New Primary Market - Temporary Holdings Exhibition
Take me to your dealer
The Temporary Holdings Exhibition featured works from recent AUT graduates. The works were continually rotated throughout the show by two technicians, mirroring and underlining the movement of art objects as commodities throughout the primary and secondary markets. I acted as the dealer, touching elbows, taking commission, moving product.
Expanding my practice to explore and reconcile its position in the current ecology of finance has led me to dealing. When the artist becomes the dealer, can the market become the extemporised form? As a muse it is multitudinous and drenched in facets of details, rich in varietal reach. Expanding a practice to include the movement and flow of capital, indeed to centralise it, problematises the traditional stereotype of the artist (bringer of mystic truths, starving poet) and taints it with the newer incarnation of the modern successful artist: the risk-taking entrepreneurial adventurer for the New Economy. The artist model has become the new prototype of the ultimate emergent services worker: flexible, self-employed, upwardly-mobile. With precarity of means being their standard state, they are perfectly suited to being at the forefront of a life in the vacillating job and money markets: these idealised workers just needed to respond ‘creatively’ to the economic world at large, in the same way they were experimenting with their artistic production. Artist-labour-models perfectly express the neoliberal doctrine that individuals have control over their own economic fate. The interaction with the market and the increasingly blurred fields of consumption/production, become a primary component of the works’ form.
Featured Artists:
Fu-On Chung
Phillipa Emery
Gareth Hemmings
Jenny Horrell
Claudia Jowitt
Rhiannon Leddra
Rohan Mills
Ammon Ngakuru
Debbie Tubb
Mark Schroder
Stock Technicians:
Lisa Greenfield & Joshua Rutter