

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public funding (albeit, in the US, peripherally through tax-exempt status). Klamer also points out that the public sector (tax) subsidies for culture often privilege the privileged over the low- income. While cultural production is indeed made possible by these public subsidies, the works that are supported are often of the sorts that tend to be more popular with the wealthy and well educated. Thus, the poor give proportionally more of their tax dollars to culture in which they generally do not partake.18 Russell Keat, another European cultural economist, agrees that the market must not be permitted to intrude where it does not belong19. He discusses this situation of cultures inability to adhere to standard market configuration by presenting a theory of valuation specific to certain forms of activities he terms practices (actually a term and concept Keat borrowed from another British Economist, Alasdair MacIntyre)20. For Keat, practices are those social and cooperative activities with their own standards of excellence21, and for which goods are an internal product22 of striving for achievement within the discipline. In the case of the painter for instance, the painting itself is a mere byproduct of her attempts to accomplish mastery of the practice of painting. Internal goods can be transferred outside of a practice to exist in the regular market economy, but the way a painting (for instance) is judged (on beauty, on innovation, on adherence to a set of formal laws) within a practice by practitioners is specific to that practice and will tend to differ greatly in comparison to its external reception.23

18 Klamer, 16. 19 Keat, Russell. Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, (St. Martin's Press: New York, 2000), 3. 20 Keat, 22. 21 Ibid., 22. 22 Ibid., 23. 23 Ibid., 23.

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The idea of practices internal to a discipline forming a different system of valuation within that discipline than in the wider economy outside it is in opposition to free-market theory, which posits that each consumer is his own sovereign internal expert, and that markets depend on the decisions of these self-actualized consumers. Keat posits that a method of protecting cultural production (and other fields which engage in practices and produce internal goods) is to put (state enforced) boundaries on the market system, which would provide instruction on what instances using the market for determining value and maintaining exchange relationships is inappropriate. The consumer/want-driven activity of the market must be kept separate from the ideal/producer- regarding actions of practices. Keat sees the market as a site for potential colonization of practices, where practices would be forced to work to produce value for the market, unless they are protected. The method of protecting practices is social sanctions, or limits to the market (hence the title of the book: Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market) and what Keat calls blocked exchanges: legally or socially enforced prohibitions on the use of money to acquire a wide range of specific goods (including love, murder, votes, bombs, friends).24 Keat sees the final flaw in the markets relationship to culture to be the lack of merit given to the desires of producers (and their practices) versus consumers. The market is a procedure for making decisions about the allocation of economic resources to the production of goods in which the only criteria by which the value of these goods are judged are those endorsed and applied by consumers themselves and not by the state or by any other supposedly authoritative body.25 Art as Market Irritant & Exchange Facilitator
24 Keat, 73. 25 Ibid., 163.

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Where economists like Keat and Klamer are using an analysis of cultures special role in relation to the market in order to present some possible solutions to the problem of accommodating that role in a complex and market-based society, curators and artists inside the art world seem to be more invested in maintaining the friction caused by arts marked market exceptionalism. In 2005 Ted Purves edited an influential book on art and generosity, What We Want is Free, which included several short essays and a compendium of art projects and collectives which engage with their audience through explorations of the mechanisms of generosity or exchange. Many of these contemporary projects fall under the rubric of what is now discussed in terms of (Nicolas Bourriauds) relational aesthetics, although Purves examples are all focused in some way around gestures of hospitality or benevolence. Purves draws a direct line of descent from 1960s activist collectives like the Diggers (who gave away free food),26 to Mierle Laderman Ukeles 70s feminist Maintenance Art (intended to raise the everyday toil of battling entropy to the status of art),27 to Felix Gonzales Torres (who created what Purves calls gift sculptures),28 to contemporary works in the realm of public practices, like Superflexs Superchannel (a hyperlocal television broadcasting tool)29 and Temporary Services publication projects.30 The projects included in What We Want Is Free align themselves with the bond-producing, ambiguous network of the gift economy, and generally resist accommodating institutions. In a collaborative essay in Purves book, curators Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen discuss the contradiction between market and both art and generosity; they see the conflicts source 26 Purves, 35
27 Purves, 104 28 Purves, 101 29 Purves, 159 30 Purves, 122

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arising from art production and acts of generosity requiring nonlinear, expenditures of time and resources. 31 This lack of linearity, and the lack of specificity in regards to exchange value is precisely what creates the resistant relationship with market forces of circulation and communication for both art and generosity. The internal functionings of generosity and art have their own economy and their own set of communicative symbols. As Larsen and Fowle write: Theoretically the two are entwined within a system rooted in symbolic values as opposed to market worth. An intricate economy has been established by which to make things happen that cannot flourish, or perhaps even exist, within the basic supply and demand principles of commerce.32 What Larsen and Fowle see as potential processes of liberation from the inevitable progress of production33 and what Purves calls strategies for responding and perhaps even fighting back34 also often act in collusion with the market. The market itself, with its compelling systems and alluring potential for profit, can become a site of artistic inquiry. And of course the art object can famously be an object of speculation as well. One of the few times art makes the daily mass media roundup is when new all time high sale prices for art works come out of the secondary auction market. The excitement is over new super-high values being created for a singular object, and that object will forever after be associated with its record price. The antagonism between market and art and culture is essentially the dichotomy between eros and logos. Theodor Adorno describes culture and administration as
31 Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, Lunch Hour: Art Community, Administrated Space, and Unproductive

Activity in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, ed. Ted Purves, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 17. 32 Fowle and Larsen, 17. 33 Fowle and Larsen, 17. 34 Ted Purves, Blows Against the Empire in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, ed. Ted Purves, (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2004), 27.

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inexorably bound, with cultures binding erotic and ideological qualities being governed and directed by logical efficient administration with the goal of producing market oriented mass culture, which attempts to neutralize social conflict.35 The paradox that Adorno discovers is that while culture suffers damage when it is planned and administrated36 it requires that same administration to survive. Like the internal goods specific to Keats practices Adornos culture judges its works by its own criteria, but it is always beholden to the demands of the administration upon which it relies. The projects that Purves collects under the theme of generosity are not only investigating the bonding utopian dream of the gift economy, they are also engaged on some level in determining the boundaries of the interstices and collusions between culture and the administrated system of the market. Systems as Media: Conceptualism & Dematerialization of Artworks Where artists have intervened in the market, it has tended toward one of two extremes. One is the move towards a dematerialization of the artwork, a move away from Benjamins auratic object and towards a mode of cultural production that emphasizes an intellectual or quasi-philosophical practice over object-oriented production, which essentially attempts to block commodification of the art object. The other is towards a direct, positive, engagement in the market, often by embracing modes of technological reproduction and distribution. Often, especially with contemporary media-based art, these 35 Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 64. 36 Adorno, 94.

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modes are intertwined, but the focus on systems of distribution, communication, and exchange found in conceptual art, is central to an understanding of practices that promote disengagement with the market. There are, of course, many models of cultural intervention and disengagement with the market, including Duchamps ready-mades, the Situationist political dtournement of mass media, media art collectives like Raindance, activist groups like ACT UP, the media architects of Ant Farm, Allan Kaprows Happenings, Fluxus, and feminist performance art, to name just a few. Many of these examples pulled away from the standard commercial art market of their day, but I choose to focus on conceptual art because of its specific focus on investigating the functioning of systems, including but not limited to, the market systems that mediate value. When German, Bauhaus-educated, intellectual Ursula Meyer37 published Conceptual Art in 1972, she begins her introduction with semiological and phenomenological quotes by Wittgenstein and Barthes38 about the difficulty of escaping language-systems when presenting concepts. Meyers vision of the concept art project is essentially an a-political, intellectual enterprise of combining the traditional roles of critic and artist 39. For Meyer Conceptual Art is about making the ideational premise of the work known, a decided contrast to other contemporary art, which is not concerned with defining the intention of the work, attending (almost) exclusively to its appearance40. One might, given the context, venture to guess that the other contemporary art Meyer refers to is in fact Pop. While the assertion that Pop Art deals exclusively with appearance has been widely discussed and disproved by critics like Hal Foster, the point of her argument is that conceptual work is
37 Biography of Ursula Meyer accessed 3/31/12, http://www.ursulameyer.com/biography.htm 38 Meyer, Ursula, Conceptual Art, Ed. Ursula Meyer. (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: New York,1972), vii. 39 Meyer, viii 40 Meyer, pviii

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about stripping away the visual element as the defining principle of the work, leaving the intentional concept of the artist as its foundation. The procedure of presenting the concept, or perhaps even of arriving at the concept, becomes the work itself. Often these procedures look like Wittgensteins language games, and in the same way their intent is to disassociate sign and signifier, in order to lay bare the functioning of an otherwise totalizing system (language, capital, value). This combining of the role of artist and critic disallows the specialized role of the critic in creating meaning and value-production for a work of art. Concept art combined internalized meaning-production with an intentional abolition of the art object 41 intended to further dissolve the relationship between the cultural object and value dependent on style, quality, and permanence.42 Ursula Meyer quotes Richard Kostelanetz disavowal of value-production: Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Dont you see that when you get a value judgment, thats all you have? Value judgments are destructive to our proper business which is curiosity and awareness.43 She is very clear in seeing these artists (from Acconci to Weiner , presented in alphabetical order), whose work in this book consists mostly of short texts or photo- documentation, as following the philosophical precedent of Marcel Duchamp. Later she includes an excerpt from Robert Morriss Statements, 1970, which was originally exhibited in the seminal Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition organized by Donald Karshan at the New York Cultural Center. In this excerpt Morris refers to Duchamps attack on the Marxist notion that labor was an index of value, but the Ready-mades are
41 Meyer, xv 42 Ibid. 43 Meyer, viii.

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traditionally iconic art-objects.44 Morris sees conceptual art as a new mode of attack that goes beyond the ready-mades failure to destroy the art-object and instead attacks the formulation of labor itself, and art as a form of labor the rationalistic notion that art is a form of work that results in a finished product.45 Where the object is deemphasized in this type of work, it may not completely disappear, and often the remnants of a time-based work are reintroduced as salable or exhibitable objects. Sol Le Witts work, (represented in Meyers book with his Sentences on Contemporary Art46 which often takes the form of instructions for wall drawings to be carried out by technicians, is widely exhibited and valued by museums and collectors. Lucy Lippards vision of the dematerialization of art (from object into concept) is, as opposed to Meyers purely philosophical concept, both socially and politically engaged, and perhaps in many ways a product of 1960s political dissidence, and in particular tied to anti- Vietnam war movements. In the introduction to Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, Lippard discusses the importance of the Art Workers Coalitions explicit anti-Vietnam war stance in organizing a nascent group of Conceptual artists who were mixing art and politics.47 What both Lippard and Meyer discuss in terms of concept art also includes works that we now think of as earthworks (such as Robert Barrys gas works, which released

44 Robert Morris, Statements, 1970 in Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer, (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: New

York,1972), 184. 45 Morris, Statements, 184. 46 Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Contemporary Art, in Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer, (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: New York,1972), 174. 47 Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. (University of California Press, 1973), ix.

 various inert gasses into the Mohave Desert landscape)48, minimalism (LeWitt is often included in the Minimalist camp), systems or process art. Lippards book, The Dematerialization of the Art Object is, like Meyers text (though published the following year, in 1973) a compendium of artist writings and reproductions of texts and works published elsewhere, as well as quotes, interviews and ephemera. The title essay was originally published in a 1968 issue of Art International, 49 in collaboration with John Chandler, another artist and writer. Lippard herself has noted that her use of the term

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dematerialization is problematic in that many of the works she places under this rubric are not, in fact, fully dematerialized. The notable presence of materials includes Robert Smithsons earthwork Spiral Jetty and several executed examples of LeWitts large-scale wall drawings. Jacob Lillemose, whose essay Conceptual Transformations of Art: From Dematerialization Of The Object To Immateriality In Networks appears in the text Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems discusses Lippards use of the term dematerialization with an emphasis, quite germane to the work being discussed, on the process of dematerializing the object, rather than the purity of the result.50 Lippard discusses dematerialization as a process in which the object may become wholly obsolete51 thus the object is no longer the focal point of artistic production and perception. Instead the focus is emphatically shifted to the concept of the work as work, as
48 Meyer, 34. 49 Lippard, ix. 50 Lillemose, Jacob Conceptual Transformations of Art: From Dematerialisation Of The Object To

Immateriality In Networks in Curating Immateriality, ed. Joasia Krysa, (Autonomedia: New York 2006), 119. 51 John Chandler and Lucy Lippard, The Dematerialization of Art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. (University of California Press, 1973), 43.

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originated by the artist, and (sometimes but not always) as encountered by the audience. As LeWitt states in the thirteenth item in Sentences on Contemporary Art, A work of art my be understood as a conductor from the artists mind to the viewers. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artists mind.52 Immateriality and Distributed Networks This emphasis on a process that results in obsolescence prefigures the huge technological changes in networked information sharing that have occurred since Lippards writing to alter the face of culture. Lillemose uses immateriality of networks or of artworks as a formal descriptor of the form of art that uses reproductive technology such as digitization, rather than as an aesthetic of its own.53 Obsolescence, not just of objects, but of networks as well, is a constant and accelerating reality for all technology. Even the most immaterial of the conceptual art being discussed by Lippard and Meyer often produced archival material ephemera as byproducts of its distribution, such as Dennis Oppenheims photo documentations of temporary bodily interventions into public spaces in Parallel Stress54 which were then reproduced and distributed as objects by galleries and publishers. On some level, however, these works were being produced with the networks of distribution in mind, in a way that previous works could or would not. The instruction- based conceptual works of Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, or Lawrence Weiner could function as software, being read and installed by a the artist or a user in an endless succession of new hardware settings. A painting or a sculpture must be moved to its audience in order to be
52 Sol LeWitt Sentences on Contemporary Art, in Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer, (E.P. Dutton &

Co., Inc.: New York,1972), 174. 53 Lillemose, Curating Immateriality, 113. 54 Meyer 198, 199

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perceived completely. A copy does not maintain all the features of the original. We see that an installation of a set of LeWitt instructions, even after his death, is not just legible, but fully understood as a work that has been authored by LeWitt, although he did not see or supervise the execution of the work as it occurred. Jack Burnhams exhibition Software55 which curated dematerialized or instructional systems artworks for a New York audience at the Jewish Museum in 1970, one year after Lippards first expressly conceptual exhibition 557,087 in Seattle56, is discussed by Lillemose in terms of his understanding of dematerialization as less of a formal aspect of this type of art, but as a condition of its foregrounding of systems aesthetics. The emphasis on cybernetics and human- system interaction is intended to produce a heightened awareness of exchanges and relationships between nodes, objects, individuals, rather than on the objects (individuals/nodes) themselves. Burnhams exhibition, included works by Joseph Kosuth and Hans Haake, who were also claimed as, or considered conceptual artists by Meyer in Conceptual Art several years later. Software also presented technology in the form of the first public exhibition of hypertext (Labyrinth, an electronic exhibition catalog designed by Ned Woodman and Ted Nelson)57 and an architectural work for gerbils by members of the Architecture Machine Group, a precursor to MITs Media Lab.58 This foregrounding of the aesthetics of the system itself leads away from the critique of the object59 that is generally understood to be the goal of conceptual art. Lillemose makes the argument that an art sans object does not do away with materiality, or aesthetics. Instead the
55 Matthew Rampley, Systems Aesthetics, Burnham and Others, Vector e-zine, January 2005,

http://virose.pt/vector/b_12/rampley.htm 56 Lippard, x. 57 Shanken, Edward A., Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art, (http://artexetra.com/InfoAge.pdf), 433. 58 Shanken, 433. 59 Lillemose, Curating Immateriality, 116.

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dematerialization is to be understood as an aesthetic process within a system whose materiality is concept-driven communication. This conceptual materiality allows for an understanding of dematerialization to be comprehended as an extensive and fundamental rethinking of the multiplicity of materiality beyond its connection to the entity of the object.60 Where previous art forms may have tried to transcend materiality through non-material principles, such as ideology, beauty, and sign value, conceptual art emphasizes its social, economical and cultural aspects and exposes them to alternative conceptualizations; conceptualizations most often guided by principles and values of heterogeneity, irrationality, openness and destabilization, and opposed to harmony, control, power and capitalistic exploitation. Thus conceptual art acts as an imaginative and speculative mediator between the political codedness and aesthetic potency of materiality. 61 For Lillemose the conceptual art project, while failing to complete the magic trick of dematerializing the art object, did succeed in prefiguring the aesthetics of digitally networked and internet-based artworks, which rely on an understanding of process and communication as permissible products of an art project as much as they do on access to the available technological production methods and networks. Lillemose cites as examples bermorgen, Kingdom of Piracy, and Eva and Franco Mattes (01.org), most of whom are European net.art artists involved in explicitly political anti-copyright, open-source software and hacking projects.62
60 Ibid. 61 Lillemose, 117 - 118. 62 Lillemose, 124.

 Chapter 2 Aestheticized Economies Shares & Bonds Online

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These types of net-based projects Lillemose references not only exist almost entirely on the internet, they also primarily function to comment on the internet and networked technology as a whole. They are Keats internal goods, fully realized as an amalgamation of media and concept that is completely unable to enter the market outside of its specific practice. The conceptualists of the late 60s and early 70s were interested in the process of dematerializing the link between the value- laden object and the concept which was presumed to be value-free, as an investigation of a variety of systems, less than in the abolition of material per se. Artists using the internet network as material have had the heavy lifting of removing an object-oriented practice done for them, allowing them to focus almost entirely on the media internal to their practice, which is networked communication itself. The internet is often conceived of as a seedbed for myriad gift economies63, where creative goods such as songs and movies can be endlessly and losslessly traded as pure information between peers. Andrew Currah, in a white paper

63 Andrew Currah, Managing creativity: the tensions between commodities and gifts in a digital

networked environment, Economy and Society, 36 (2007): 469. This paper is intended to present best practices for industry control and monetization of copyrighted creative goods without either stifling entrepreneurial innovation or engaging in ongoing lawsuits.

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written for the film industry, and published in Economy and Society 64, describes the ever-present economic tension between commodification and control of property rights for creative goods.65 He describes how over protection of copyright control for creative goods creates market enclosure and under-utilization of creative works while over-sharing and freedom of gift exchange risks implosion of the production market and subsequent underproduction.66 The networked gift exchange that occurs on the internet differs substantially from the sort of emotionally bonding goods that Cheal and Mauss describe. Because the individuals participating in these networks are potentially far-flung geographically and are often anonymous, they may not share strong ties to each other. By exchanging electronic content losslessly, without losing any of its usability themselves, participants in this type of networked gift exchange are creating non-excludable goods, which are part of a common pool of resources. The weak ties the nodes in the networked commons share are lacking in strong compulsions toward reciprocal obligation. This is particularly true of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing sites that rely on tons of users swarming content with this type of file sharing, everyone who currently has a copy of the file is simultaneously sharing pieces of it with the downloader. The generosity implicit here is the individual use of time and resources to build up the shared network.
64 Currah, Managing creativity. 65 Currah, 468. 66 Currah, 468.

 Soup Structures

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InCUBATE or the Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday is a core group of several self-defined as radical arts administrators (originated by Abigail Satinsky, Roman Petruniak, Bryce Dwyer, and the late Ben Schaafsma, who died in 2008) most of whom are recent graduates of the Department of Art Administration & Policy at the Art Institute of Chicago. They describe the group as a research institute dedicated specifically to exploring new approaches to arts administration and arts funding.67 InCUBATE deliberately eschews public subsidy via non-profit tax status (501c3), which they call the Non- Profit Industrial Complex.68 InCUBATEs members take issue with the rigidity of the structures for support offered to artists via traditional grant models and institutions, who are reliant on broad taxpayer funding. They lay the blame for this lack of flexibility squarely on the culture wars of the 1990s, which halted a system that upheld challenging contemporary art and legitimized innovative artists in the eyes of many private foundations.69 The funding now available to artists through grants and public subsidy must fulfill a mission deemed acceptable to the most conservative of taxpayers. The non-profits that administrate this funding must also
67 InCUBATE, About, http://incubate-chicago.org/about/ 68 InCUBATE, About Other Options, http://incubate-chicago.org/other-options/about-other-

options/ 69 InCUBATE, http://incubate-chicago.org/other-options/about-other-options/

 invest in building an internal structure that granters will recognize and trust,

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including management, boards of directors, membership and fundraising efforts, all of which detract from the original purported mission of supporting creative work. In order to circumvent this system INCUBATE is interested in exploring financial models which are less constrained by external controls and market concerns and which are more effective, more realistic, and more relevant to both art and the everyday. 70 While InCUBATE does curate artists projects, organize residencies, and engage in several publishing ventures, the most popular project has been the Sunday Soup event. Sunday Soup is essentially a fundraising event, in which members of the community gather to eat an inexpensive meal centered on soup cooked by a guest chef. Each diner pays a small amount, such as $5-10 for his or her meal; during the event artists present projects to the audience/diners, and after the event the audience/diners vote on the project they think deserves the profits from the meal. Most of these grants are quite small, between $100-$500, although of course the total income depends on the number of participants in the meal.71 Since its inception in 2007 the Sunday Soup concept has exploded in popularity, with over 60 ongoing projects in the US and internationally that use InCUBATEs model, or the Sunday Soup name. Locations are as far flung as Cairo, and as rural as Carbondale, Illinois.72 F.E.A.S.T. (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) in NYC uses an almost identical model, except -as perhaps
70 InCUBATE, http://incubate-chicago.org/about/

71 InCUBATE, Sunday Soup FAQ, http://incubate-chicago.org/sunday-soup/sunday-soup-faq/ 72 Sunday Soup, Soup Network, http://sundaysoup.org/soup-network

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should be expected for NYC - with a slightly higher price tag ($20) and fancier food at the dinners.73 InCUBATE has franchised the Sunday Soup project into an International Soup Network which has its own website, and encourages others to adapt the model, allowing the individual projects to have some degree of autonomy.74 This rapid, franchised expansion of interest and engagement in the model is due in part to the current difficulty of obtaining any kind of cultural funding via the bureaucratic institutional channels, but also owes its influence to the ability of interested participants to access the social networking tools available on the internet. The Sunday Soup Network website provides listing of other active chapters as well as detailed instructions on how to start a new local. Individuals can then use their preferred networking and publishing technology to promote the event and distribute the grant proposals within a short timeframe. Since the funds go directly to the artist via a voting body of willing participants, there is little chance that the participants will be unhappy with the artistic outcomes, although that does not seem to be the point. The products of the soup-grants, which range from a Gowanus Canal restoration project (funded by Brooklyn FEAST)75 to a vinyl record release (funded by Portland Stock)76 do not seem to be the focus of the project. The projects are usually on a fairly small scale, and the artists, after receiving their funding, have no obligation to present their
73 F.E.A.S.T. In Brooklyn, How We Feast, http://feastinbklyn.org/?page_id=2 74 Sunday Soup, About, http://sundaysoup.org/about 75 F.E.A.S.T., http://feastinbklyn.org/?cat=6 76 Portland Stock, Money = Future Music for Conceptual Minds, Nov. 7, 2011,

http://portlandstock.blogspot.com/

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work or seek approval for the finished product from the funders. Works produced by artists who received grants are not featured on the main Soup Network website (though they may be featured on local sites), and the grant carries little institutional prestige. These projects do indeed reallocate small amounts of funds to artists, but the

process seems to be more about strengthening the network of ties between artists and audiences in a community. Artists are given the opportunity to present work in an atmosphere of receptive conviviality while the audience can choose the work that resonates with them based on their perception of the artists concept, rather than the finished project or object. The gift provided by the audience/funders in the form of small grants serves to form ties between members of the supportive community as a whole, rather than between granter and grantee. Sunday Soup is influenced by a project by the conceptual artist Gordon

Matta-Clark, who with Carole Goodden, started a restaurant called FOOD in Manhattan in 1971. Goodden, who had come into an inheritance77, funded the restaurant,78 which staffed a rotating roster of artists as its staff. The cooks, waiters, and dishwashers were paid at a rate much higher than the prevailing wage, and used their pay to finance other creative activities.79 The FOOD project, which folded after essentially bankrupting itself three years after it began, was the locus for

77 Benjamin J. Schaafsma, Other Options: Artists Re-Interpreting, Altering and Creating

Infrastructure That Affects Their Everyday Lives, (MA Thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008). 78 Richard Nonas, interview with Sara Unzila Ahmed, An Interview with Richard Nonas, Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, March 2009, http://www.gastronomica.org/10years/nonas.html 79 Shaafsma, 33.

 several documentary projects by Matta-Clark (including the film Food)80, but is mostly remembered today for its association with Matta-Clark himself. Gordon

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Matta-Clark is most famous for interventions into architecture, such as the building cuts which split existing structures open or apart. Carole Gooden, who did not have a subsequent art career, has mostly been forgotten as a creator of the FOOD project, despite the fact that her generous donation of external goods made the project possible. FOOD, like Sunday Soup, provided a source of financial support for artists, but it did not focus on defined individual projects. Instead it created the structure for a network of artists and audiences engaging in social relations. Like FOOD, Sunday Soup is not a self-sustaining system, relying as it does on regular infusions of external resources in the form of ingredients, labor, and attention in order to produce both the stated goal of providing micro-grants, and the implicit goal of creating ties between artists and communities. Unlike FOOD, which was by and for artists, and which had the stated goal of feeding artists, Sunday Soup is a project created and maintained by administrators (albeit radical administrators) in order to promote a network and community of cultural producers and supporters. Projects such as FOOD and Sunday Soup are essentially involved in a project of crowdsourcing in the sense that they produce and move value from a distributed group into a specific holder of value (the artist or project). However, the process of building the structure of the distributed network is where the actual labor, and value, lies. InCUBATE, in effect, partially replaces one method of capital-raising
80 Food, prod. and dir. Gordon Matta-Clark, 43 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video, 1972,

http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=761

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with another, essentially by ignoring value systems already in place and replacing those values with their own democratic, community-minded, anti-administration administration.

Visible Time e-flux, on the other hand, eschews the arts-administrative function of capital

raising and distribution, and instead presents the methods of superseding currency completely, assuming that the individual participants involved can effectively maintain or support their own self-worth or individual sense of final-product value. Its a disbursed factory, and a social network that illustrates and fosters ties. e-flux originated in 1998 with an email sent by founder Anton Vidokle to a

group of artist friends about a hotel room party in New York City81. The email promotion for the party was so successful that he decided (with a group of friends including Adriana Arenas, Josh Welber, and Terence Gower) to set up a company to provide promotional services to galleries and museums. At the time, before the dot.com economy dissolved, and before such services were widespread, such an initiative probably seemed innovative and quite valuable to art institutions. Currently e-flux runs two separate mailing lists, both of which are free for

subscribers, but cost a variable fee for clients who wish to send out announcements. The e-flux announcement list is used by Nearly all the leading art museums, biennials, cultural centers, magazines, publishers, art fairs, and independent

81 Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ever. Ever. Ever., e-flux, July

2006, http://www.e-flux.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hans_Ulrich_Obrist_Interview.pdf

36

curators worldwide 82 including MOMA New York, the Tate Modern, Artforum, and Art Basel. Art&Education, which branched off of the main list in 2006 and collaborates with Artforum, is intended for academics, students, art professionals, and art-based educational programs.83 Participants include Goldsmiths, The Rhode Island School of Design, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and our very own SUNY Buffalo (Visual Studies and Media Study). Neither the e-flux listserv nor the Art&Education listserv list their rates (you

must contact them to get a rate)84 but the rate quoted to the Visual Studies Department here at SUNY Buffalo was $660.00 for a single announcement and $1650.00 for a package of three.85 The gross income from Art&Education, if each of the 424 clients were to submit one announcement, would be $279,840.00, which is not bad for immaterial labor. The e-flux list, which has around 45,000 readers86 (as opposed to Art &Educations larger list, shared with Artforum, of more than 80,000)87 lists 1,810 clients, which is a much lower message to receiver ratio. Presumably, however, the e-flux mailing list clients are paying to send out announcements at a similar rate to the one paid by Art&Education clients. The listservs operate to finance the other projects produced by e-flux, and they are treated with businesslike discretion. In a 1999 Dossier magazine article, Vidokle dissembles when asked about revenue by the interviewer:
82 e-flux, About, http://www.e-flux.com/about/ 83 Art&Education, About, http://www.artandeducation.net/about/ 84 Art&Education, About, http://www.artandeducation.net/about/ 85 Stephanie Rothenberg, email message to author, Oct. 25, 2011. 86 e-flux, http://www.e-flux.com/about/ 87 Rothenberg, email message.


How much is the fee?

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The fees are different for public, corporate and commercial institutions. If you have a specific project you want to disseminate through our network, you should email us with a description of what it is. If we decide to work with you, we will send you all the pertinent information. How big is e-flux in economical terms? What is the approximate yearly turnover? Are you kidding me? No. Im from Sweden, a country where all information like that is public. But I guess youre talking about public institutions; e-flux is a private entity. Actually, its all public information. But were in the United States, so I dont blame you for not answering.88

There are other members of e-flux (Julieta Aranda and Brian Kuan Wood),

but founder Anton Vidokle, a Russian migr to the US, is the spokesperson of the group in writing and interviews. Like InCUBATE, e-flux is skeptical about reproducing the non-profit

structure. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist Vidokle describes how artists initiatives these days from the start mimic existing institutional and commercial structures: incorporate, establish a board of directors, sell memberships, produce benefit auctions and market editions, sell artworks, etc.89 Vidokle, similar to the members of InCUBATE, feels that these modes of organizing and funding activity affect both content produced by these organizations and their ability to focus on creative experimentation rather than preserving the structural supports.

88 Anton Vidokle, interview with Karl Lydn, Interview: Anton Vidokle of e-flux, Dossier Journal,

2009, http://dossierjournal.com/read/interviews/interview-anton-vidokle-of-e-flux/ 89 Vidokle, interview with Obrist.

38 The projects e-flux has created since its inception have been focused almost

entirely on structures of exchange, and the economic in its broadest sense. Projects have included a open library of Martha Roslers personal book collection,90 a free video art rental shop,91 unitednationsplaza (a series of lectures and seminars in Berlin),92 and the e-flux journal.93 e-fluxs projects have gathered widespread attention in the US and European art worlds. They recently opened a second location in Berlin, and have presented their works at international art festivals such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta. In 2011 the trio were named fifth in Art Review magazines annual Power 100 a list of the most influential people in the art world.94 One of e-fluxs longest ongoing projects, and the one that seems to gather the most publicity and critical analysis is the time/bank. The actual concept of a time bank is quite old - the earliest versions appear in the US with Ohio Anarchist Josiah Warrens Cincinnati Time Store95 . British financier and industrialist Robert Owens Indiana-based New Harmony utopian community, founded in 1824, used time money to pay workers within the community. 96 97 Today there are many time banks being used as alternative modes of value

distribution all over the world, alongside other schemes such as local or micro-
90 e-flux, Announcements, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/martha-rosler-library-2/ 91 e-flux, Program, http://www.e-flux.com/program/e-flux-video-rental-found-a-home-2/ 92 e-flux, unitednationsplaza http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/ 93 e-flux, Journals, http://www.e-flux.com/journals/ 94 Art Review Power 100, Art Review, http://www.artreview100.com/people/755/

95 Josiah Warren, Plan of the Cincinnati Labor for Labor Store, Mechanics Free Press, 1829.

http://www.crispinsartwell.com/warren.htm 96 American Studies at the University of Virginia, New Harmony, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/cities/newharmony.html 97 The History Guide, Robert Owen, 1771-1858, 2004, http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/owen.html

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currencies, barter networks, and so on. There are over 50 community time banks, recognized by TimeBanks.org, a non-profit, in the US.98 The efficacy of using a time bank is of course expanded by networked

technology, which allows for sharing of information about skills, as well as a variety of schemes for logging and verifying hours earned. A time bank is a mode of expanding the generally dualistic trading pattern of barter. In a usual barter situation, a person with a need (Person A) has to find someone in her community who can both provide for that specific need (Person B), and who has a specific need of their own that Person A can fulfill. Thus both parties in a barter must be a very good match for each other, almost like a romantic couple. Of course, in a complex society in which abilities and skills are highly developed and differentiated it becomes very difficult to find someone who can repair audio equipment, and who needs a headshot made, while you are a photographer who tinkers in home recording. The time bank is borne out of a need to shift the needs and wants over by one

or more placeholders. Thus, your hour of photography skills for an aspiring actor who needs headshots, can be logged and put into the community bank in order to spend later, when the audio repair becomes necessary. This means that time is being conceived of as being equivalent to currency, doing away with that level of abstraction in Marxs conception, where labor hours are converted to commodity value which is converted to use value. Indeed, all hours of labor are worth the same amount in the time bank, as the only value judgment placed on services is that of the

98 Timebanks.org, Network, http://timebanks.org/network

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time spent doing them. While this absolves the problem of value judgments being placed on currency in the absolute sense, that is - one type of labor is not being valued above another in terms of the amount of labor-hours being disproportionate to the quantity of currency being earned during those hours - the value placed on those differing types of labor can of course be judged as more or less valuable by the participants in this community/economy. Because of course, the efficacy of such a closed economy relies on its participants being bound to one another in a community where reciprocity can be enforced by social norms. A September 2011 issue of the e-flux journal, with the theme of Alternative Economies, includes an interview with Paul Glover, who created one of the first contemporary time banks in the small town of Ithaca New York. After Ithaca HOURS was begun in the early 1990s, Paul Glover spent eight years as a full-time HOUR networker 99 explaining the currency, publishing a newsletter and directory, and generally engaging in boosterism in order to build a community understanding and acceptance for the project. An alternative, local, currency must be circulated (rather than hoarded) in order to be viable. Its continued success requires the investment of citizens in using and maintaining the system. The time/banks authors are producing a new system within the established system of the art market, and presenting that system with the aestheticized and perhaps exotic vision of a functioning alternative economy. e-flux is in fact, quite successful in monetizing its own practice, both by bringing in real money from established institutions, via the listservs, and by institutionalizing itself via the
99 Paul Glover, Anti-Monopoly Money, e-flux journal #27 (2011), http://www.e-

flux.com/journal/anti-monopoly-money/

 internationalized art fair scene. This has little bearing on the participants in their project, who benefit from structure, but seem to gain little from proximity to the monetized art world. time/bank has two values: the use value it presents to its users, as a mode of sharing their own labor in the form of gifts, and the value it

41

presents to the market as an aesthetic object of artistic administration. The works by the individual cultural workers operating within the confines of the bank do not present as singular entities or nodes within the network, but the project as a whole does appear as a viable entity. Like the projects funded by InCUBATEs Sunday Soup (or any of its offshoots) the work being produced by networkers in e-fluxs time/bank is not the point of the enterprise. Unlike Sunday Soup, which funds individual artists with specific projects, the time/bank sources specialized labor for projects in progress. Currently general listings on the site include a request for a guided tour of den Hague (for two time hours), a call for a gallery installer to hang a New York artists work in a group show in Berlin (two hours)100, and many offers and requests for translations. The time/bank is not wildly popular - there are only one or two new listings per day, much fewer than on an international secondary-market site like craigslist. The participants can all be assumed to identify in some respect as artists, since e-fluxs time bank is designed as a parallel micro-economy for the cultural community.101 This micro-economy, instead of relying on geographic proximity to enforce social codes of reciprocity, instead places confidence in a hopeful sense of the strength of the individual actors self-identification with an international art community.
100 e-flux, time/bank listings, http://e-flux.com/timebank/all-listings 101 e-flux, time/bank about, http://e-flux.com/timebank/about

 Instead of relying solely on the social debt incurred in receiving generosity, the debt incurred by actors in the time bank is to maintain the movement of the alternative time-based currency. And of course, in order to gain time-currency to spend, one must initially find and perform a service for another participant. Everyone enters into the network a pauper, and must interact in order to gather

42

value to be spent on further interactions. Time/bank allows artists to gather real codified value from what would have otherwise have been just generosity. As Anton Vidokle states in an interview about the project:
Most artists and curators are very generous with their time: they often help people in the field, colleagues and students and others, to develop ides, offer knowledge and criticism, expert skills and so forth. For many of these services theres no expectation or a practical way of getting compensation. Usually you dont let this stop you. But if you spend a lot of your time doing things that are not compensated economically, it will become difficult to get by. Time/Bank is an attempt to create a parallel economic structure that could create compensation and enable you to spend more time doing things that you really enjoy doing.102

Projects such as time/bank are creating protocol and pathways for this type of exchange as well as marking the trails and publishing the maps. This process is making visible the previously invisible network of strong tie and weak tie bonds that make a community of individuals create and maintain social networks. 102 Anton Vidokle, interview with Jolien Verlaek, Working With That We Feeling Anton Vidokle on
Time/Bank, Metropolis M Magazine, 2011, http://metropolism.com/magazine/2011-no1/werken- met-een-wij-gevoel-1/english

 Conclusion: Structured generosity and other alternatives to the commodity economy

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become more important in times of economic stress and deprivation. In discussing the gift economy David Cheal notes an increased dependence on social networks for mutual aid under conditions of economic and political insecurity.103 In these situations rational actors adapt to lack of access to the broader commodity-oriented economy by the use of symbolic taxes for the purposes of social reproduction.104. He notes that the these symbolic social reproduction oriented acts of generosity are instrumental or cooperation basedrather than expressive, sentimental or sociability based.105 Anton Vidokle describes the Time/Bank project as both a response to the current international economic crisis and to the ongoing crisis of value for artwork in general: While Time/Bank is a project that responds to the shortage of money and resources, Julieta and I did not start it because of the current economic situation only. For us, its more of a response to a perpetual condition in the field of art, where historically there have been a lot of imbalances with how time, resources and compensation are distributed. 106 Projects like the Time/Bank or Sunday Soup are on the one hand a reaction to the economic, technological and political climate of their time, which seek to both fill in the gaps left vacant by recently defunded or overly solipsistic institutions of
103 Cheal, 96. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Vidokle, http://metropolism.com/magazine/2011-no1/werken-met-een-wij-gevoel-1/english

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cultural support, and on the other hand logical extensions of the movement toward artworks that aestheticize networks of exchange. Acts of currency-free exchange in this broader practice-based community context reflect Cheals concept of cooperation based generosity, and are generally free from the sentiment associated with private gift-exchange. We can see that what has been called dematerialized or conceptual art is not without material at all, but rather is concerned with foregrounding systems of communication. In Relational Aesthetics, a text that has become the standard referent for artworks based on exchange, Nicolas Bourriaud worries that communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that divide the social bond up into (quite) different products. Artistic activity for its part, strives to achieve modest connections, open up (one or two) obstructed passages, and connect levels of reality kept apart from one another. The much vaunted communication superhighways with their toll plazas and picnic areas, threaten to become the only possible thoroughfare from a point to another in the human world.107 The art works that he presents as an antidote to this dystopia of technologically mediated human interaction are often predicated on some form of gift exchange between artist and audience, but take place in the institutional, populated space of the gallery. Relational art, which Bourriaud defines as an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the

107 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods w/ Mathieu

Copeland. (Les presses du reel, 1998, 2002), 8.

 assertion of an independent and private symbolic space 108 is essentially an institutional encounter between artist-producer and audience-consumer. The projects Bourriaud discusses as relational, including Rirkrit Tiravanijas various

45

soup giveaways, Sophie Calles documentation of services or actions, and Philippe Parenos parties, are essentially time-based attempts at foregrounding the transaction of the concept from artist to audience, in the form of a production engineered to promote embodied interaction: a gathering or a gesture. These types of works are intended to promote a bond between audience members and the artist, and that relational bond is the locus of the work its aesthetic goal. In a subsequent work, Radicant Aesthetics, Bourriaud describes how Works of art create relations, and these relations are exterior to their objects; they possess aesthetic autonomy. 109 Relational artworks as described by Bourriaud are engaged in aestheticizing systems of social interaction within the context of cultural institutions. The production of immaterial or objectless works for networks, as in net.art or software based works, also provides for relational interaction between participants, though the emphasis on a bodily interaction is obviously less present. The projects that I have described here use technological networks as a structure for disseminating information or self-promotion, but the system of exchange they investigate is economic. If we define form, as Bourriaud does, in terms of a coherent unit, a structure (independent entity of inner dependencies) which shows
2009, 2010), 155.

108 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14.

109 Bourriaud, Nicolas, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen & Lili Porten. (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,

46

the typical features of a world110 then the structure of administrated exchange, in its specific guise as alternative economy, can take its place as a form which presents the features of the world of commerce. Commerce here being understood in the broadest sense, as interchange or social relations between actors. Alternative artist produced economies are essentially about aestheticizing the network functions of economies as a site of exchange. Like relational works, these projects create value in the process or the action of exchange, rather than by producing objects for contemplation. However, instead of requiring transmission of an idea from artist to audience in order to produce the desired interaction, these projects are interactions that are produced by the audience. The product is not the immaterial network-based goods of net.art, the concept itself, or the interaction between audience and artist, but the production and exchange of value itself by the participants. As relational artworks rely on the institutions of the art world to reify their value as art, and artworks created for technological networks rely on structures of technology and promotion of innovation to realize their value, aestheticized economies require an influx of value from external sources. In InCUBATEs case this value comes from the approval of an audience invested in a community and willing to allocate resources gathered from their individual incomes. Despite the lack of currency being exchanged in the time/bank, the project is reliant on e-fluxs entrepreneurial efforts to support its structure, and the recognition of the group within an international art scene that lends credence to its projects. Where

110 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 19.

 relational artworks place the artist as intermediary between institution and

47

audience, the works I describe are the products of administrators who mediate the flow of value through systems of their own design to an audience whose participation populates the network. The visible aesthetic of these aestheticized economies stems from the design world, where usability, interface structuring, and functionality are prized. However, the internal workings bear more similarity to relational aesthetics or net.art, where the network structure of participant interaction and exchange creates both content and context. In the same way that a networked product like Facebook creates value for its participant consumers by providing a platform for information exchange and self-promotion, while relying on the value of the presence of those participants to sustain itself through advertising, aestheticized economies rely on both internal and external goods for self-maintenance. Instead of engaging in institutional critique, aestheticized economies are engaging in the production of parallel systems which, like Facebook, are produced by users. By providing a networking community building service of moderate value to their participants, they deliver the mother load of value to the administrators. These projects do not replace the non-profit, educational, or museum models of support for artists, but they do make the radical gesture of visualizing the value exchange that goes on in communities engaged in "practices". Capitalism, which seeks to free the individual from bonds with others outside

of a small family unit by using the abstraction of currency, inasmuch as such a thing is possible, is here countered with a suggestion of a return to increased bonding,

48

more social ties. The increase in social ties is not an end in itself. Instead it can be seen that the ties themselves have been determined to have value because they form the content of the administrated system. The "eros" nature of interpersonal bonding ties relies upon the "logos" of the supporting administrated system. Together the technological, administrated network communication structure and the individual community oriented bonds create a model "object" that allows for the aesthetic contemplation of the systems of commerce and of culture. In the same way that Duchamp's readymade exposes the rule by defiantly becoming the exception, these works expose the rule that art must be produced by the artist or group of artists rather than by the administrators. These aestheticized economies make visible previously invisible and inchoate ties and sources of value, but like other community-based alternative economies they are unlikely to successfully supplant either commodity-based capitalism or the regular functioning of the commercial art market. Rather, they articulate the particular ability of art to function as a tool to apprehend and investigate systems of administration and commerce, and perhaps to act as a prognosticator of our future interactions and engagements with each other via the systems and structures we perpetuate.

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Bibliography "New Harmony." American Studies at the University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/cities/newharmony.html. Cultural Economics. [in English]. Edited by F. Abb-Decarroux, Ruth Towse and Abdul Khakee Springer-Verlag: Berlin ;, 1992. The Value of Culture : On the Relationship between Economics and Arts. [in English]. Edited by Arjo Klamer Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 1996. "Robert Owen, 1771-1858." The History Guide, http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/owen.html. Collectivism after Modernism : The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2007. New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art. Edited by Christiane Paul. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin Wes Blomster, Gordon Finlayson, Nicholas Walker. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Ahmed, Sara Unzila. "An Interview with Richard Nonas." Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, March 2009 2009. Art&Education. "About." http://www.artandeducation.net/about/. Benhamou-Huet, Judith. The Worth of Art (2) [in English]. Assouline: New York, NY, 2008. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics [in English]. Collection Documents Sur L'art. Les Presses du rel: Dijon, 2002. . The Radicant. Translated by Lili Porten James Gussen. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009. 2010. Bozeman, Barry. "Public-Value Failure: When Efficient Markets May Not Do." Public Administration Review 62, no. 2 (2002): 145-61. Brooklyn, FEAST in. "How We Feast." http://feastinbklyn.org/?page_id=2. Carrier, James. "Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange." Sociological Forum 6, no. 1 (1991): 119-36.

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Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life [in English]. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1984. Cheal, David J. The Gift Economy. London: Routledge,1988. Critchley, Simon, and Chantal Mouffe. Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London ; New York: Routledge, 1996. Currah, Andrew. "Managing Creativity: The Tensions between Commodities and Gifts in a Digital Networked Environment." Economy and Society 36, no. 3 (3 August 2007 2007): 467-94. de Mijolla, Alain, ed. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. s.v. "Eros." http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=176 (accessed March, 2011). Diedrichsen, Diedrich. On [Surplus] Value in Art: Reflections 01. Reflections. Witte de With Publishers and Sternberg Press, 2008. Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects : Art and the Dialectics of Desire. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006. e-flux. "Time/Bank." http://e-flux.com/timebank/. Fischer, Ernst. The Necessity of Art, a Marxist Approach [in English]. Pelican Books, A632. Penguin Books: Baltimore, 1963. Flyntz, Elizabeth, and Anna Scime. "Erotic Economies Working Group." Digital Humanities Initiative at Buffalo, 2010. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol : How Control Exists after Decentralization. Leonardo (Series) (Cambridge, Mass.). MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2004. Glover, Paul. "Anti-Monopoly Money." e-flux journal, no. 27 (2011). Graves, James Bau. Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community & Public Purpose. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Groys, Boris. "Art and Money." e-flux, no. #24 (April, 2009 2011). Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 2007. InCUBATE. "About." http://incubate-chicago.org/about/. Jacobs, Jane. The Nature of Economies. Modern Library: New York, 2000.

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Jung, C.G. Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 10). Translated by Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1970. Keat, Russell. Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2000. Krysa, Joasia, ed. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Vol. 03, Data Browser New York: Autonomedia, 2006. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy : Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. . Hegemony and Socialist Strategy : Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London ; New York: Verso, 2001. Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972... University of California Press, 1973. Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System [in English]. Meridian (Stanford, Calif.). Stanford University Press: Stanford, Calif., 2000. Lthy, Michael. "The Consumer Article in the Art World: On the Para-Economy of American Pop Art." In Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, edited by Max Hollein and Christoph Grunenberg. Hatje Cantz Publishers. Lydn, Karl. "Interview: Anton Vidokle of E-Flux." Dossier Journal, 2009. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Libidinal Economy [in English]. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, 1993. . The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 1979. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization; a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud [in English]. Humanitas; Beacon Studies in Humanities. Beacon Press: Boston, 1955. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. . Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1, New York: Random House, 1977. 1867. Matta-Clark, Gordon. "Food." 43 mins., 1972.

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Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Routledge, 2000. Meyer, Ursula. Conceptual Art. Edited by Ursula Meyer. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972. Morrison, Richard of The Times (London). Review of the $12 Million Stuffed Shark http://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark- Contemporary/dp/0230620590/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333563202& sr=1-1. Mouffe, Chantal. "Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy." Translated by Stanley Gray. In Readings in Contemporary Political Sociology, edited by Kate Nash. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. "Ever. Ever. Ever. Interview with Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle." e- flux (2006). Pollon, Ann. "Biography of Ursula Meyer." http://www.ursulameyer.com/biography.htm. Purves, Ted. What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art. SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture. Albany: Stat University of New York Press, 2004. Rampley, Matthew. "Systems Aesthetics, Burnham and Others." http://virose.pt/vector/b_12/rampley.htm. "Art Review Power 100." Art Review, 2011. Rothenberg, Stephanie. Email correspondence with author, Oct. 25, 2011 2011. Schaafsma, Benjamin J. "Other Options: Artists Re-Interpreting, Altering, and Creating Infrastructure That Affects Their Everyday Lives." The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008. Shanken, Edward A. "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art." Siggraph Art and Culture, http://artexetra.com/InfoAge.pdf. Sholette, Gregory. ""State of the Union: On Artistic Labor"." ArtForum (2008). . "State of the Union." ART WORK: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, Temporary Services, 2009. . Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2011.

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Marxism and Culture. Edited by Mike Wayne (Reader in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University) Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics at University of London) Birkbeck,New York: Pluto Press, 2011. Slater, Josephine Berry. "Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems." In Data Browser, edited by Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. Soup, InCUBATE / Sunday. "Soup Network." http://sundaysoup.org/soup-network. Stock, Portland. "Money = Future Music for Conceptual Minds." In Portland Stock, 2011. Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. 1 ed. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Throsby, David. "The Production and Consumption of the Arts: A View of Cultural Economics." The Journal of Economic Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1994 1994): 1-29. Timebanks.org. "Network." Timebanks.org, http://timebanks.org/network. Tool, Marc R. "A Social Value Theory in Neoinstitutional Economics." Journal of Economic Issues 11, no. 4 (1977): 823-46. Verlaek, Jolien. "Working with That 'We Feeling', Anton Vidokle on Time/Bank." Metropolis M Magazine, 2011. Warren, Josiah. "Plan of the Cincinnati Labor for Labor Store." Mechanics Free Press, http://www.crispinsartwell.com/warren.htm.

 Appendix A: Illustrations

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Figure 1 - SUNDAY SOUP network

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Figure 2 - SOUP network map

Figure 3 - Buffalo Sunday Soup - Hosted by Sugar City, photo by Bernice Radle.

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Figure 4 - 3 time/bank listings

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Figure 5 - 2 time/bank listings

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Figure 6 - time/bank currency designed by Lawrence Weiner.

Figure 7 - Ithaca Hours currency designed with a variety of locally relevant flora, fauna, and personalities.

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Appendix B: Further Resources There are many groups of artists and culture workers currently investigating economics (and particularly the familiar stomping grounds of the culture market) as a system and as a platform for the production of networks of exchange. In the preceding paper, I chose to focus on two projects that I see as archetypal and particularly influential in terms of this general category of work. The following is a list (by no means exhaustive, but perhaps representative) of other groups and projects that I discovered in my travels and research. Ive divided these individual projects into subcategories that presented, to me, helpful guidelines for suggesting the works underlying structural similarities and differences. Most of these groups originate in the US, where there is much less available institutional funding for artists and art projects. Ive included only groups which are contemporary (rather than art-historical), and which I was unable to address in my paper. I. Alternative or Democratic Funding Models These projects generally aim to provide financial support for specific art projects or individual artists, while circumventing institutional structures such as universities or non-profit grant making bodies. Many of them use food as a resource for community building. a. TRUST ART Trust Art was founded by artist Seth Aylmer and economic analyst Jose Serrano-McClain in 2009. The goal of the organization is to build community around public art projects by issuing shares based either on financial donations or in-kind contributions of time or materials. Trust Arts trustee is Lewis Hyde, who wrote a seminal text on art and generosity: The Gift. http://beta.trustart.org/ b. Artist Run Credit League (ARCL) A project of InCUBATE based on the concept of Tanda; a form of rotating credit association and monetary practice formed upon a core of participants who agree to make regular contributions to a fund which is given in whole or in part to each contributor in rotation. Such a form is often utilized by Mexican and Latin American immigrant communities as means of establishing informal credit when the use of banks is not a viable option. (http://artistruncreditleague.wordpress.com/about/) http://artistruncreditleague.wordpress.com/ c. Josh Greenes Service-Works Service-Works is a project of artist Josh Greene, who provides a grant for an individual artist or project based on his earnings during a single night working as a

60 waiter in a San Francisco fine dining restaurant. Josh chooses the winning application based on his own tastes. http://www.josh-greene.com/serviceworks/ d. Sweet Tooth of the Tiger This project ended in 2009. Before its demise, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger was a renegade bakery project run by Tracy Candido, which functioned as a cross between an artist residency and a bake sale. Guest baker/artists would produce the ingredients for a bake sale with Tracys help, then sell them and use the profits to fund a project. http://www.sweettoothofthetiger.com/

e. Co-op Bar Co-op Bar is a franchised fundraising model for art venues, rather than individual artists. The venue builds a mobile bar, and investors purchase bottles of liquor. Visitors buy drinks at regular bar mark-up prices, and after returning the initial funds from the liquor investors the venue can keep the profits. This public domain project was developed by Steve Lambert while in residence at eyebeam art + technology center. http://www.eyebeam.org/projects/co-op-bar Public domain guide to creating a co-op bar, complete with blueprints, spreadsheets, and bottle label templates: http://visitsteve.com/co-op-bar/ II. Experiments in Extra-market Modes of Exchange or Distribution and Parallel Economies These projects and groups attempt to develop alternative structures for the distribution of art-goods, outside of the commercial art market. Rather than funding the production of the projects themselves, the finished goods are circulated in order to build community and networks. a. Fine Art Adoption Network FAAN describes itself as an online network, which uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors (http://www.fineartadoption.net/). The projects goal is to connect works with caring collectors who are selected by the artist based on their own individual criteria. http://www.fineartadoption.net/

61 b. Big Miss Moviola and Joanie4Jackie These projects, which may or may not still be extant, were created by Miranda July in the mid- 1990s as a means of distributing short videos made by women. Before a video-enabled internet, these chain-letter style tapes functioned as video-zines for a burgeoning DIY media community, intertwined with the Riot Grrrl movement. http://www.joanie4jackie.com/ http://vimeo.com/5326144

III.

Warped Iterations of Standard Market Procedure These artist-produced versions of market structures (a store, a factory) draw attention to the anomalous nature of the commodity art-market, whose institutions and systems of value often function in contrast to contemporary capitalist institutions. They also caricature capitalist modes of production and distribution. a. Fawn Kriegers COMPANY This project by sculptor Fawn Krieger, is influenced by Claes Oldenbergs 1961 project Store, in which the sculptor filled an entire storefront on the Lower East Side with sculpted version of commercially produced objects, all in his signature paper-mach and painted plaster style. In Kriegers version (supported by Art in General) objects and services are available from a variety of artists, including Krieger herself. Many of the objects chosen for sculptural recreation in COMPANY are those that would not normally be available in a commercial setting for reasons of hygiene or legality: old band-aids, prescription drugs, passports, and credit cards are a few examples. http://www.fawnkrieger.com/company/company_products.html http://www.fawnkrieger.com/company.html

b. Double Happiness Manufacturing - (aka Invisible Threads or Double Happiness Jeans) This project by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse consists of a virtual sweatshop located in the online world of Second Life. Second Life factory laborers (controlled by players) take orders from real-life customers. Once designed, the jeans are printed out on fabric and can be worn (albeit not comfortably) by an actual body. http://www.pan-o-matic.com/blog/?page_id=72 http://www.thething.it/snafu/?p=361

 IV.

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General Agitation These groups are engaged in protest against specific art-institutional practices that they see as unfair or immoral. a. PLATFORM (or Promoting Creative Processes of Democratic Engagement to Advance Social and Ecological Justice) Founded in the early 1980s and based in London, PLATFORM is involved in various forms of economic, ecological, and political activism. Many of its projects are net-based locative media intended to raise awareness about corporate crimes. Recently they have been making works to protest BPs position as major fiscal sponsor of Londons TATE Modern. http://blog.platformlondon.org/2012/03/20/tate-soundscape- hijacked-by-artists/ http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/20 10/10/10/platform/ b. W.A.G.E. (or Working Artists and the Greater Economy) Influenced by the Art Workers Coalition (formed in 1969), W.A.G.E., intends to pressure various New York City based museums, galleries, and auction houses into enacting reforms. Demands include the payment of artist fees for inclusion in museum shows and the fair treatment of unionized auction house workers and art handlers. http://wagerage.blogspot.com/ http://www.wageforwork.com http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/20 10/10/10/w-a-g-e/

V.

More on Time Banks These are not specifically art projects, but there are many versions of alternative currencies, especially time banks, all over the world. There are over 100 contemporary iterations of specifically time-based currencies (with many micro-currencies in addition). This fiscal localism seems to be a growing trend in the US, Europe, and South and Central America. a. Time Banks USA Nonprofit support service for time banks nationwide. http://community.timebanks.org/findtimebanks.php

63 b. TINY (Time Interchange NY) A NYC based time bank. https://timeinterchange.wordpress.com/ c. Our Goods Our Goods describes itself as a barter network for the creative community, which it seems to define quite broadly. This group is much more aligned with the non-profit and entrepreneurial world than e-flux. https://ourgoods.org/

 Appendix C: Erotic Economies

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As gift exchange is an erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things.111

Erotic Economies began as curatorial concept based on readings of Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss (both of whom published books titled The Gift focused on theories and observations of generosity in culture) and a simultaneous obsession with the vagaries and vulgarities of the commercial art market. Of particular interest were the ways in which performative, public, distributed, or immaterial works were being either absorbed or ignored by the art market. The specific idea of an erotic economy is my own phrasing, but the concept is an amalgamation of post-Marxist concepts of value, exchange, and culture presented Mauss, Hyde, and Herbert Marcuse. The term erotic economy specifically identifies the production of networks of exchange that exist outside of capitalism. Eros, the great binder112, values the irrational, immaterial, and experiential bond created by an encounter between individuals, rather than the logic and self-motivation oriented aspects of that interaction those things that might be able to assimilate into the market and find some sort of commodity value.

111 Hyde, 86 112 C.G. Jung. Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10), (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1970), 10.

 My erotic economy is the system of circulation of value specific to this broader, cultural, comprehension of erotics.

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Lewis Hyde describes this bond as erotic in reference to the mimetic bond being produced, where one individual (and by extension a community) is tied to another in a sort of coital melding of interests. Hyde uses this specific and loaded term erotic in order to get at the problematic intersection of generosity and art (which he sees as intrinsically related) in capital. This acknowledges the difficult position of eroticism in relation to value, as the practice of sex is ideally one of mutually given pleasure, outside of commodity, but one that can in certain circumstances produce both reproductive value (through conception of children, i.e. future labor and markets) and the commodification of sexuality and the eroticized body in media. Thus this term erotic in relation to artworks and generosity points to the way that gifts and art exist both separately from capital, and as part of that economic system, producing surplus value via both production and exchange. In Eros and Civilization Marcuse explains that the pleasure principle113 (the human impulse to play, and to eroticize social interactions) is suppressed as much as possible under capitalism in order to exploit pleasurable leisure activities (such as sex) and create surplus value via labor that is performed for free but that generates profit. The scientific management of instinctual needs114 requires the system to subvert the erotic impulse in order to turn merchandise which has to be bought and used into objects of the libido115
114 Marcuse, xxi. 115 Ibid.

113 Herbet Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. (Boston, Beacon Press), 12.

 Marcuse presents the utopian alternative to this system (which he calls

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polymorphous sexuality116 in a situation in which the capability of post-industrial societies to produce a level of productivity high enough to do away with the necessity of exploiting labor and sublimating the pleasure principle is exploited, allowing the populace engage in libidinous social interactions, focused on interpersonal bonds and pleasure rather than value production. However, the existing state of science and culture, in the service of capital, serves to repress this instinct. Both Hyde and Marcuse are relying on a Freudian definition of Eros as the underlying binding force of human interaction: In his final theory of the drives, Sigmund Freud made Eros a fundamental concept referring to the life instincts (narcissism and object libido), whose goals were the preservation, binding, and union of the organism into increasingly larger units.117 Thus the Erotic Economies project is an attempt to pinpoint the intersection of these ideas: locating utopian iteration of the pleasure principle in artworks that deal with the binding, un-commodifiable, qualities inherent in culture, generosity, and sexuality, without losing sight of the potentially destructive nature of the gift economy in all its forms. There are quite a few new formations of art and culture that seem to be dealing with the production of erotic economies, most notably what is being called public practice after relational aesthetics, and various forms of immaterial art for network systems. Many of these formations acknowledge problems arising from the 116 Marcuse, xv.

117 International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, s.v. Eros.

 market directly. Most interesting to me in this context of erotic economies are

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projects that attempt to provide new methods of exchange and communication, or new modes of funding artworks, in parallel or in opposition to the existing models. To that end, with and without collaborators, I produced several projects that

served to illustrate or investigate these concepts. Erotic Economies Journal Project and the Erotic Economies Working Group In 2009, Anna Scime and I began working on a publishing and curatorial project intended to collect work by emerging media artist who seemed to have some parallel interest in (what was at the time a vaguer notion) of the intersection between sexuality, economics, and value. We wrote: The mission of Erotic Economies is to create a critical discourse among media and visual artists who are concerned with investigating, reproducing, or otherwise engaging with economies of exchange, in order to excavate and engender writing and artwork that underscores those bonds and links created by exchanges that occur outside of commodity exchange or work that can present visionary schemes for escaping production/consumption cycles, and that can portray otherwise invisible systems of value and radical noncompliance with markets. Is anything outside the market? Can art resist capitalism the way it attempted to resist materiality? Is there anything beyond value? Can humans exist

 in any state besides labor, work, and play? that is, besides death (pace Derrida)?118

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The Erotic Economies journal intended to look at various issues that arise in the intersection of Eros, the market, and art, and to create a conversation between artworks and audiences that address these issues. The journal also attempts to expand the usual iteration of a scholarly journal by integrating a wide variety of media: video, web-based, performance documentation, writing, schematics, and images. The first issue is a collection of works that addressed the widest implications of what was meant by erotic economies, some pieces dealing with sexuality and its commodification, others dealing with labor, capital, currency, and the effects of technological networks on cultural exchange. The simplest iterations include Hermonie Onlys counterfeit hundred-dollar bill, which turned out to violate anti-counterfeiting laws, and required several last- minute negotiations with the publications printer and bindery. Lou Lauritas paintings contain text, that once deciphered by the viewer, accuses him or her of implication in the spread of sexually transmitted disease (Waterfall 18 You Knew When You Fucked Him Bareback ) or hyper-materialism (Gimme You Pray for So Much Shit You Should Be Burned In It). Sophie Hamachers film Der Nebel uses YouTube as a source for found footage of smoke and fog (produced by the weather, warfare, and anti-riot police) as the basis for a meditation on the encompassing and bewildering nature of capitalism. Reaching a little further into abstractions of these

118 Flyntz et al., Erotic Economies Working Group, 2010

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themes, James Boatwrights YouTuberator allows the user to remix existing content based on keyword-search algorithms. The web component of the journal includes documentation of projects that have been retroactively taken under the Erotic Economies umbrella, such as 2008s B Be-In, in which a group of artists from Baltimore was transported to Buffalo, and shared three days of performance and leisure with members of the Buffalo art community, amid great shows of hospitality (home-cooked meals, gifts, tours, etc.) Other Erotic Economies Projects: Other curatorial and production projects continually intersect with the umbrella of Erotic Economies. Most of these have to do with creating spaces for networked communication and collaborative curating. While there was an Occupy presence in front of Buffalos City Hall, Anna Scime and I presented bi-weekly free public screenings of activist themed film and video (many borrowed from Tony Conrads collection or the DMS video library). We attempted to choose films that were appropriate for the children in attendance, while providing helpful historical information and subjects for debate for the adults. The screenings were well attended by people associated with the University, who were not part of the encampment, but used the event as an excuse to come and show their support. I have also been engaged in an ongoing collaborative curatorial project with the Bauhaus University Weimar. The exhibition, Time Mutations, has the goal of strengthening the bonds between Bauhaus Universitys Mediengestaltung

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department and our Media Study department by creating a space for the display of artworks produced by students, alumni, and faculty of the two institutions. The concept of the exhibition, which focuses on the technologically produced experience of a broken timeline, was inspired by a series of Skype jam sessions between Buffalo and the Bauhaus, taking place (respectively) in the afternoon and late evening. These Portal Project sessions led eventually to a longer collaborative curatorial project between the two departments about the very nature of this sort of time-and-space lapse communication, as well as the effects of editing on media. The Time Mutations project, which began with an exhibition housed in a Nazi-era radio transmission building in Weimar, will conclude at UBs Center for the Arts gallery. In all of these endeavors, the concept of erotic economies exists as an

attempt to foreground the essential exchange component of both economic transactions and the presentation of artworks, particularly those works whose form and distribution is premised on imminently distributable media.