Bartering Redefined
In the late days of the summer before the gallery season began, the performance art group The Floating Lab Collective staged an experiment in bartering at Transformer Gallery. I was fascinated from the moment I received the email announcement. Bartering, an outmoded form of trade and system of determining value, has always seemed to me such a romanticized act. An object with no set price has a transient sense of existence in anyone’s possession because it’s easily traded for another more desired object. Simultaneously, the saying we congratulate ourselves with when donating twenty-year-old clothes or kitchen appliances, “one’s man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” illustrates the complex social dimension also inherent in bartering.
I’d always dreamed of bartering, imagining I would haggle with a gypsy woman from the old country in some distant flea market. Seeing my opportunity to live that fantasy, I raced to the gallery. It was the last day of the project and the gallery was about to close. Not having enough time to sift through my belongings in search of something meaningful or worthy of trading, I grabbed odds and ends things that I knew I wouldn’t miss. I had two books, picked up from a library give-away, a highlighter, and a broken brick I had picked up on the street en route.
At the gallery, a plywood board leaned against the wall, hooks fastened to the board for the custom baggies holding bartered goods. Each baggy had printed instructions explaining what to do with the object-to-be-bartered, asking participants to explain the significance of the object and what memories surround it. Some of the objects included a sheep made out of Crayola model magic, a pair of black platform shoes, a bag of pistachios, sex dice, a Hard Rock Café guitar pin, a bullet. On the opposite wall hung sketches archiving the evolution of the bartering over the weekend, each capturing the basic look of the object alongside notes on its story and significance.
It was apparent that these were objects easily parted with and which held no immediate value to their original owner. The experiment to recreate this outdated financial transaction was completely undermined by the participant’s modern attitudes towards the practice. When bartering works it’s because it is understood that the items being exchanged are considered by both parties to be of equal value. But what does it do to the value of the objects when the exchange is one sided? In the experiment, each participant was able to decide independently what they wanted to exchange their object for; they didn’t even have to determine a specific value.
It could be argued that the value place upon each object—or, rather, the absence of any value—is meant to represent the value society places on art. In a sense, the participants were asked to willingly become part of a piece of art. The value wasn’t placed on the quality of the output, but rather on the participatory aspect of the project; the lure of being apart of something or some kind of process, something bigger than the individual, could be satiated through an artwork. It’s not unlike people who have photos take of themselves in front of their favorite artworks in a museum, thus being able to take a piece of it away to call it their own.
After surveying the bartered items I realized that, for the most part, others had done the same as I had; quickly ran their eye over their belongings and grabbed something they knew they wouldn’t miss. I stood reading the descriptions as I cradled the cumbersome collection of objects in my arms, but ultimately I couldn’t part with them. They held no stories for me, except for maybe the books which I still might want to read, and I felt cheap trying to barter off a broken brick. In an age of stuff, it’s never surprising what kinds of attachments we forge with mere objects.
