A Conceptual Consultancy erects temporary office in the Auckland Art Gallery seeking clients interested in participating in the international Contemporary Art and Culture industries.
Agents:
Joseph Jowitt & Joshua Rutter
This phase of the ongoing Conceptual Art & Culture Industries project occurred as part of the Lab in the Auckland Art Gallery for the 5th Auckland Triennial.
Emergent Services were offered: one agent manufactured bespoke audio stings to match any participant’s personal brand identity, while the other agent ran Cultural Capital Means testing. Willing interlocutors had their Cultural Capital assessed and were offered strategies to increase their cultural holdings, or utilise their surplus. Based on the results of the audit they were assigned a number, and if they wished to be attached to the project, this number would be the basis of font size which their name would be printed in. If they felt their name was too small they were offered to opportunity to increase their Cultural Holdings at the flat rate of $1.00NZD per point size. By having their name prominently displayed in the Auckland Art Gallery participants could greatly increase their Cultural Capital. If the participant had a large standing already and a large font size, the project harvested the surplus value as a trickle down effect.
With the recent escalation of the techno-social sphere, mediated interaction and info- products demand constant ministration. The zone of productivity is endlessly diluted until the act of identity preening and discursive hyper-communication has become the primary activity. This fragmentation of postindustrial capitalism (for the Western middle classes) has allowed abstracted, semi-social productivity to both take the place of actual labour-time, and erode the division between the traditionally separate leisure-time/work-time states of being.
The general dematerialisation of labour-time as the primary source of employment activity in many Western contexts (as a result of the geopolitical division of industrial production to third world countries) has resulted in the capital itself being abstracted into a sphere of associations, mediations and attention time. Cognitive consumption then, becomes the actuated capital or Semiocapital. This has created a contingency on a consumer base which through the consumptive act, is enmeshed in the production itself, as well as a producer of cultural material which is intimately and permanently connected to the increasingly generalised territory of common production/consumption. As the state of constant of immaterial production is a standard element of post-Fordist capitalism, the cognitarian is never free of work.
The artists will be offering consultancy services in the realm of contemporary culture. The project aims to articulate the fiscal narrative inherent in contemporary modes of cultural poesis and its integration into the combinatory frame known as Semiocapital.