Exhibition Review: David Tomas, Consigned for Auction

Journal of Curatorial Studies 3:1 (2014) 119-123 Exhibition Reviews 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. DAVID TOMAS, CONSIGNED FOR AUCTION Artexte, Montreal, 7 September–26 October 2013; 31 October 2013–11 January 2014 Reviewed by Marc James Léger, Independent Scholar In his 2012 artist’s book Escape Velocity, David Tomas proposes that the university is the new context for art’s production and the medium for the formation of the artist since at least the 1960s and 1970s. The production of knowledge, he argues, pivots around the library as the archive for books – the university’s main medium for storage and communication as well as a context for the transformation of ideas. Consigned for Auction transfers this interest in the relation between knowledge and cultural production to the exhibition and research spaces of the artists’ documentation centre Artexte. Since the 1980s Artexte has disseminated information on contemporary visual art through publications, the distribution of exhibition catalogues, and formerly through bookstore operations. The specific type of book that Tomas explores in this two-part exhibition is the auction catalogue, which he defines as ‘an archive in relation to an [art] object’s economic – market – value and cultural identity’ (2013), one that allows the tracing of an artwork’s movement from private to public spaces and collection to collection. The two parts of the exhibition present a complex array of wall-mounted displays, display cases and wall text, along with transparencies of Tomas’s Remote Exhibition e-mails about auction lots pasted to tables in the research room. The project as a whole can be seen as an artwork about the conditions informing radical artistic and institutional-critical autonomy within its ‘normal lifecycle’ in a market economy, and as a self-curated project with multiple components that can be sold independently. It is fitting that in Part 1 the installation that is in the Artexte gallery space – a hanging that alludes to the new practice of auction houses to arrange their own commercial exhibitions – begins with a reproduction of a work purchased by Tomas at auction: Fluxus artist George Brecht’s Exhibit (1963), a silkscreen and stencil on a 24 x 24” canvas acquired through Christie’s in 2012 and presented by Tomas as a triptych. A Christie’s condition report as well as a reproduction of the back of the canvas are also reproduced on canvas and stretched on a frame as though original paintings, inducing a sense of artworld-promotional sign-value. Beside this is a wall of canvases of the same size that detail the mechanics of auctioneering, including a piece that says ‘No Lot’, reminding viewers of the possibility that a sale at auction will be withdrawn if it does not manage to increase the monetary value of the works being marketed. The works’ construction enable reflection upon the post-minimalist and post-conceptual art situation today, where works from the ‘golden age’ of art in the 1960s are promoted and re-circulated by collectors as well as art critics and historians. Although the viewer cannot know this in advance, this same wall will in Part 2 present another triptych, this time on unframed Tykek, presenting the electronic interface that would have 119 JCS_3.1_Exhibition Reviews_115-147.indd 119 3/11/14 8:36:27 AM Exhibition Reviews David Tomas, Consigned for Auction (2013), installation view of Part 1 (above) and detail of Part 2 with My Work Doesn’t Mean a Damn Thing (2013), inkjet on paper, mounted on 16 mm Sintra, 191 x 191 cm (100 elements) (below). Photos: courtesy of the artist and Artexte. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 120 JCS_3.1_Exhibition Reviews_115-147.indd 120 3/8/14 7:06:28 PM Exhibition Reviews 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. allowed someone to purchase a 1967 piece by Jan Dibbets. The two-part structure therefore effects a kind of feedback loop or intellectual montage where the recollection of Part 1 folds critically into the viewing of Part 2. To come back to Part 1, the fourth wall in the display space is themed ‘art and politics’ and depicts the sale at auction of Chinese artist Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism (2003), a work that shows revolutionary workers holding up a Sotheby’s catalogue as if it were Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, the latter transmogrified to suit an economy with a growth rate of nearly ten per cent, far outpacing Europe and North America. Guangyi’s work comments on the way that even the radical culture of the Maoist period has become a site of investment for the surpluses produced by global capitalism. A nearby description of the auctioning of a work by Bernar Vernet acknowledges the inevitability of the commodification of art. This is underscored by a soundtrack in the room of the auctioning of Allan Kaprow’s copy of a Duchamp bottle rack called This Is Original if You Want to Believe It (1992). The Kaprow sold for €23,750, far less than the Carl Andre piece that is reproduced on the floor, which sold for US$2,434,500. The display space also bears a wall text that reads: ‘The Boundaries of Seeing. A selling exhibition curated by David Tomas’. All told, the four walls in this room, thematizing meta-art, the mechanics of auctioning, mechanical and artistic reproduction, as well as culture and politics, articulate the processes through which cultural and symbolic capital bring together different times and spaces, experiences that are ‘nourished by desire, competition and ownership’ (Tomas 2013). The idea that everything, no matter how politically motivated, is ultimately for sale is marked in at least three separate ways in the framing of the exhibition overall: the repetition of a canvas that shows the covers of Phillips auction house catalogues in both the display space and behind the Artexte welcome desk; the selling of a vinyl Dubplate-format recording of the auctioning of the Kaprow; and the affixing of a small canvas near the library stacks that details an e-flux announcement describing how in 2011–12 Sotheby’s locked out its unionized art handlers for the sake of a US$3.2 million contract, a tiny sum when one considers the scale of the company’s profits and the salary of its CEO, William Ruprecht, who made US$6 million in 2010 alone. These different strategies situate viewers both inside and outside the auction process, on the one hand as potential buyers and on the other as possible critics of capitalist social relations. As part of the programming for the show at Artexte, Tomas organized a screening of a 1974 documentary film about the auctioning at Sotheby’s of the collection of Robert C. Skull, an event that was protested by the Taxi Rank-and-File Coalition and by members of the Guerrilla Art Action Group. A copy of the catalogue from this auction is included in one of the exhibition’s display cases. In Tomas’s words (2013), the catalogue has become a kind of ‘non-site’ since its original function to capitalize on the identity for the artistic merchandise has now been guaranteed by the auctioneer’s hammer. In the second half of the exhibition, the painting format is substituted by printed Tyvek, which extends the appreciation of the auction process and details the sale at auction of the Anton and Annick Herbert foundation. The multimillion-dollar prices of sales ‘realized’ for works 121 JCS_3.1_Exhibition Reviews_115-147.indd 121 3/8/14 7:06:28 PM Exhibition Reviews of minimal and conceptual art is contrasted to an authentic paper work by Louise Lawler, complete with letter of authenticity and reflexively titled People Who Expressed Interest in This Work also Bid on the Following (2009). Lawler’s work was part of Two in One, an auction co-organized by Nicolaus Schafhausen, director of Witte de With, and Ann Demeester, director of de Appel, and produced by Christie’s, which was comprised of works made by artists specifically for auction. A generic observation about auctioning processes is contrasted to an actual meta-artwork that has been purchased by Tomas and is displayed in the exhibition. Consigned for Auction thus provides viewers (and prospective buyers) with information to consider the relevance of consumption not only in the making of artworks, but also in the making of a reflexive meta-artwork that takes both works purchased and works for sale into consideration. Given the impact of collecting upon the field of art, Tomas’s project implies that detailed awareness of the commodification of art should be a part of the basic knowledge of all artists and art theorists. The bold statement by Carl Andre presented in the second part – ‘My work doesn’t mean a damn thing’ – acknowledges that something is amiss in this world of surplus. How so? According to Andrea Fraser (2011), the influence of the art market can be directly indexed to growing economic inequality. The increase in the number and political monopoly of ‘High Net Worth Individuals’ since the late 1990s directly contributes to the decline of public arts funding and to the privatization of museums, biennials, art degree programs, art publications, residencies and awards. The anti-tax and anti-government policies of the major collectors support a class hierarchy that plays into populist reaction and prevents the stabilization of public art collections. Witness, for instance, the recent appraisal by Christie’s of the major works of the Detroit Institute of Arts as part of the plan by Detroit’s emergency bankruptcy manager to sell works in this public collection to pay off the city’s wealthy creditors (see Walsh 2013). These processes imply that if members of the artworld want to have some control over public institutions they need to consider the ways in which their works circulate in the economy of auctions as a financial system. Consigned for Auction does not provide a program for what is to be done in this context, but it does propose a heterodox model for the transfer of knowledge from the consumption realm of collecting and auctioning to the production space of art. As both ‘artist historian’ and ‘artist curator’, also known to have defined himself as a ‘transcultural visual worker’, Tomas offers the users of the Artexte documentation centre a small sampling of contemporary auction catalogues. He also presents a micro-archive of ‘meta-catalogues’ that have previously explored the possibilities of the auction catalogue as a potential vehicle for artistic interventions. These include Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 auction catalogue for the sale of works by Francis Picabia, Christie’s 2007 catalogue for the auction of Warhol’s Green Car Crash (an elaborate catalogue deployed in the service of a single artwork), the 2008 catalogue for Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Inside My Head Forever (the first sale of an artist’s work to be organized by the artist himself), and, as a final example, the 2008 Collect this Catalogue by Phillips de Pury (the first to include original works by living artists). Presented at Artexte by just 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 122 JCS_3.1_Exhibition Reviews_115-147.indd 122 3/8/14 7:06:29 PM Exhibition Reviews 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. such a living artist, Consigned for Auction asks not only that a work’s sale be considered in advance, but that this process be understood in terms of artistic (self-)knowledge, (self-)documentation and (self-)distribution. Acknowledgements Thanks to David Tomas, Rosika Desnoyers and Julie Fournier Lévesque for sharing their thoughts on the exhibition. References Fraser, Andrea (2011), ‘L’1%, c’est moi’, Texte zur kunst, 83 (September), http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/9848/andreafraser_1_2012whitne ybiennial.pdf. Accessed 18 November 2013. Tomas, David (2012), Escape Velocity: Alternative Instruction Prototype for Playing the Knowledge Game, Montreal: Wedge. Tomas, David (2013), Consigned for Auction: A User’s Manual, Artexte, http:// artexte.ca/wp-content/uploads/Manual.pdf. Accessed 18 November 2013. Walsh, David (2013), ‘Christie’s Appraisal of Detroit Museum’s Artwork “Like the Weighing of Souls”’, World Socialist Web Site, 21 August, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/21/chri-a21.html. Accessed 18 November 2013. E-mail: leger.mj@gmail.com Marc James Léger has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format it was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 123 JCS_3.1_Exhibition Reviews_115-147.indd 123 3/11/14 8:39:21 AM