…you’re it
Tag starts when you receive a phone call from either Shelley or Erin. You may or may not know them, but you’re part of the same network, a small army of TRUCK Gallery supporters, some recently joined and others who seem like they have always been there. Some of you will receive this note from me in the mail. Conversations like this are happening all over the city, some even echo far away from home. Each of you will be invited to receive a gift from the artists, a small gesture of acknowledgement for being part of their community and a reason to reconnect. Each gift (from a numbered edition of 1700) will have a tag with a name on it; one will be waiting for you at the gallery during the exhibition. You will be asked to leave your “tag” on a mural in place of your gift. Yet, your real gift is not what you will pick up from the gallery, but the experiences you will have if you choose to become a participant. Perhaps your participation will lead others to join the network. Maybe you’ll bring a friend to the gallery and, while you are there, you might meet Katherine or Jason or a volunteer or another visitor with whom you start a conversation.
In his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property Lewis Hyde argues that the artwork “is a gift, not a commodity. …a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”1 Tellingly TRUCK’s name comes from the French "troquer" meaning "to barter” or exchange without money. Tag is not an object-based commodity in a market economy, and it engages TRUCK’s role in the gift economy as a shared resource that is offered to a community without any specific expectation of reciprocal exchange. Tag comprises multiple gestures of appreciation dispersed within a gift economy in which the only purpose is to establish and foster relationships through generous acts. The gift requires nothing in return; it is not an exchange and has no monetary value.
The relationship generated during a gift exchange is what Hyde calls “erotic commerce.” For Hyde, trading in generosity and selfless actions is a strategy to defeat an impersonal, rational, ego-driven (“what’s in it for me”) logic that drives the capitalist market economy. The gift economy defeats the myth of the self-made man by demonstrating “you can't make your own capital, [be it financial or symbolic] it has to be generated by participants in the economy itself.”2
Tag unleashes the gift’s transformative potential through a complicated set of relations that includes both the desire to belong and the responsibility of being “it.” Participation in the project is akin to a sort of labour; a labour of love motivated by a commitment to the project, but not by direct monetary reward. Participants reap the value of their investment in less tangible forms, stronger community bonds, tacit knowledge, memories and fun. In this system status belongs to those who disseminate the wealth, perhaps by mentoring, volunteering, collaborating or teaching. This belief is deeply engrained in many aboriginal cultures and has been adapted and shared by leftist social movements, feminists and artist-run culture. Power so strategically deployed can change a ripple to a wave.
One could argue that recent trends in artist-run culture — growing importance of corporate sponsors, concentration of programming power under curatorial authority, increased emphasis on exportable product, professionalization, “excellence” and career-oriented administrations to name but a few — are indicative of a paradigm shift towards a market economy that eradicates creative altruism. Institutions erode under waves of individual ambition. Art stardom and institutional power supersede collectivity. Hyde recognises art slips back and forth between gift and market economies — and indeed, this is necessary — but often the market economy profits at the expense of the gift economy without following their own laws of reciprocity. So we remain a poor cousin of the market economy, and in its pursuit we often do not reap the riches of our most abundant gifts.
Diana Sherlock
Endnotes
1W. Lewis Hyde. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House Inc. Vintage Books, 1983.
2Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. Chance Texts: “Accruing Interest.” (August 12, 2006) <http://www.chanceprojects.com/>.
Diana Sherlock is a Calgary independent contemporary art curator and visual arts writer.
