Faith or Credit ?

  “Brand-name mythology and symbolic economics in the arts.”Faith or Credit?For decades now, certain artists have chosen to organize and orchestrate their process(es) in the form of — sometimes real, sometimes fictitious —enterprises.  Those brands, propelled by artistic or critical motives rather than commercial ones, are giving shape to an astonishing symbolic form of economics that invites infinite narrative speculation.Rethinking the Myth of the ArtistGlobal ethereal economics and Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theories are the order of the day. The world of tomorrow is in the hands of creators (of form, process or knowledge). Thus redefined in today’s society, the myth of the artist as marginalized or dependent upon government subsidies loses its meaning. As such, artist-entrepreneurs become an interesting area of experimentation on a recurrent behavior pattern — that of social beings who certainly keep the critical distance necessary to realizing a particular vision or practice art in general, yet attempt to officially or conceptually fit into or interact in economic affairs. “I quickly figured out that a brand name, as opposed to a personal name, was a very effective means of bringing together company logic and social life,” said Iain Baxter, a pioneer artist in this field, who founded the N.E. Thing Company in Vancouver in 1966. In 1971, he drafted an clearly theoretical artistic manifesto detailing his position. It read, “The objective isn’t personal profit, but the development of a structure and method by which products, functions and power can directly change the value of societal systems.”Toward a Saga of BrandsSince then, art history has seen an entire sphere of influence of artist-entrepreneurs and of artist brand names flourish across the four corners of the globe, offering that concept in a variety of forms of prototypes and one-of-a kinds. The artistic venture adopts business codes and language, uses slogans and logos, justifies its art-world reason for being with issues of an economic nature, but once they’re “transposed onto another field, they’re reevaluated and formulated according to esthetic, ethical and social criteria,” as Rose-Marie Barrientos states in Les Entreprises Critiques (Cité du Design, publishers).Playing with parody and the fictitious, these artists appropriate the business model — name, labeling, brand, status, graphic image, operational style, marketing or production… They make us conscious of the role of brand names and corporations in our society. These postures go far beyond the one-time commercial or economic game.Dutch designer Joep created the Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) in Rotterdam in 1985 to confront a growth industry and oversee the multidisciplinary staff that gradually took form around him. AVL’s production is, above all, the fruit of team work, a synergy of creative minds, a dynamic commercial strategy.  All of AVL’s objects and art works are sold directly by the Atelier.German artist Dida Zende, who founded FIT (Freie Internationale Tankstelle) in 2001, reclaims closed or abandoned gas stations and renovates them, turning them into creative stations where anyone can come to refill their tank with psychic energy and form a genuine social dynamic around them. FIT is truly symptomatic of the artistic enterprise’s way of manufacturing social bonds and its powerful effect on society, as British artist John Latham claimed back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.He and Barbara Steveni cofounded APG (the Artist Placement Group), coining the phrase, “The Incidental Person” to describe the artist who is socially engaged and able to collaborate with industry, governmental bodies, or any organized social entity. Veritable contemporary temples, gathering places devoted to human creation in absolute freedom, Dida Zende’s stations — be they temporary or permanent —leave their mark on the locality and recharge the symbolic imagination of the public space.The Artist As Brander of SocietyStaunchly committed to the social realm or the universe, soberly present in art circles, the artist-entrepreneur refuses narcissistic withdrawal, fervently tackling the issues of the times in an attempt to follow and shed light on them.Take for example BP, the artist-enterprise that emerged in France in the late ‘80s — the boom time of brand names as publicity tools — which appropriated, and symbolically distorted, the infamous oil company’s moniker. That artistic duo created sublime sculptures out of gas cans and dark oil and operated a kind of counter-ad — as critical as it was poetic — depicting the fascinating speculation on black gold as generic material of a future, synthetic world.But the world changes. Environmental problems transform our vision of natural resources. To better preserve its commitment as tracker of the contemporary world, BP — now reduced to the figure of Renaud Leyrac — has reinvented its own brand. The eponymous exhibition “Before Present” [see details below] refers to the principle of carbon 14, the substance used to date materials. With that semiotic device — a semantic inversion that art is quite adept at — BP has refashioned its own myth and bounces its own history off the real...Société Réaliste, an artists’ cooperative founded by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in 2004 — and based on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s production theories, as adapted to art — is another exercise in symbolic economics set in motion by an artistic enterprise. Their EU Green Card Lottery walks the fine line between politics and economics, parodying an American website that has promoted a lottery to win the coveted American Green Card for the past fifteen years. Their lottery-site’s prize is a fictitious European Green Card.False HopeAppropriating and twisting the official nature of government and its habitual codes (hospital green, intricate forms, type face, iconography adopting Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty symbols), the website offers a passport to freedom for the global migrant. A European American fantasy promising “A European Dream,” the formative myth of a superpower that compels the world to revolve around it. By doing so, Société Réaliste reveals a complex symbolic value system in which speculation, hope and faith operate.Beyond even the symbolic credit these artists create via their methods and structures, Goldin+Senneby, a pair of Swedish artists, question the very foundations of the real economy and its unit of currency — money. Inspired by the theories of the astonishing, sadly overlooked French philosopher, Jean-Joseph Goux, their The Decapitation of Money project [see details below] reveals the wide range of esthetic interpretations and faith in our mechanisms for creating financial value, leaving room for all kinds of fictitious extrapolation and economic, as well as symbolic, speculation. Moreover, that project includes contributions/interpretations by economist-geographer Angus Cameron, as well as the nonexistent writer K.D.Goldin+Senneby call to mind the accursed tendency of Georges Bataille to latch onto black holes in the comprehension of financial mechanisms in which those vast forgotten values are lodged. Speaking of which… we’re tempted to turn to the work of Gabriel Tarde, the late 19th century anthropologist-economist recently exhumed in Bruno Latour’s The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology (La Découverte, publisher). You’ve really got to believe that economy goes hand in hand with art.