What I liked most about Matthieu Laurette’s Money Back Life!, in which he purchased every item of food (whether he wanted it or not) from the supermarket that offered a money back guarantee and returned each container saying he was not 100% satisfied, is the line spoken in response to the question from a daytime talk show host as to whether the shopping cart full of food was really a sculpture: “I do not offer just a work of art, I offer a method!” A method.
6 comments:
A method -- but toward what? with what objective? (one wonders) Anyway: what work of art doesn't offer a method? (one might also wonder) Glories of the methodical. But what I wonder is: if he returned every item, what are those things in the shopping cart on display? Did he buy 'em back again? :-)
Laurrette is Guy Debord- influenced, and what he refers to as method is enabling the viewer of the work to eat for free after an initial investment, and in so doing making problematic the mass-corporate flow of food distribution. I agree that all works of art offer a method, and it’s possible that the subtitles of Laurrette’s comments did not include the word ‘just’: I may have put it in there.
There is the question of whether a ‘signature’ method of making art, of, say, abstract expressionists, causes proletariats to feel alienated by a work, such as the woman I referred to on my road trip preview (below) who didn’t like Twombly, or an elderly Joe 6-pack who kept repeating to a female curator that may have been an in-law that he didn’t like Kandinsky. A ‘signature’ in New York art exists amid thousands of zeroes who want to copy you but if they did it would be obvious (I tend to call people on signature-copies).
This differs somewhat from the ‘School of Reubens’ tendency of past masters. My answer to the ‘I can do that’ declaration against conceptual art is always ‘So do that.’ which leads to the question: ‘Why don’t they just do that?’ In the case of Money Back Life!, copying Laurrette leads directly to free food, while drawing doodles on blackboards would be sent back by gallery owners as a ‘dated concept.’
A propos your last question, he took the supermarket items home, then either consumed them or didn’t, and returned them thereafter. He said that the customer service desk was always polite about this.
Oh I see -- he was illustrating a method of cheating, or (given a slightly different spin) of holding the corporate courtesy to its own exacting word. That hadn't occurred to me: he was offering instruction in how to game the system. And so: one can "return" a mere empty package, claiming dissatisfaction . . .
The net result of mass following of his method, of course, would merely be a change in the rules; such courtesy returns would no longer remain established practice.
Ah well: an appreciation for art (conceptual or otherwise) requires the right mood -- i.e. a willing suspension of grumpiness.
I'd not seen the name Twombly in a long time. I seem to be living in mental boondocks.
You mean there's nothing you like when you're grumpy?! I have a whole section in my book shelf...
good point. I wonder if grumpiness is one of the elementary particles (like Silliness or Lyricism)?
oops, I mean Stillness. Though Silliness is another idea.
(That was a reading equivalent of a Mondegreen, seems.)
hmmm -- and Mondegreens, too, seem a meme-film idea waiting to happen.
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