A La Cart Performance Website
2014 – …
in collaboration with Urša Sekirnik
internet project / live performance / various installations
Art is not something you can sell, is just one of the answers received in a survey my colleague, Urša Sekirnik, and I sent around, asking the art scene around us what they thought about a performance art being sold through a webshop.
Claims like this have encouraged us to set on a research, trying to understand why so many surveyed artists would utter something like this. Our survey showed that many artists didn’t consider art as consumer good and therefore not something one could sell. Such statements shocked us, because they were clearly not true, but they also made us wonder whether there was a correlation between such ideas and the common belief that making art is not real work.
Determined to show the opposite, we chose the format of a webshop, one of the most neoliberal inventions of our time, to be the frame of our artistic work. This format suited our purpose perfectly; through a webshop we could promote, present and sell our work and set a fixed price for both our work and our art. But placing something “of such refined substance” as a work of art into the neoliberal machinery of a webshop also created a conflict, again an effect we wanted to achieve, because we wanted the audience to reflect on notions such as the value of art or the value of artistic work.
However problematic the idea of performance webshop might appear, we realized that the mechanism of the webship, with all its functions developed in order to make money, can help us earn the money art making actually costs. Borrowing from common marketing tricks and hidden costs that we normally hate so much when booking a plane ticket, we devised a shopping process in which art seems very cheap at first sight. But venturing into the shopping process, the customer encounters more and more hidden costs (for example, starting costs for the artist to come on stage, travel and accommodation, VAT…). This way we try to educate the customer about how much art actually cost, but we also set realistic prices that do cover the cost of artistic work.
So while the complex structure behind the performance webshop is already an art work in itself, the project also encompasses the second artwork – that being the actually performance customers can order via the webshop. The topic of the performance is again very personal. Taking ourselves for an example, we address the absurdities connected to art-making, among others the need to always producing new ideas, being trapped in vicious circle of precarity, burning out from working all the time, etc. The bizzare fact was that while with this project we were trying to point out the unsustainable conditions connected to the art production, we were producing it exactly in the same unsustainable way.
A quick audio-visual tour around the performance webshop is available here.
Formats used: webshop, performance, exhibition, peep show, archive
Element of disturbance/subversion: abuse of online marketing tricks
Method: pre-prepared curating
Key topics discussed: living conditions in the arts, authorship, value of art, value of artistic work, vicious circle of life, precarity