Pregled posta

Marketing

An installation view from the Trienal Poli/Grafica de San Juan: America Latina y el Caribe.

Notes on “FEAR”
By CHRISTOPHER COZIER

18 April, 2006
New on the Market: I was thinking about “FEAR”. Has it now replaced ethnic identity as a new political (even national) commodity? In its current 10-oz. packets, it can easily be distributed for consumption.
28 June, 2006
“Available at all leading stores!”
Curator Andrea Fatona calls from Toronto . . . she has seen another of my graphic works on my blog. In this work, I am speculating about “fear” as a new political commodity. People in Trinidad are supposed to be living in fear, so we need a new government or new security measures to save us. They also say we need a renewal of moral and religious values! I keep asking myself who is selling this and why?
As usual, someone told me that the work looked foreign and that there was nothing distinctively Trinidadian about it … they said it looked generic.
The way I see it, these local concerns place me in a larger, less anxious and competitive domain, in which a kind of empathy can take shape between myself and others in other countries and cultures who are facing similar challenges and manipulations in the fast-expanding global economy and social order.
Maybe on islands people look inward and outward simultaneously. So the curator and I begin to collaborate. We are imagining how this work will fit in to or shape her idea,
and if she can take the responsibility to make aesthetic choices in the implementation and placement of the work in the space and context. I decided that a simple rubber stamp made at an office store would do.
This means that people entering the exhibition could make the stamp themselves on the little cardboard boxes. To me this is exciting. It occurred to me that this is a collaboration not just between myself and the person that enters the show and gets to stamp the “fear” label on a box and take it home, but also with Andrea. She gets to actually choose the boxes and order the stamp and have a say in how it will work. The work enables a number of participants, and I am more of an instigator than a sole maker “artist-man” in the old-fashioned sense.
In the early 90s the term “marketable historical injury” kept coming up in my speculations about the use of identity. It was my final departure (hopefully/optimistically) from the territorial prospects (but designations) of multicultural politics, and particularly the reductivist political commodification of self and sensibility within local electoral politics, and the lucrative postures of newspaper columnists. The seed of further distrust and by extension the marketability of fear and insecurity were coming on stream.
Early 2009, in responding to a question from Julieta Gonzalez
I am still imagining other commodities like this one, even though the thoughts came up about four years ago…. Initially it came to me while I was watching regional media coverage and election campaigns that were brokering fear rather than offering the kind of leadership or vision that would allow us to confront it. As I thought about it more, it could also have implications about the post-9/11 world and broader global realities, and about the way we watch CNN and BBC etc living in places like Trinidad … the way
a confusion sets in about who these broadcasts are aimed at, about who is actually living within a certain political expectation, economy and access and who is not….
I started as a designer, and I always associate design work with a more direct communication with a possible public. Some of my earlier design work was placed anonymously in public places. I still appreciate the dissemination, accessibility, and the direct communication. I live in a location in which there is no critical or financial embrace for what I do, so I cannot depend on magazines and institutional structures to position or convey my ideas. So the Internet and design strategies have become even more important. There is also an economy thing, in that the objects themselves are not precious. I can plan and imagine them, they can be made industrially or by others, and one rarely has to ship and insure anything. Their value is in their conceptual intent, and in the moment that a viewer encounters the work and enters the head-space it
initiates. I work for that moment.
Some of these notes were previously published in Small Axe 23, June 2007

Most-certainly the right choice for Old Fashioned Boilings?

This relic of a different age is to be found in Portobello's Bath Street. Admittedly Hamilton's is a bit musty inside but nontheless compelling to visit.