Hand over ‘the Goods’!

The Goods will be on display at the Galerie Espace, 4844, Saint-Laurent, from March 6th to the 11th.

Although every one of the exhibitions in Concordia’s own Art Matters festival are free, at least one of them would like to make a statement about the price we’re willing to pay for ‘art’.

Art itself has become a commodity, says Andrea Wong, curator of The Goods, because the “art market is only patroned by the super wealthy.” Even so-called conceptual art hasn’t been spared from this commodification, “because art is really just a bunch of commodified ideas that are sold and validated by the museum,”says Wong.

Businessmen and investors alike invest their money in paintings, under the assumption that art won’t be subject to the same market fluctuation as the almighty dollar. But, says Kristine Aguilar, while other people look to Christies or Sotheby’s auction house to add quantitative value to art, she doesn’t want to influence how people think about her work, entitled Bling, and preferred not to be quoted in this article so as to preserve the subjective responses of her viewers.

Tytus Hardy’s “Archetype Canada” alludes to the time when Canada existed purely as a mercantile colony for the mass production of furs, but by covering it in jeans it also comments on the modern context of trade, where designer jeans are made in Third World countries using cheap labour and then shipped back to the New World. It’s “a sort of commodity time-continuum,” as Wong puts it.

Joshua Jones’ “Sunken Carts” is an analysis of the delivery system that gets commodities from store shelves to our cars. The shopping carts emerge from walls, half-exposed, like muddy lakes littered with commercial refuse. Jones took inspiration from the frequent sighting of shopping carts flowing down stream in a local river. “Who knew,” said Wong, “even shopping carts get disposed of.”

“Durable and utilitarian, they were, in a way, made to be co-opted and transformed into something more than they were ever intended to be,” says Jones.

Alanna Lynch documents her “Untitled Performance” through a series of photographs. Since October, Lynch has worn the same little brown dress, restricting herself from adopting the “new outfit every day” mentality forced on us by society.

“Where all the other artists re-contextualize notions of commodity in external objects, Lynch wears the concept,” says Wong. “She lives it.”