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Rogue Economies

By Lance Blomgren

The nature of economy, as Jonathan Crary posits it in his essay "Eclipse of the Spectacle," is perhaps better viewed as a vanishing point—a disappearance—than an empirically based system of figures, budgets, statistics, and market percentages. As he proposes, "There is no more opposition between the abstraction of money and the apparent materiality of commodities; money and what it can buy are now fundamentally of the same substance."

On one hand this loss of distinction can be seen as a sort of travesty where the relationship between work and what we work for becomes blurred in mediation, intangibility. Our proximity to local communities of production and their relation to consumption is rendered invisible, or is lost altogether. Somewhere in the middle of direct deposit, direct withdraw, and online shopping, our paycheque occasionally shows up as a black leather loveseat from The Brick. This can be alienating, and at some point to we have to admit that we usually have no idea where this thing was made, by whom, or under what conditions. The value in this economic formula, indeed the value of value, becomes difficult to discern, or worse, an invisible, systemic black hole of legally sanctioned extortion, false advertising, fine print and fees. In short, a bad deal for most of us.

On the other hand, to the optimistic eye, this collapse of economic distinctions can also be said to provide a sense of liberation or relief. The flexibility inherent in the wake of this economic vapour-trail offers room for re-imagining our notions of income and expenditure, our systems of value. Fixed definitions and distinguishing characteristics of our economic structures become meaningless.

In Crary's equation—where capital and commodity have merged—reestablishing local barter systems, leveling our theatres of trade, and locating new relationships of worth all seem possible. "Transient economies" can be ascertained in this condition of breakdown, as Matthew Stadler noted at a recent lecture at Artspeak in Vancouver—fleeting, localized interactions that remain unhindered from typical corporate influences.

The grey area of overlapping economic forces continues to be a source of inspiration and creative exploration. While art itself seems to provide a timeless example of the absurd vagaries of commerce—an almost random combination of investment and aesthetics, market value, material desire, and the overtly functionless—many artists have turned to the structures of business as a means of addressing and complicating these relationships.

In Vancouver, where the spectre of N.E. Thing Company's influential forays into economically-based projects continues to linger, it is not surprising to find The Regional Assembly of Text revisiting some of these ideas. In an attempt to create a cross-pollination of commerce and art practice (promote the Gross National Good over Gross National Product), N.E. Thing Co. functioned within the common business model, starting the Eye Scream Restaurant and the city's first cibacrome photo lab in the 1970s. These projects strove to demystify both disciplines, acting to bring a sense of wonder to our institutional structures and an organizational acumen to creative production.

Evolving out of these ideas, Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Dolen's Regional Assembly is a store-sized installation, featuring lines of hand-crafted notebooks, t-shirts, and various printed ephemera, which reveal a distinct eye for the one-of-a-kind, or deliberately noncommercial. Many of their products display a pointed revision of our print-based culture, adding grace and mystery to things like greeting cards, fridge magnets, glasswork, and office-grade stationary. In their hands, our endless bureaucratic paper trails take on personality, restoring a sense of tangibility to communication, something that often gets lost in the shuffle of filing or email. The store's design—part museum, part museum shop—locates a tentative meeting place between the economically viable and the eccentric.

Also in the South Main Street district, St. George Marsh, run by Jacob Gleeson and Gareth Moore, provides a more subversive vision of economics and art. Whereas The Regional Assembly of Text is ultimately shaped as a sales venture (like N.E. Thing's businesses, or Martin Kippenberger's early 80s Capri Restaurant in Venice, CA—another strong West Coast precedent), St. George Marsh forgoes typical notions of economic viability in favour of the social potential of entrepreneurial endeavours.

St. George Marsh, Vancouver BC
Photo Courtesy of Gleeson and Moore

Conceived as a kind of corner store (and housed in an suitable old residential store front), St. George nonetheless provides little in the way of consumer goods, food-stuffs, or even art. The products for sale—canned vegetables, old-fashioned candy, and exotic soft drinks—mainly provide a backdrop for a systematic revision of the currency of products.

St. George Marsh, Vancouver BC
Photo Courtesy of Gleeson and Moore

Here, you can find sticks and rocks for sale, outdated (or broken) technologies and media, bones and teeth, and curios that openly embrace ideas of worthlessness. In fact, there is much in this store that is not for sale. A recent installation of a transsexual abominable snowman pulling a sled of tools takes up one large section of the store strictly for your viewing pleasure, while a free book and VHS lending library undermines any commercial potential for the project. The economy favoured by St. George is one of experience and confusion. The store frustrates the shopping impulse, transforming the typically un-valuable into something approaching invaluable.

The recent Ghosttown project by Portland's Red76 art collective, running through February 2006, provides a nice counterpoint to these recent Vancouver undertakings, and a useful metaphoric link to Jonathan Crary's analysis of contemporary economics. The one-month series of events and venues, which includes a restaurant based on the potluck and a clothing store where you bring an item to exchange with another (after recording your personal relationship to the item of exchange), locates itself in the disappearance of supply and demand. The ghosts of commerce—what we've bought, what we consume—become the rubric for social interaction, a narrative of communion. The material histories of our food and manufactured products, as well as our relationship to them, presents a powerful common ground for discussion, empathy, catharsis, and possible reinvention.

Although our economic structures remain largely disconcerting—an external series of intangible abstractions—as these projects suggest, they also present a unifying potentiality, something worth its weight in gold.