Money & Artworks

Interest:

Formal:

Participatory performances/installations
People as material
Appropriation of social forms, behaviours, and relations
Money, labor, work, hiring, buying/selling within the work (economic transactions)

Subject:

Digital labor & globalization
Morality &art as economic good, meeting market needs
Activist art as the commodification of socio/political/moral criticism

Late 1960s in Argentina

The Argentine response to the Fluxus Happenings, in the context of their political climate (Argentine military Junta, 1966-1973)

Artists below part of Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (Group of Avant- Garde Artists)

Twenty elderly, lower- middle class men and women paid 600 pesos to stand for an hour, in front of an audience, subjected to fire extinguishers, a deafening sound and spotlights. Audience paid 200 pesos each to watch.

https://post.at.moma.org/sources/8/publications/136

Graciela Carnevale *Confinement Action* 1968
Participants locked in a room with glass windows. Had to break window to get out

“Once the people were inside, Carnevale locked the door from outside. The glass was covered with posters that the trapped public (most of them students) proceeded to remove. Then a group attempted to take apart the hinges. A man that was passing by, seeing the desperation in some of the faces inside, broke the glass wall to let them out. At this point an artist friend who was inside as a mole, disappointed by the actions of the rescuer, hit him with an umbrella. There was pushing and shoving, angry insults and the noise of broken glass. It happened to be October ninth, the first anniversary of Che’s assassination in Bolivia and the police were particularly alert. Soon a police battalion intervened and closed down the exhibit.” https://www.e-flux.com/journal/30/68167/the-sound-of-breaking-glass-part-i-spontaneity-and-consciousness-in-revolutionary-theory/

131b — Oscar Bony, *La Familia Obrera (The Working Class Family)* 1968
One working class family paid to sit on a plinth in the gallery for eight hours a day while recorded sounds of their home life played in the background. Money paid was 2X the daily wage of family’s income earner, Luis Ricardo Rodríguez, a die-caster.

above examples from Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

Piero Manzoni: Artist’s Breath and Artist’s Shit

Hans Haacke etc

Gursky: 99 Cent

David Hammons *Bliz-aard Ball Sale* (1983, winter NYC)
Selling snowballs

Louise Lawler *Monogram*
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1646?

More Recent

Aaron Koblin: mechanical turk series
Josh Kline : smoothie fridge
Lauren McCarthy

Santiago Sierra *12 Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes*
12 people paid minimum wage to be locked in a box for 4 hours everyday.

Sierra: …… A banker who buys one of my pieces is like a newspaper that accepts letters to the editor. Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and their guilt. (speaking generally, interview with BOMB magazine)