This Gift is a Problem for you to Solve
Curated by Sarah Walko: RED Gallery, Savannah, Georgia
“What you are regarding as a gift is a problem for you to solve.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, as reproduced on a glass by American artist
Joseph Kosuth.
Gift giving is both authentically human and universally problematic. This action binds communities together. It can also alienate, enslave, and upset the given order of society.
This exhibition explores gift exchange in relation to artwork. The exhibition will focus on the idea of art as the exchange conduit, occurring through an object rather than as an object. The gift as conduit calls into question the position of art within our society. How do gifts complicate notions of value? Does giving constitute a blur between art and commodity? How does giving create a bond between an artist and an audience? Is the “gift economy” which Marcel Mauss famously discussed the base of all art? Mauss identifies the elevation in a gift’s value as it becomes reciprocated. The same process happens when an audience explores a work, taking the time with an object to investigate what it is offering. The artist gives a code, a problem, a subtle blanketing which can initially be foreign. Through the process of reciprocation (investigation) the gift gives its secret-a bit of advice, a compliment, a small beautiful notion, a blunt statement. Artwork is a vehicle for a gift. Reciprocal gift exchange, points to the fact that a person must be willing and ready to receive a gift before an exchange can be complete.
A gift, as something bestowed upon you, can refer to the “talent” of the artist, intuition or inspiration, which often, the artist does not take credit for. As D.H Lawrence states “ Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me”. Artists often speak of work after completion as a feeling that it was not them, as one person, as the person standing before you, who completed the work. This aspect is another form of exchange conduit; not just the work, but the artist. Therefore two elements of through ways for idea exchange are occurring. Artists make these objects to serve as important in themselves however, the purpose is that the object is not the end but rather the middle. It is the body of the paragraph but not, the conclusion.
Last, beginning with an assumption that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity, a discussion of the difference in an object which is given and one which is bought arises, especially in an all consumed capitalist society. Works of art exist within two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no market. Also, if an element of something is that we cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will, it remains outside the realm of our control.
The work of artist Jay Gould is a parable of sorts. He creates seemingly complex charts and images with very man-made production/function oriented aesthetic. But then the images themselves, are records of performances, and acts of beauty. The jump in between this rational presence and its presented “function” is in reality a presentation on the struggle to understand the rational in reality. The “character” of the artist in Gould’s work reclaims a scientific order. These scientific concepts are then melded with the photographic medium as both records of exploration and offered explanation.
Annette Lemieux’s Vehicles of Elevation explore the gift exchange through absence and presence of the vehicle of the body. Her “Circus Equipment” piece and her “Platforms” both create the visual of a lifting a body off the ground, a hovering body. However, the lifting occurs conceptually, within the mind of the audience. Also the connotations of what these objects are, circus equipment and platforms create a charade image, an absurdity, creating a back and forth in the viewers mind between the absurd on the ground, very human and very flawed, and the lifting, the elevated, the magic and the disappearing act of what is beyond this entire act.
This Gift is a Problem for You to Solve is an investigation into gift exchange in artwork as well as a offering in itself for the audience to question this proposed philosophy stated concisely by Wittgenstein.
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
The Hollow Men- T.S. Eliot