EXCERPT
The art market has always provided asylum for value, and also for people like us. Artists Micaela Carolan Template – with whom I have collaborated on various projects – and Leigh Ledare join Reba Maybury as gatekeepers of the ethical and economic grey zone between conceptual practice and market ontologies. What we have in common is a willingness to exploit the bondage of capitalism with institutional consent.
Here, the art object is an external context – one of many chains that link value to its legitimacy. Carolan’s web-based project “The Chandelier Bid (2014)” (est. 2014) troubles the exhibition format with a series of e-commerce paywalls that may or may not function as installation art; Ledare and Maybury use more traditional forms of exploit: archive fetish, commodity dialectics.
The exhibition, when it is used, appears as the territorial strategy of a certain troubled estate. The dungeon provides Maybury and Carolan with a pre-existing marketplace; as a motif, it easily extends to Ledare’s prisonhouse of institutionally ringfenced desire.
Not only is there an economic precedent for prostitution as a reinvention of art, there’s rampant institutional sanction for it – the most prominent being Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), in which Fraser created an artwork out of a sexual encounter with an art collector who had paid to commission the work. The video documentation was then editioned and sold. It was a moment of unworkable conjecture under which the body of the white woman, as a pillar of morality, and the role of the artist, as a beaver of a cultural ethics, is realised within the sacrifice of exchange.
