100 Blocks
As an applied artist I am very interested in the idea of gift exchange and gift economy. I have explored ideas from the theorists Mauss and Hyde and decided to create my own gift exchange as a working experiment.
The idea of my gift exchange originates with the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his studies on Melanesian tribes/culture in the 1920’s. Potlatch is also a great interest to me. Lewis Hyde shared similar thoughts and views with Mauss. He thought that these exchanges such as potlatch taking place in tribes helped to build a bond in the community’s. For everyone to stay as an equal part in the community they all needed to contribute to share the wealth.
For this project I have hand made 100 glass blocks. My intention is to trade these pieces for objects provided by the audience of the work. The only rule is that there must be no currency used during the trade instead, for each transaction the audience member is able to trade for an object they feel is of the same value.
Today the western world uses money economy as its main medium of exchange. We earn money and we spend it. More often than not these transactions are in stores or on the internet. Most of these then we could say are alienated exchanges; often we know little about where they were made nor, who made the objects that we by.
For me as a practicing artist I hope to be able to explore unalienated connections with the audience, with whom I trade in a gift exchange.
I have set up a blog and a facebook group to try to bring the people that I trade with together to try and track connections that are made through my gift exchange, and any subsequent trades that involve the same glass blocks.
From this project I hope to explain the message of gift exchange better to my audience and at the same time try to look into how people value glass as a product.
