PASS IT ON: CONNECTING DO-IT-YOURSELF CULTURE COLUMBIA COLLEGE A + D GALLERY
Pass It On: Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture
It’s All About Things
The Micromentalists
What’s your idea of utopia and how to reach it? If you agree with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” idea, that capitalism and liberal democracy have triumphed, we’re there. If you’re a fan of Bruce Mau, the designer guru behind last fall’s “Massive Change” exhibit/trade show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a participant in the corporate-visionary C6 Symposium at the Pritzker Pavilion in April, then we’re well on our way. But if you have some sympathy with the Diggers, the 1960s San Francisco interventionists, we’ve got a long way to go. Their name came from a 17th-century British collective that opposed private property, farming common land and giving away the harvest. The modern Diggers began as a guerrilla street-theater group but later made use of volunteer labor, donated money, and scavenged goods to create free stores, bakeries, banks, hospitals, and the like. Since then other activists and artists, notably those in the Fluxus movement, have taken on similar projects intended to challenge the concept of global capitalism generally and the inflated commercial art market in particular.
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All these shows propose new systems, at least in the universe of art–free or shared resources, negotiated barter, and sliding-scale pricing. There’s no reason these experiments can’t coexist, but as Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille have pointed out, gifts can have psychological and economic consequences, incurring a nebulous debt or entailing displays of expenditure and waste. Sometimes you just want to make a fair exchange for a pretty product. Still, it’s good to be challenged to think about artworks as something other than fashion accessories, luxury items, or marketing gambits.
