EXCHANGE 

Mike Cooter, Graham Hudson, Mathew Sawyer, Barry Sykes, WITH (withyou.co.uk)

Exchange brings together a group of London based artists whose practices can be considered within a framework of cultural and social exchange and whose work tests traditional models of production and consumption.

Traditionally we understand capital as a mix of accumulated labour and the tools of production, created through exchange. However to relate these theories directly to contemporary art practice is redundant, although the selected artists do exchange capital of sorts in the production of their work. Placing value on unquantifiable and varied exchanges between artist, viewer, curator and owner amongst others.

Moving beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of Cultural Capital, where an artwork could be considered to function as a set of ideas with the viewer requiring Embodied Capital to consume the work, the group of artists bought together for EXCHANGE invite cultural exchanges with an outside party to produce the work, opening the work up to an element of chance and a body beyond their control. Precedents exist in art history; Duchamp’s Readymade introduced objects or commodities into the realm of art alongside chance operations and it is the reliance on the labour or an exchange with others that characterises much of the work in the exhibition.

According to Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1995 essay, Relational Art of the 1990’s encompassed practices that took human relations and their social context as their point of departure rather than the artist’s subjectivity. However for EXCHANGE it may be more productive to reference Maurizio Lazzarato, whose essay Immaterial Labour appeared a year later than Bourriaud’s. In it Lazzarato explores what he suggests is the hegemonic form of labour and analyses the forms of subjectivity that inform and are informed by this labour. Immaterial Labour is defined as the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity, the informational content referring to the workers new labour processes under post-Fordist capital, whilst the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, which interests us most in EXCHANGE, “involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as work”. It is these shifts in labour that have radically changed the organization of production and which in Lazzarato’s words transcend “the split between conception and execution between labour and creativity, between author and audience...”

Curated by Beth Greenacre