retail as niche construction, as a series of subversive poems about transaction
day 37
cycle day 28
first quarter
the fool
40 degrees, mostly clear
Woke up this morning with a sense of dread and urgency which I decided to transmute into action. Listened to an interview with Ibrahim Mahama in which he says that art starts with risk and crisis. That feels right.
I’ve been thinking a lot about utopian ideals and possibilities for alternative economies in the midst of this one. Today I decided to mark off a section of the main room of WRASTLE MATCH and make it a store. The more I worked on it the more excited I got about a social practice using retail as a modality for exploring relationship, instagram as a tool for co-emergent performance, and livelihood as place-making.
Maybe a decade or so ago I dreamt up opening SACRED HARDWARE, a store that sold curated tools and raw materials. As I was arranging things today I wondered if I’ve circled around to that idea again. I like the concept of selling art not as finished objects for display but as tools and materials for symbolic homemaking and community building.
I’m starting to think I need this container of exchange for my practice to make sense in this time and place I inhabit because it brings cultural discussion into the matrix of ecological intelligence. The works (and readymades) arranged in the space are ever in progress and shifting, being informed by and forming psychosocial and material habitats.
I was also able to identify that an important part of my practice is to keep internal/external, micro/macro, private/public, individual/collective, digital/irl practices coupled. I think any work that has the potential of shaping our perception must work in these tandem arenas (or thought of another way, to integrate what we’ve been taught to separate).
Personally I’m needing to metabolize and shed a lot of stuff from my live/work space and collectively I think we need to practice modalities of no-waste since “waste” doesn’t exist in nature. I like the potential symbiosis inherent in the movement of matter from one function to another. It rings of breathe, in which one being’s inhale is another being’s exhale.
