patricia jacomella bonola

ANTI-PRODUCTION TIME IS PORDUCTION TIME

1998 - 2000

 

J&W not only channel the flow of money: sometimes they simply call a halt to its seemingly naturl movement - to give people time to stop and think.

 

Works of art are considered worthwhile investments, Third World crafts are not. The former are allowed to carry a high price-tag, the latter are expected to be as cheap as possible. Instead of supporting living contexts and cultures whose very existence may be threatened by famine, the money flows into prestigious, overpriced works of art. 

 

But in no culture did art start out primarily as an individual process aimed at producing select and saleable material goods. It originally manifested itself in socially efficacious acts - in rites and performative behavior outside which the words themselves possessed no significance. The elevation from artefact to atrwork went hand in hand with secularization, disengagement from the collective and an increasing fixation on originality and individual authorship. As the process of infividualization and the fetishisation of money are evidently mutually conditional, an orientation towards collective and performative contexts could be a way out of the money-fixated hierarchy of values.