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Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice

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Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice

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Content i
MEJOR VIDA/BETTER LIFE AND DAY-TO-DAY EXCHANGES:
NETWORKS OF SOCIAL EXCHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS PRACTICE

by

Joy Angela Anderson

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Joy Angela Anderson

ii
DEDICATION

To all my relations, ancestors, activists and artists that have worked in defense of human
and environmental rights, peace and social justice toward creating a better and
harmonious world. They continue to inspire and guide me.
I also dedicate this thesis in memory of the guiding strength of my grandfather Robert
Almeida.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My abundant gratitude to those who extended their time, support, service and
skills throughout this process. I have so much appreciation to Janet Owen Driggs and
Rita Gonzalez for their commitment and careful attention to my progress in crafting this
textual tapestry. Thanks to Rhea Anastas and Elizabeth Lovins for their extra efforts of
support.
Los Angeles, where the shinning stars of my family, friends and community
surround me with light, inspiration and love. I give thanks to you all for your creative
energies to making it a better place. I am grateful for; Elisa Almeida, Maria Almeida,
Sunshine Anderson, Jessica Gudiel, Sandra de la Loza, Robin Garcia, Jill Moniz and
Allison Behrstock for being a sparkle of guiding energy at crucial moments throughout
this journey.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Shifts Towards Non-Object Art and Art as Social Practice 13
Chapter Two: Gift Economies and Non-Monetary Exchange In Arts Practice 20
Chapter Three: Minerva Cuevas: The Mejor Vida Corporation 25
Chapter Four: Carolina Caycedo: Living Day-to-Day 33
Chapter Five: e-flux Time/Bank 45
Conclusion: Creative Actions Toward The Possible 58
Bibliography 63

v
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.3: Mejor Vida Corp. 26
Figure 2.3: S.Coop 31
Figure 3.4: Carolina Caycedo 34
Figure 4.4 Museo de la Calle 34
Figure 5.4: Daytoday List 38
Figure 6.5: Hour Notes, 2009 by Lawrence Weiner 50
Figure 7.5 Hour Notes Prototype, 2009 Carolina Caycedo 50

vi
ABSTRACT

The current economic crisis has brought attention and criticism to a dominant global
economic system that is characterized by the goal of exponential expansion in pursuit of
private monetary profit. In this thesis I explore the possibility for social and participatory
art to invoke, inspire and mobilize action towards alternative sustainable systems of
economic exchange. Generosity and non-monetary exchange as a social practice and
artistic strategy provide a space for artists and audiences to perform models of alternative
economies in the social/public sphere. While they also cultivate a network of social and
cultural capital that values shared time and resources for mutual benefit. Using tactics
evocative of feminist artists of the 1970s, the art projects considered in this text
experiment with ways to live independent of, and in resistance to, the corporate market.
My discussion focuses on the socially engaged art projects of artists Minerva Cuevas and
Carolina Caycedo, and the Time/Bank initiated by artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta
Aranda of e-flux. I reveal how their art projects perform creative models towards an
economic paradigm shift, while positioning social and participatory public art practice as
models towards sustainable lifestyles.
1
INTRODUCTION

“Art helps people to regain consciousness in every day life.
-Carolina Caycedo”
1

“Today the elements around which we can create points of reference even points of
resistance to the market are the ones built on the land of the common. Because the
common basically signifies that which costs nothing, that which is necessary, that which
is participatory, that which is productive, and that which is free! And I believe that there
are new use values already present in our common, and that these values can be easily
spotted.”
- Antonio Negri
2

“I guess that’s where the other culture, or alternative information network, comes in  so
we can have a choice of ways to live without dropping out.”
- Lucy Lippard
3

At the second Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice
4
on October
8-9, 2010 in New York City, more than forty international public and social creative
practitioners, cultural producers and thinkers presented and discussed how their work
responds to and engages with contemporary world issues.
5

1
"LatinArt.com - The Definitive Online Source of Latin American Art," interview by Bill Kelly Jr.,
LatinArt.com || an Online Journal of Art and Culture, section goes here, accessed December 07, 2010,
Creative Time describes their
selections as representing “… a vast array of practices and methodologies that engage
http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=102.

2
"“In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist” E-flux Journal #18 Ñ September 2010 01/12_09.09.10,
accessed December 28, 2010, www.e-flux.com.

3
Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. University of
California Press, 1997, 9

4
Creative Time is a Public Art non-profit organization in New York City.
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/?v=programs

5
Creative Time - Programs." Creative Time - Home. Accessed February 07, 2011.
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/?v=programs.
2
with the canvas of everyday life.” The participants in the summit provide “a glimpse into
an evolving community concerned with the political implications of socially engaged
art.”
6
Author and scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson referenced recent economic and
environmental crises, both of which were entangled with corporate economic forces. She
cited the violation of Texan legal limits on the emission of air contaminants
Panelists were organized in thematic sections including “Alternative Economies”,
“Food”, “Institutions”, “Market” and “Plausible Art Worlds”. A common thread that
ran through the presentations was the overarching topic of economics and sustainability.
The notion of alternative and self-organized sustainable economies was of general
concern and interest throughout the summit.
7
by oil
company British Petroleum (BP), the 2005 explosion of the BP Texas City refinery and
the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.
8

6
Ibid
After she identified Houston, Texas as having the
fifth worst air quality in the world due to the over 5000 energy related industries located
in the area, Bryan-Wilson introduced the section of the summit on the topic of the
“Market”. She used the metaphor of air to say, “…talking about the market…is like
talking about air. We coexist inside it, it both enables and limits our activities and often it
eludes our precise investigation. You could say that market economies are the oxygen we

7
Julia Bryan Wilson, "Markets" (Keynote Presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, Cooper Union Great Hall, New York City, October 9, 2010), accessed February 07, 2011,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/julia-bryan-wilson/.

8
On April 20, 2010, there was a deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that flowed for 3 months. The
BP oil company was held responsible. The spill caused damage to workers, marine and land wildlife, and
the fishing and tourism industries. Damaging impacts continue to impact the economy and environment of
the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding areas.

3
breathe. Capitalism expands to fill the space around us.”
9
Her discussion concluded with
a reference to an artwork by Zoe Strauss who, for the past decade, has held an annual,
one-day DIY art show in the urban public space of Philadelphia, underneath a freeway, at
which she sells her artwork for five dollars a piece.
10
Bryan-Wilson concluded with this
statement, “It is this kind of improvised and fleeting micro-market that offers us a zone of
possibility within the suffocating logic of late capitalism.”
11
Bryan-Wilson highlighted some of the ways in which artists have created their
own alternative economies and self-organized markets, including trade at the local level. I
begin with an introduction about the Creative Time Summit in order to highlight a
growing interest in public and social art practices that experiment with models of
alternative and sustainable economies as their artistic strategy. In this thesis I will
consider not only how artists criticize corporate economic forces, but also the ways in
which they create zones of possibility in the “canvas of everyday life”

12
While artists have generated creative, socially engaged and participatory
strategies of generosity and non-monetary exchange, does the potential exist for their
locally influential practices to affect wider change and perhaps even to spark towards a
through socially
engaged art practices that perform models of alternatives in resistance to the market.

9
Julia Bryan Wilson, "Markets" (Keynote Presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, Cooper Union Great Hall, New York City, October 9, 2010), accessed February 07, 2011,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/julia-bryan-wilson/.
10
Ibid

11
Ibid

12
"About the CREATIVE TIME Summit," Creative Time - Home, accessed February 08, 2011,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/about/.

4
paradigm shift? If so, how are the artists upon whom this thesis is focused attempting to
function in this way?
The “financial meltdown” of 2007
13
In order to discuss how art as a social and activist practice can propose creative
models in resistance and towards an alternative to the market, let me first describe the
characteristics of globalized corporate capitalism. As suggested by Julia Bryan-Wilson,
like the air we breathe, the corporate economic system permeates throughout our daily
lives and, like air, it is polluted by the operations and exploitive practices of privatization.
The fundamentals that support a healthy life come from the Earth’s natural resources.
However, most of these (water, land, food, shelter, etc.) have been privatized and
exploited by the operations that corporate capitalism, an age-old project of U.S. Western
expansion, continues to fuel.
, the subsequent bank bailouts, the BP oil
spill, the threats posed by climate change and peak oil; all of these factors have brought a
wave of criticism, questioning, and protest of the globalized corporate economic system
into the mainstream.
Corporate capitalism is a globalized free market economic system that is
characterized by the goal of exponential expansion in pursuit of private monetary profit.

13
Since 2007 the U.S. has been facing a financial crisis that economists have compared to the Great
Depression of the 1930s. The housing bubble and resulting rises in the cost of real-estate have caused
damage to banks and financial institutions, along with homeowners who took out adjustable rate mortgages
that rose. The government financially bailed out banks, but homeowners and stockholders were left on their
own. Foreclosures, employee lay-offs and unemployment have also risen as a result of the financial crisis.
"Three Top Economists Agree 2009 Worst Financial Crisis Since Great Depression; Risks Increase If
Right Steps Are Not Taken | Reuters." Business & Financial News, Breaking US & International News |
Reuters.com. February 27, 2009. Accessed February 28, 2011.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/02/27/idUS193520 27-Feb-2009 BW20090227.
5
To this end it pursues the privatization of resources, including land, for capital; the hiring
of wage labor at the lowest possible rates; and the institution of privately owned
multinational corporate businesses. Global corporate capitalism is a system in which the
concern for generating profit from the world’s natural resources is prioritized over
concern for the well-being of people and the life of the planet. Enforced by the
institutional framework provided by the World Bank
14
and the International Monetary
Fund,
15
corporate capitalism has expanded globally as a system of supranational
jurisdiction, which functions to sustain the agenda of a globalized neoliberal
16
Asserting that it is the “new global form of sovereignty”
economic
policy.
17
, philosophers Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri identify the global capitalist economic system as “Empire”
18

14
“A central bank, controlled by the United Nations, whose funds come from the member states of the UN
and which lends money to member states.” Defined in Defined in Dictionary of Banking and Finance
fourth edition 2010
.
Their hypothesis contends that the project of globalization has taken hold of all economic
and cultural exchanges. What they offer in their account of Empire is the agency of the
multitude. They optimistically emphasize that “The creative forces of the multitude that

15
Henry Veltmeyer. On the Move: The Politics of Social Change in Latin America. Broadview Press, 2007,
12.

16
“A set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so”; the embraced
of imposed free-market capitalism to the extent of “Liberating ‘free’ enterprise or private enterprise from
any bonds imposed by the government…no matter how much social damage this causes Elizabeth Martinez
and Arnoldo Garcìa: What is “Neo-Liberalism?” A Brief Definition
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberalDefined.html Retrieved 3/5/11

17
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Preface," in Empire (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Univ. Press, 2000),
xxii.

18
Ibid.,xii

6
sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an
alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.”
19
In their discussion of
the potential for political power of the multitude to act against Empire, Negri and Hardt
admit that they do not have specific models to offer, but what they do propose is a call to
action: “Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models
and determine when and how the possible becomes real.”
20
On the stage of the social landscape artists are taking up the challenges of
practical experimentation to offer and perform models of generosity and alternative
economies, which have the potential to be replicated by the multitude as “points of
resistance” to the market. Social practice as a mode of artistic production, similar to
feminist art practices of the 1970s, experiments tactically with creative strategies,
working in direct exchange with communities toward social change.

In this thesis I explore three projects by four contemporary artists, all of whom
take on creative strategies of generosity and non-monetary exchange as an artistic and
social practice in order to address social and economic concerns. Through
experimentation and interaction with publics in and outside of the art world, these artists
enact models of alternative economic systems. Their works offer opportunities to
deliberate the potential of social practice to become integrated into daily life and function
as a form of resistance and dissent in relation to the dominant paradigm. Whether or not
the artists intend for their projects to function in resistance to the market or model

19
Ibid, xv

20
Ibid, 411
7
alternative economic systems, their work offers the kind of practical experimentation
that, as Negri and Hardt suggest, tests other possible paradigms of exchange.
Artist/activist Minerva Cuevas created Mejor Vida/Better Life Corporation
(MVC) in Mexico City. She appropriated the identity of a corporation to offer free
services and products for MVC’s clients as an act of generosity to address socio-
economic concerns and offer functional solutions. MVC is an outcome of Mexican artists’
response in the mid-nineties to the institution of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and economic and political crises such as the devaluation of the
peso, Mexico’s monetary unit.
21
In her seven-year social art experiment DaytoDay, Carolina Caycedo practiced
the art of non-monetary exchange. Her experiment in living day-to-day without money
operated by way of informal economies such as bartering. While cultivating a social
network, she offered personal skills, time and commodities in exchange for her daily
needs. Caycedo’s practice can be traced back to her time as an art student in Bogotà,
Cuevas’ work is contextualized therefore in response to
the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization. Her self-identified corporation functions
simultaneously as a series of public interventions in Mexico City, as a social,
participatory and activist practice, as well as a form of social service. Using the status of
a corporation to critique the very same apparatus, MVC exemplifies a distinct artistic
strategy of irony and appropriation. Art historians and critics Cuauhtèmoc Medina and
Hans Ulrich Obrist provide insight into the political intentions of Cuevas’ art and activist
practice.

21
Ruben Gallo. New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),9.
8
Columbia, when she began exploring public practice with El Museo de la Calle in
1997/98. Caycedo’s practice references both feminist and wider political intentions. She
responds to her personal economic situation as she experiments with public “temporary
autonomous zones” of non-monetary exchange. Ted Purves, writer and editor of What we
Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, indexes her work, including the
MVC, within a survey of art practices interested in integrating audiences as participants.
Daytoday culminated in Los Angeles in 2009 as a long-term art practice, but Caycedo has
plans to continue to explore alternative economies as a practice within her current
geographical community in Puerto Rico. Social networks of like-minded individuals who
practice more formalized expressions of an alternative economy, including the Echo Park
Time Bank in Los Angeles, have influenced Caycedo.
The final case study of artistic experiments in alternative economies is the most
topical. In 2009 artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle introduced Time/Bank. It is a
functioning time bank facilitated online through e-flux
22

22
“Established in January 1999 in New York, e-flux is an international network which reaches more than
50,000 visual art professionals on a daily basis through its website, e-mail list and special projects. Its news
digest – e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world's most important
contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia.” “About / E-flux." Shows / E-flux. Accessed
February 07, 2011.
, which also has a storefront
location in New York City. Aranda and Vidokle describe the Time/Bank as a platform
and site for cultural producers and workers to engage in an alternative economy that
values time as a source of currency. Critical reception of this recent project is provided
http://www.e-flux.com/pages/about.

9
through an online discussion facilitated by artist and writer Gregory Sholette as part of
the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice.
23
Through a critical analysis of each of these projects from a feminist art
perspective,

24
I propose that they offer a determinative lens and experiences of
participating in alternative systems of exchange that act as points of resistance to the
corporate capitalist market economy. In their interrogation and practice of alternative
models, these projects also offer a space in which participants are able to perform various
“ways to live without dropping out.”
25
Common threads that run through this discussion are inquiries that seek to reveal
how the selected projects are situated historically relative to social and participatory art
practices. Additionally important are the strategies they use to counter the monetary
economic system; the ways in which the projects are sustained monetarily by art
institutions and negotiations and contradictions the artists confront as their work
oscillates between art as symbolic representation and art as action.
Specifically, participants are introduced to the
possibility of moving towards sustainable economic practices, perhaps even a new
economic paradigm, that values people and life on the planet over monetary profit.

23
Access this website to read and participate in the online discussion:
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/

24
I position the works of Caycedo, Cuevas, Aranda and Vidokle as a social practice in which the artistic
forms of social interaction and performance function as tools critical of a dominant system that impacts on
a personal level. There are striking similarities and strategies by feminist artists of the 1970s, although in
these contemporary cases it is not patriarchy but the corporate capitalist economic system the artists
concerned seek to criticize and rupture.

25
Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972... (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997),9.

10
Concerns for social, economic and environmental justice have long influenced the
use of social and participatory artistic strategies as forms of political activism and
experimentation. Lucy Lippard’s critical treatise
26
on feminist art practices of the 1970s,
The Pink Glass Swan, for example, provides substantial historical reference for the
development of feminist activist tactics that continue to be influential today. While more
recent theoretical texts by Gregory Sholette offer an account of the “artistic dark matter
of the art world”
27
, which he defines as “non-professional or informal, creativity,”
28
and
cite social and public art practices that, while influential in informing and sustaining the
mainstream art world, are largely unrecognized or discredited by major art institutions
and the contemporary art market. In a different article, Sholette expands on the creative
dark matter that includes new media technologies and global networking, an advantage of
neoliberalism, that has expanded access for more visible social productivity and
autonomy from high art and mainstream market culture.
29
The three case studies under consideration function as more than symbolic
representations of resistance. They experiment with artistic forms that open up creative

26
Lippard, Lucy R. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art. New York: New Press, 1995.

27
Gregory Sholette, "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere," 2003, 2.
http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/05_darkmattertwo.pdf.

28
Gregory Sholette: “Dark Matter,Las Agencias, and the aesthetics of Tactical Embarrassment,” The
Jounal of Aesthetics And Protest October 2003, volume 1, issue 2.
29
Gregory Sholette:“Gifts of Resistance,” an essay for the catalog Periferic 8: Art as Gift, Biennial for
Contemporary Art, Iasi ROMANIA 10/03/08-10/18/08, Curated by Dora Hegyi pp. 129-137.
http://neme.org/main/887/periferic
8http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/GiftsOfResistance.Perifieric..pdf.

11
social and public spaces for audience participation. In these social spaces the
audience/participant becomes a part of social and cultural networks. Not only do they
cultivate social networks online through the Internet, they also manifest as social
networks in real time and physical space.
It is hard to ignore the impact of social networking when the recent Egyptian
Revolution has demonstrated the power of people in communication and mobilized for
change. Journalists for Al Jazeera English have used the term “weapons of mass
mobilization”
30
Economies of generosity have evolved through global access and exchange on the
Internet as a site of “the commons” where information and knowledge are freely
distributed. Although the Internet is currently also in threat of being privatized by
corporate economic forces, the notion of “the commons” has been located in theoretical
discussions of the Internet and new media technologies. Hardt and Negri provide some
insight for this discussion, which is especially relevant to the work of the e-flux
Time/Bank and MVC.
to describe the influence of online social networking as an organizing
tool that facilitated mass mobilization. The three artists’ projects in question have all
depended on the Internet as a site for their work.
The three artworks I examine create and perform functioning alternatives that
consciously work within the public realm to reach and engage a wider audience in and

30
AlJazeeraEnglish, "Empire-Social Networks, Social Revolution," Democracy Now!, February 17, 2011,
accessed February 17, 2011,
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/17/amy_goodman_on_al_jazeera_english_empire__social_net
works_social_revolution.
12
outside of the art world, beyond the confines of the gallery space. They use strategies of
generosity and non-monetary exchange to critique and question the dominant corporate
economic system and to suggest models of sustainable economic exchange. My inquiry
focuses on the possibility for social and participatory art to invoke, inspire and mobilize
action towards a shift and a rethinking of the global economic system. Is there potential
for art and cultural production to have an influence toward rupturing the current global
economic paradigm? These projects suggest that there is. I realize the sentiment that art
can propose ‘solutions’ is an idealistic one, but still I suggest that social, participatory and
experimental art practices can offer ways of imagining and experiencing the power and
prospect of alternative economies from an optimistic position.

13
CHAPTER 1: SHIFTS TOWARDS NON-OBJECT ART AND ART AS SOCIAL
PRACTICE

"A developed feminist consciousness brings with it an altered concept of reality and
morality that is crucial to the art being made and to the lives lived with that art."
- Lucy Lippard
31

Art provides a space for imagining and experiencing complex ideas and concepts.
It also provides a space for artists and audiences to question and challenge existing
systems and hierarchies. A shift from art in the galleries to art in the streets has happened
at various points in art historical narratives and social political movements. Numerous
examples are located in histories of artistic and cultural production. In particular, feminist
art practices of the 1970s exemplify a period when art challenged a dominant paradigm.
It was a fundamental concern of feminist artists to radically influence social change and
undermine the dominant perspective of patriarchy, not only within the art world but also
in wider society. As Lucy Lippard wrote, “…feminists are more willing than others to
accept the notion that art can be aesthetically and socially effective at the same time.”
32
Offering examples of such willingness, feminist artists Suzanne Lacy and Monica
Mayer, among others active at the Los Angeles Women’s Building in the 1970s,
influenced a collaborative process between artists and activists and worked (continue to
work) with communities to explore artistic and activist strategies of social engagement

31
“Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s” in The Pink Glass Swan:
Selected Feminist Essays on Art The New Press: New York, Lucy Lippard, 1995, 177

32
Ibid. 178
14
and public performance to reach a mass audience. The group Adriadne: A Social Art
Network, founded by Leslie Labowitz and Lacy, employed interdisciplinary tactics,
incorporating collective strategic organizing and staged collaborative public
performances to attract the attention of the media. Conscious of the power of the media,
they staged spectacles to address specific feminist issues with acute awareness about how
the images they produced would be perceived in the public domain.
33
Giving credit
specifically to artists involved with the Los Angeles Women’s Building in the 1970s,
Grant Kester notes: “These artists combined techniques developed in the feminist
movement (consciousness-raising groups, the analysis of self-other relationships) with
artistic strategies drawn from Kaprow’s happenings and performance art to create what
[Cheri] Gaulke termed a “new aesthetic, informed by the collective experience of the
feminist educational process.”
34
The role of feminist art practices in aiding a social shift away from the dominant
system of patriarchy exemplifies the way in which art can impact the world. Feminist
artists, activists and writers opened up discursive paths, facilitated the acknowledgement,
inclusion and visibility of women artists in art and educational institutions and formulated
a critique of the modernist art historical canon.

35

33
Lucy Lippard. “Issue and Taboo” in The Pink Glass Swan Selected Feminist Essays on Art The New
Press: New York, Lucy Lippard, 1995. 158
Lippard identifies feminist values and
34
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 125.
35
Griselda Pollack provides more on this topic in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the
Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2008)

15
tendencies as “…collaboration, dialogue, a constant questioning of aesthetic and social
assumptions, and a new respect for audience. Feminism’s contribution to the evolution of
art reveals itself not in shapes but in structures. Only new structures bear the possibility
of changing the vehicle itself, the meaning of art in society.”
36
Those new structures of artistic practice could be identified as experimentation,
performance, social interactivity and participation with audiences and discursive forms of
a public practice. Feminist artists, activists and collaborators pushed to make room for a
diversity of women, for feminist and social concerns of race, class and gender. Their
work contributed immensely towards a shift in collaborative, collective, participatory,
social and public practices in art and social consciousness.

With a strong history of addressing the inequalities of the labor market and
exploring the often unpaid and/or undervalued labor of domestic work, a feminist
perspective problematizes the notion of gift economies and non-monetary exchange.
With such works as Touch Sanitation (1980), in which she shook hands with and
personally thanked more than 8,500 sanitation workers from the New York City
Department of Sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles acknowledged a vast undervalued
labor force. While Caycedo’s Daytoday project and the Time/Bank of e-flux both bring
into question the value of the work of cultural producers in a market economy. In
particular, these projects bring to light the value of social and cultural capital as a form of
non-monetary wealth and a resource within informal and formal networks.

36
Ibid, 174
16
The desire to dismantle the commodity status of art by emphasizing the concept
of a work rather than its aesthetics, or by the related dematerialization of the art object,
was an interest and practice of art from the mid 1960s through the 1970s. At this time
artists’ criticisms of capitalist practices were largely centered within the art world and
often addressed the corporate practices of art institutions. Artists conceptualized and
positioned themselves as workers and in the same way, as labor activists, they demanded
workers’ rights. For example, during the period 1969-1971, the Art Workers’ Coalition
(AWC), a group of artists and critics from New York, identified themselves as
artist/laborers and demanded artist labor rights. They publicly protested exploitive
museum practices such as the absence or exclusion of women and artists of color. In 1969
they presented New York’s Museum of Modern Art with a list of thirteen demands,
including: “a royalties system by which collectors would pay artists a percentage of
profits from the resale of their work...the creation of a trust fund that would provide
living artists ‘stipends, health insurance, help for artists’ dependents and other social
benefits’…”
37
AWC was also active in protesting the US military involvement in Southeast
Asia.
Other demands included extended museum hours and free admission, the
one demand that was achieved. The AWC used tactics that parallel feminist public
practice in their effort to influence change.
38

37
Gregory Sholette, “State of the Union” ArtForum, April 2008
Artist Hans Haacke, an AWC member, exhibited MOMA-Poll, 1970 at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) to reveal economic and political

38
Ibid
17
connections and contradictions of museums and their trustees. The poll asked museum
visitors to answer whether they would vote for New York governor Nelson Rockefeller,
who was also MoMA’s board member at the time, in the coming election. It asked
museum visitors to consider the fact that Rockefeller refused to reject President Richard
Nixon’s Indochina policy, and asked if that information would influence them to vote
against him in the coming election.
39
Today there continues to be criticism and questioning of museum and art
institutional funding, the majority of which is tied to corporate entities such as BP.
Two clear ballot boxes were set up like sculptures
in the museum, with directions on the wall for the viewers to cast their yes vote in the left
box and their no vote into the box on the right. The transparent boxes enabled viewers to
see the majority of votes accumulated in the left hand, ‘yes’ box. Haacke’s participatory
project addressed issues related to museum patronage and artists’ political, economic
concerns while engaging audiences on the topic.
40
In the United States, while artists criticized museums and art world practices,
critical conceptual art evolved and was eventually favored by art world institutions. In
But
like Haacke, artists such as Minerva Cuevas and Carolina Caycedo use institutional
funding to create critical work about their political and economic concerns in the hope
that their work will have an impact on its audiences.

39
Tanya Zimbardo, The Art of Participation:1950-Now, (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 2008) 126.

40
For a recent discussion on this specific topic see Robby Herbst’s article: "Social Art, Ambiguity, Oil,
Critique, Compromise, and Los Angeles Art Museums – Robby Herbst « 127 PRINCE," 127 PRINCE,
October 21, 2010, accessed October 24, 2010, http://127prince.org/2010/10/21/social-art-ambiguity-oil-
critique-compromise-and-los-angeles-art-museums-robert-herbst/.

18
contrast, conceptualism emerged in Latin America in a different context. Non-object art
was produced in Latin America more as a direct response to political and economic
conflicts of nation states. Luis Camnitzer
41
explains the distinction when he writes: “In
the Latin American context, dematerialization was not a consequence of formalist
speculation. Instead, it became an expedient vehicle for political expression, useful
because of its efficiency, accessibility, and low cost.”
42
In a more specific context, and in relation to Minerva Cuevas’s practice, the
development of contemporary art in Mexico and other global conceptual practices has,
until recently, been overlooked in dominant art historical discourse. The exhibition
catalogue for The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997
serves as a fundamental archive documenting a recently uncovered history of an art and
cultural movement that was disregarded even within its own country. Olivier Debroise
and Cuauhtémoc Medina, art critics and curators from Mexico, focused on the work of
Mexican artists since the 1968 Student Movement and government-ordered massacre in
Tlatelolco

43

41 Substantial research and writing on this topic is also credited to curator Mari Carmen Ramirez.
and created a framework to examine the art and cultural works that emerged
in response to political crisis. The exhibition indexes artworks through 1997, in order to
mark another pivotal moment in the political history of Mexico: the 1994 Zapatista
uprising. This armed movement of indigenous people offers direct resistance to the
destructive impact of globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement
42
Luis Camnitzer, "Conceptual Art and Conceptualism in Latin America," in Conceptualism in Latin
American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 29.

43
On October 2, 1968, ten days before the summer Olympics, government police in Tlatelolco, Mexico
massacred student protestors, killing more than three hundred.
19
(NAFTA) on their life, land and culture. In the context of economic crisis due to
government corruption and neoliberal capitalism during the 1990s in Mexico, and viewed
alongside the work of the Zapatistas, Cuevas’ practice and interventions become an
artistic response and an action of resistance that provides small immediate solutions
towards a much larger problem.

20
CHAPTER 2: GIFT ECONOMIES AND NON-MONETARY EXCHANGE IN
ARTS PRACTICE

“A gift offered in the midst of the transgressive act not only destroys, it creates.”
-Ted Purves
44

Artist and curator Ted Purves asserts that an act of generosity, especially when it
is offered in unexpected or unsanctioned situations, simultaneously has the potential to
both create a social bond between giver and receiver and destroy the social boundaries
imposed by the market.
In some non-western cultures, when money or gifts are offered to appease the
deities represented on shrines and altars, it is thought that a spiritual bond occurs. Is there
an expectation of reciprocity on behalf of the giver? Perhaps he or she acts in hopes of
achieving good health or a better life through the symbolic act towards spiritual
commitment. In contrast, in a market economy when money is exchanged for
commodities or service, the level of connection to the recipient is different; no bond
occurs. In the logic of capitalist consumerist culture, monetary transactions symbolize an
agreement based on a predetermined market value of the goods or service. The exchange
is based on monetary profit or gain and value is determined in monetary terms. Social
theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944, speculate on the situation of
consumers and the commodification of the culture industry. In their discussion they

44
Ted Purves, "Blows against the Empire," in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent
Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 27.
21
reflect on the displacement of value; “Everything has value only in so far as it can be
exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its
essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit
of works of art—becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy.”
45
Writing about the social and spiritual bond that gifts possess, Lewis Hyde asserts,
“Because of the bounding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity
exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to
others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom.”
The notion of
value applied to human relationships outside of the market mentality is brought into
public discourse and action through the non-monetary exchanges of Caycedo’s Daytoday
and e-flux’s Time/Bank.
46
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is often cited for his use of gifting as an artistic form.
Audiences for his sculpture Untitled (Public Opinion) 1991
Instead of
money, gifts in the form of objects or service secure a social bond and obligation that
potentially cultivate a community where value takes on a different significance.
47

45
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Juliet Schor and Douglas B.
Holt (New York, NY: New Press, 2000), 128.
, which comprised
individually wrapped candies, were able to take away a piece as a gift offered as part of

46
Lewis Hyde, "The Bond," in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York:
Vintage Books, 2007), 88.

47
Gregory Sholette:“Gifts of Resistance,” an essay for the catalog Periferic 8: Art as Gift, Biennial for
Contemporary Art, Iasi ROMANIA 10/03/08-10/18/08, Curated by Dora Hegyi pp. 129-137.
http://neme.org/main/887/periferic
8http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/GiftsOfResistance.Perifieric..pdf.

22
the function of the work. In his book What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in
Recent Art, Ted Purves makes a distinction between art objects that are gifts by which
generosity is enacted, and non-monetary exchange as a strategy of art within the social
and public sphere.
Purves catalogues artistic productions that use generosity and exchange as
strategies of social engagement in which audiences become co-creators. Purves
contextualizes these practices within an art historical framework and, while
acknowledging gift giving and exchange as artistic strategies, asserts that they can
construct relationships, and as a practice of resistance, operate as tools. In particular,
tools that experiment with radical art practices expand “the possibility of greater social
and aesthetic freedoms.”
48
Concepts of non-monetary exchange have been recognized and practiced by
societies of the past and present. In 1967 Marcel Mauss published The Gift: Forms and
Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Considering non-Western pre-capitalist
economies he writes, “In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of
goods, wealth and produce through markets established among individuals. For it is
groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by
obligations…”

49

48
Ted Purves, "Blows against the Empire," in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent
Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 28.

49
Marcel Mauss, "Prestation, Gifts and Potlatch," in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in
Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967), 3.

23
While the practices that “we do not find” – the non-market based exchanges – are
not part of the global capitalist system, artists and communities continue to explore
systems of non-monetary exchange that would have been familiar to pre-capitalist
societies. In particular, it is not uncommon for people, especially those in precarious
working conditions such as undocumented migrants and cultural workers, to informally
adopt strategies of non-monetary exchange for purposes of survival. Hyde notes that
scholarship on gift exchange has primarily emerged from the field of Anthropology
because it is a practice that “…tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended
families, small villages, close-knit communities, brotherhoods and of course tribes.”
50
Extending outside the gallery and in direct exchange with individuals, the three
art projects I have selected for consideration are integrated into the social landscape in the
form of free services and skill sharing. These are also familiar practices in both ‘semi-
autonomous and do-it-yourself’

The functionality of a project like Aranda and Vidokle’s time/bank is intended to increase
the available resources between networks; in this case, a network of cultural production.
51

50
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2007),
xxii.
(DIY) subcultures and in non-Western societies that
value gift giving and exchange as a social, political and economic practice. Looking at
them as “dark matter of the art world,” Gregory Sholette describes that although DIY and
activist practices significantly influence and inadvertently sustain the mainstream ‘culture
industry’ that sometimes co-opts their practices, these informal subversive practitioners

51
Gregory Sholette, "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere" 2005, accessed November
7, 2010, http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/05_darkmattertwo.pdf.

24
work from a marginalized position and gain no monetary recognition for their
contributions. Because of their assertion of autonomy, they rely on collaboration and
social capital as an important resource within the field of cultural production and among
social practitioners.
In an article “Gifts of Resistance,” Sholette maintains that informal creative
means of social production are assertions of autonomy “from not only the high art, but
also mainstream market culture.”
52
In light of his claim, he then poses a question of
significance to this thesis: “How then do we reconcile this fact with the simultaneous rise
of the multi-million dollar, global art market?”
53
Although global neoliberal policies have brought on crisis, the affordances of
global networking and exchange that have come with them have expanded opportunities
for previously underrepresented artists. An example of this is the exhibition Mexico City:
An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values at P.S. 1 New York in
2002, which included Cuevas’ MVC. Focusing on MVC, the next chapter of this thesis
highlights the functionality of art in everyday lives in the social sphere and urban public
space, and considers the goal of creating a better life.

52
Gregory Sholette, an essay for the catalog Periferic 8: Art as Gift, Biennial for Contemporary Art, Iasi
ROMANIA 10/03/08-10/18/08, Curated by Dora Hegyi pp. 129-137. http://neme.org/main/887/periferic-
8http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/GiftsOfResistance.Perifieric..pdf

53
Ibid, p. 1
25
CHAPTER 3: MINERVA CUEVAS: THE MEJOR VIDA CORPORATION
Minerva Cuevas presented at the first Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in
Public Practice in 2009. As is a characteristic of her practice, she has been cited as using
interventionist tactics and therefore presented in the “Trespassers, Squatters and
Interventionists” section of the Summit. Cuevas’ work varies in media, but is most often
unified by the research and content that reflects her political activist intentions of social
and public engagement. As part of her campaigns to critique and call attention to
privatization for example, she has employed graphic design to alter multinational
corporate logos such as Shell, Del Monte, BP and Nestle and create posters, pamphlets
and other print material for distribution. She often incorporates statistical information
about specific corporations to uncover their criminal acts. For example, in Del Monte
2003, a mural sized image of a Del Monte can label reads “criminal” underneath the
company name. In larger text on the backdrop of tomatoes, it reads “Pure Murder,” and
on the bottom corners “CIA 100 yrs. Suffice.” With this label alteration she uncovers the
century old United States government involvement with the criminal corporate practices
of Del Monte in Central America.
54
One of Cuevas’ earliest social art projects was the Mejor Vida Corporation
(Better Life Corporation, MVC). MVC began in 1997 as a number of public interventions
in Mexico City that involved Cuevas giving away free student I.D. cards. She
subsequently experimented with giving away other useful items as a public service. She

54
Minerva Cuevas (presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, New York Public
Library, New York City, October 24, 2009), accessed November 10, 2010,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/09/03/minerva-cuevas/.
26
handed out free subway tickets at the subway station for instance. While in New York she
gave away “safety pills” in the subway trains as if they were part of the New York’s
MTA “awake is aware” campaign. The packaged pills were taped to “riding safely at
night” brochures that were left in the subway trains. Interventions of this kind sparked the
creation of the MVC as a self-identified corporation situated in an office at the
Latinoamerican Tower in a business concentrated district of Mexico City.
Although, as of 2003, the MVC office no longer has a physical location, the MVC
continues to exist online. Other independent artists’ projects share their online location at
Irational.org. Specifically, Irrational.org claims to host and support “artists and
organizations that need to maintain mission critical information systems. These
'Irationalists' create work that pushes the boundaries between the corporate realms of
business, art and engineering.”
55
MVC functions as a conceptual public art project, a website, a social service and
as a number of interventions in public space. The homepage of MVC’s website welcomes
visitors with a logo that reads Mejor Vida Corp.®, with an image of two hands shaking
and text underneath that states “For a human interface.”

55
Redirecting You to the Irational.org Front Page, accessed February 2, 2011, http://www.irational.org/cgi-
bin/cv/cv.pl?member=irational.
27
Figure 1.3

A menu on the left lists the site’s pages of products, services and campaigns. Some of the
services and products MVC offers its clients are: subway tickets, seeds to encourage
clients to grow their own food, student ID cards, barcode stickers that can be used to
replace the existing stickers on fruits and vegetables at major supermarkets in order to
reduce the price, and recommendation letters to assist people in acquiring work and other
opportunities. MVC representatives have been sighted in Mexico City’s subway stations
cleaning the platforms during rush hour. MVC’s presence in public space performing
these services calls attention to the city government’s lack of care or concern for its
residents.
Cuevas re-appropriates corporate branding strategies in her designs and actions
and with the appropriation of corporate status, MVC employs the strategy of irony, a
rhetorical devise that usually points to the contrary in order to emphasize certain
discordant features of reality. The purpose of a corporation in the ‘real’ world is to create
wealth for its shareholders by generating maximum financial profit, regardless of any
harm that such a profit-maximizing goal may engender. In contrast, this art project, in the
image of a corporation, engages in an economy of generosity, functions to better the life
of individuals regardless of their gender, racial or economic status and provides social
28
services free of charge to its clients.
By inverting the economic structure of transnational corporations in this way,
Cuevas uses her status and resources as an artist to experiment with the possibilities of
generosity contrary to profit. With MVC, Cuevas intervenes in the public through social
exchange to critique and call attention to the injustices of capitalism while she also
redefines what a corporation could be. Art historian and critic, Cuauhtémoc Medina
credits the MVC as a company that experiments with the intention of “achieving public
good by means of arts practice…fulfilling urgent demands from the public…Anti-
capitalist in spirit, the corporation is a test tube in which to examine the plausibility of
non-capitalist interpersonal relationships.”
56
With the MVC, Cuevas addresses quotidian social problems that manifest as a result of
larger systematic governmental and economic issues. What audiences are potentially able
to experience through their interaction with MVC is a corporation that is premised on
social exchange rather that monetary profit.

In the context of the political and economic crisis that resulted from government
corruption and the rise of neoliberal capitalism in Mexico during the mid 1990s, Cuevas’s
practice and interventions can be viewed as an artistic response and an action that
provides small, immediate solutions towards a larger problem. Although Cuevas works as
a single artist and is represented by the Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City, she
collaborates with international art institutions and museums as well as practitioners in

56
Cuauhtemoc Medina, Recent Political Forms. Radical Pursuits in México, Accessed November 23, 2010
http://www.irational.org/mvc/english.html

29
other fields. She has also collaborated with activists, and one of her core concerns is to
reach a wide audience so that her work might facilitate them to “question every day
issues.”
57
Perceiving art institutions as spaces that can accommodate her larger social
concerns, in a 2001 conversation with art critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cuevas
shared that she perceives the museum as one of many places through which to reach
audiences. She states that “it’s only one of the tools, the internet or public interventions
are also one of the mediums to reach all kinds of audience”

58
With a goal to make people
question everyday issues and their connection to larger systems, Cuevas sees the MVC as
social activism. As she shared with Ulrich Obrist, “I think about the MVC project in
terms of social activism, but I am using mediums and institutions from the art context.”
Her artistic intentions are concerned with how art can be useful in “social terms.”
59
Cuevas’ MVC project is an example of how art can function beyond protest and
engage in more immediate aid and exchange with the daily lives of the public. The
strategy of taking on a corporate identity that offers free products and services under the
name of a ‘better life’ brings attention to the position and conditions that corporations
impose on our lives. By giving audiences products such as barcode stickers with lower
prices, free subway tickets and even tear gas, the MVC arms its patrons and participants

57
Conversations Between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Minerva Cuevas at the First Event of the Project
"Information/Misinformation" Part of the 24th Graphic Biennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia.," interview, Mejor
Vida Corp., May 2001, accessed September 19, 2010, http://www.irational.org/mvc/english.html.

58
Ibid

59
Ibid

30
with small means of survival. Functioning as a form of social service, MVC implies that
there is a lack of governmental and economic support for the people in need, and while it
may not be explicitly promoting the idea of self-organization towards autonomous
strategies in resistance to the market, it does imply the need for a better life than the one
that exists.
Cuevas has mentioned that activists often contact her to use her corporate label
alterations in political demonstrations.
60
S.COOP, 2009, a more recent Cuevas public project, commissioned by the
Whitechapel Gallery in London, continues to investigate non-profit practices of
exchange. In this case, she responded to London’s history of the co-operative (co-op)
In these cases, her art enters the public sphere of
activism and protest against corporate capitalist practices and could be considered an
outcome of reaching audiences in solidarity with her campaigns. Unfortunately client
responses to MVC have not been well documented, so the degree to which some may
have joined Cuevas’ campaign of resistance to corporate capitalism is unknown. In terms
of efficacy towards an alternative economy however, the MVC functions as an organizing
tool in a way similar to feminist social practice. Specifically, as the previously cited
works of Lacy, Mayer and Labowitz draw attention to the characteristics and impacts of
patriarchy, so the MVC uses media, collaboration and activist strategies in public space to
call attention to the characteristics of corporate capitalism.

60
Minerva Cuevas (lecture, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, New York Public
Library, New York City, October 24, 2009), accessed November 10, 2010,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/09/03/minerva-cuevas/.
31
trade movement.
61
In the gallery she displays ephemera of the co-operatives including
tokens that were given to co-op members as proof of their co-op purchases. In addition,
she designed her own coins that were manufactured by the Mexican Mint and distributed
as a local currency amongst market traders in the Petticoat Lane Market area.
62

The coins
she designed were inscribed with text “Bread and Honey” and “The Right To Rebellion
Is Sacred 2009,” and included an image of a fist in the center.
Figure 2.3

The coins could be redeemed at an ice-cream parlour she set-up near the market on
Toynbee Street. S.COOP, 2009 shows Cuevas’ commitment in artistic urban
interventions to engage publics in non-capitalist gestures.
As an individual and an artist who is represented in the international art market by
a successful gallery, Cuevas is well placed to experiment and explore strategies of
generosity and social exchange towards a better life. Outside of the art world, such a
practice might be seen as charity, which lacks the political intention of mobilizing people

61
Coline Milliard. “Minerva Cuevas: S.COOP” Reviews in Art Monthly May 5, 2009.p.326

62
Ibid
32
towards organized action and collective resistance against the market. Referencing Hardt
and Negri’s statement quoted in my introduction, the MVC does indeed exemplify
“practical experimentation” offering models to discover how the “possible becomes
real.”
63

In this next chapter, I discuss a project that takes a few steps further in social
exchange toward mobilizing publics for an alternative economy.

63
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Preface," in Empire (Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.: Harvard Univ. Press,
2000), 411.
33
CHAPTER 4: CAROLINA CAYCEDO: LIVING DAY TO DAY
“I understood that what I have been doing in this city so far is weaving together
a tapestry of experiences and persons. And I don’t mean weaving a new
tapestry all together, but more like weaving a new color, a new thread into an
already rich and multiple layered fabric of community networks, non profit
organizations, conscious individuals, creative collectives, anarchist city
dwellers and revolutionary thinkers that share. Yes that’s it, that simply share.
What do they share? Well, first of all the public space of Los Angeles, second,
their time and resources, and finally but not less important ideals and ideas and
actions on how to relate to others and inhabit the city in a way that allows less
dependency on the system.”
64
– Carolina Caycedo

In the summer of 2009, Carolina Caycedo traversed the city of Los Angeles with
La Cholota (Big Chola), a 1979 Chevrolet “Chevy” Van she acquired while in the city for
a five-week artist residency at the g727 gallery. La Cholota served as Caycedo’s major
asset that enabled her to get to know the city and its social and cultural networks.
Additionally, along with the hospitality of g727 gallery, La Cholota served as her main
resource for negotiating non-monetary exchanges, which were the primary artistic
strategy of her project entitled Daytoday.
Caycedo began her art practice of informal economies and non-monetary
exchange in the street in 1997, while an art student in Bogota, Columbia.
65

64
“Daytoday in L.A. Blog” Daytoday 2002-2009, (ed. Carolina Caycedo)
She
collaborated with Adriana García, Raimond Chaves and Federico Guzmán in an art
collective called Cambio Cambalache, and in 1998, they created Museo de la Calle
(Museum of the Streets). This was her first social practice experiment in direct exchange
www.Lulu.com (2009), p. 55

65
Pablo Leon de la Barra, “Existing Outside The Art Economy: Carolina Caycedo’s Daytoday Project” in
Daytoday 2002-2009, ((ed. Carolina Caycedo) www.Lulu.com (2009), p. 67
34
with people in the city. The collective set up objects for barter at the Plaza de San
Victorino in El Cartucho, the center of Bogotá.
66
In What we want is Free: Generosity
and Exchange in Recent Art, Purves describes that the collective made a portable street
cart “modeled on the types of carts used by street recyclers or peddlers, which functioned
as an open space for bartering.”
67

Commodities held in the cart were bartered in non-
monetary exchanges with people in El Cartucho. The objects the artists garnered were
then exhibited in the street as a representation of the direct exchanges with the people of
the neighborhood.

Figure 3.4: Carolina Caycedo Figure 4.4 Museo de la Calle

In Caycedo’s self-published book, which addresses seven years of Datoday, Pablo
Leon De la Barra describes the collection of objects as “a cartography of the life and
trade of El Cartucho.”
68

66
Ibid, p.68
Museo de la Calle creaetd a practice of social exchange that

67
Ted Purves, What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2005), 143.

68
Pablo Leon de la Barra, “Existing Outside The Art Economy: Carolina Caycedo’s Daytoday Project” in
Daytoday 2002-2009, ((ed. Carolina Caycedo) www.Lulu.com (2009), p. 68

35
excluded money, and, by emphasizing social interaction, provided for a different
perspective on value. Iterations of Museo de la Calle appeared international art festivals
and exhibitions hosted in cities such as Istanbul, Venice, and Seville.
69
Caycedo’s Daytoday was a durational project beginning in 2002 as a public
project for the art institution Secession in Vienna. In a Flash Art review from May/June
2007, Julieta Gonzales describes Caycedo’s strategy as one that “…seems to be one of
resistance to dominant economic systems by way of small, poetic and very individual
interventions in which the gift as well as barter become vehicles for possible alternative
economies.”

70
In addition to this personal thrust, however, Caycedo’s desire to test out non-
monetary exchange as a public and social practice brought the political position of
economics up for public consideration. The name of Carolina Caycedo’s seven-year
social practice and art project Daytoday, refers to the situation of living day-to-day with
The description of “small, poetic and individual interventions” could be
said of the strategy of the MVC, but the difference in Caycedo’s strategy is that it is a
conscious artistic experiment in which the actions were initiated by the artist’s personal
needs and her frustrations with employment as an artist. In other words, in comparison to
the intended external political reach of the MVC, and in alignment with the feminist
assertion that “the personal is political”, Daytoday was intended to impact Caycedo’s
own life.

69
Ted Purves, What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2005),.143

70
Julieta Gonzales, “Reviews: San Juan, Puerto Rico: Carolina Caycedo. Galeria Comercial” in Flash Art
(International Edition) 40 (May/June 2007): 141-2
36
an unpredictable income source. The project was a social art experiment that confronted
the question of, how are basic needs met and attained in precarious economic conditions?
The artist was particularly interested in testing out Hakim Bey’s theory of the
Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), which posits the liberation of privatized space via
an ephemeral action in time and space. The notion of autonomy in this regard can extend
beyond physical space to encompass mental and psychological spaces and consciousness.
Examples of TAZ include guerilla gardens, the existence of free software, commercial
music and movies on the Internet, and creative acts of access and resistance to restricted
sites of commerce and oppressive forces.
Caycedo’s work also reflects an artistic practice associated with the late 1990s
and early 2000s that Nicolas Bourriaud terms Relational Aesthetics. In his description of
an emerging art form, he declares “Art is the place that produces a specific sociability”.
71

His book identifies artists’ practices that explore the creation of moments of opportunity
for relational interactions and exchanges (especially in the urban context), which can
potentially highlight, outside of a capitalist logic, the relative nature of life. Bourriaud
shares that a relational aesthetics is, “An art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of
human interaction and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and
private symbolic space…”
72
Daytoday took place in the streets with a van that was provided by funding from
art institutions and galleries. Similar to the mobile cart that held objects for trade in

71
Nicolas Bourriaud, Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics. (Paris: Les Presses Du Reel, 2002),16.

72
Ibid, 14
37
Museo de la Calle, the van functioned as a mobile space that carried Caycedo throughout
the city to exhibit and negotiate exchange. Testing the day-to-day experience and
possibilities of commerce without money, she offered her skills and services in exchange
for the things she needed. As part of the mobile public installation, she created a
document of two columns naming items and services of which “Carolina gives” and in
the other column, catalog her needs under the heading “you give.” Examples of things
Carolina would give include Spanish lessons, rides, image scanning, video editing
lessons, and haircuts; while things that “you give” list a place to stay, plane tickets,
books, a memory stick, tours, wine or food. The required items, which were also
circulated through the Internet, changed depending on Caycedo’s needs and situation.
38

Figure 5.4

Pablo Leon de la Barra describes Daytoday in the article “Existing Outside The
Art Economy”, included in Caycedo’s book Daytoday 2002-2009, where he states that
over the past ten years Caycedo has explored “the social and aesthetic possibilities to be
developed through the art of exchange. Taking advantage of the facilities and resources
offered by art institutions, Caycedo has created a parallel economy that questions the
mechanisms of capitalism by generating platforms for non-monetary exchanges.”
73

73
“Pablo Leon de la Barra, “Existing Outside The Art Economy: Carolina Caycedo’s Daytoday Project” in
Daytoday 2002-2009, (ed. Carolina Caycedo)
A
www.Lulu.com (2009), 67.

39
fundamental aspect of non-monetary exchange that Daytoday facilitated is self-organized
negotiation. The negotiation between individuals involved in an exchange requires a
certain amount of trust. Without the monetary unit that symbolizes an agreement, non-
monetary exchange facilitates a redefinition of value. Caycedo explains, “What Daytoday
basically proposes is that we rethink the way we value things and situations.”
74
The strategy of experimenting with non-monetary negotiations in direct exchange
with publics is one that expands a dialogical and experiential space around the possibility
of an alternative economy. In this regard, Caycedo’s strategy is similar to that of Cuevas
in the Mejor Vida Corp., which also functions as an act of resistance to the market by
providing gestures of generosity and the exchange of day-to-day necessities outside of the
market economy. Both Cuevas’ and Caycedo’s projects interact directly with the public
to provide a service or need for free. Both are interested in the impact their strategies
might have on people’s lives, including their own, and both contribute to the construction
of spaces that are organized counter to institutionalized systems of economic exchange.
In this way, MVC and Daytoday function to create an economic TAZ where, in a context
that lacks exchanges motivated by monetary profit, social interactions are valued more
significantly.
The
situations constructed by Daytoday nurtured social relationships that the artist referred to
as “allies in time and space.” For Caycedo, these are the most important results of the
exchanges of time, skills and commodities detached from monetary value.

74
Carolina Caycedo, "Alternative Economies" (presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, New York Public Library, New York City, October 2009), accessed October 25, 2010,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/09/03/carolina-caycedo/.
40
The Daytoday project created non-institutionalized space free of capitalist
motivations toward privatization and monetary profit, and provided room to resist the
dominant structure of economic exchange with which, out of necessity, individuals are
expected to conform. To put it another way, the social space that Daytoday created was
not only located geographically in physical space, but also located in the psychic state, a
place that inspires one to question what Hardt and Negri call the “notion of right.”
75
Social and participatory art may not reconstruct the world, however, it does have
potential to materialize into further actions on local levels within communities that are
motivated to construct alternative ways of organizing economic sustainability. In an
They
explain the “notion of right” as a supranational world power or law, an imposition of
authority, the accepted norm, which is held in place by legal means to defend capital.
Daytoday valorized individual skill-sets as well as knowledge and trust, which were
exchanged via non-monetary transactions. As the goal of monetary profit tends to
motivate competition, alienation and greed within the tradition of capitalist culture,
Daytoday can be viewed as both a collaborative and an individual effort that introduce a
re-thinking in regard to personal wealth and value. Although Daytoday may not have
constructed a politically radical public or social space, it can be seen as radical in the
space of ideas and the public sphere of discourse. In other words, there is potential to
influence an embodied consciousness that might be performed in the interactions of
everyday life in public space.

75
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "The Constitution of Empire," in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 9.
41
interview, Caycedo says that the gallery space is an elitist environment, while the streets
allow for a more democratic space where more sincere reactions and interactions occur.
The street is her comfort zone, because she explains, “I can redo the rules,”
76
Caycedo is aware of contemporary barter economies. In her article “I Could do
With a Little More Chaos Myself” she cites a few that exist in Argentina, Mexico,
Canada and Europe. With that in mind, the Daytoday project has been more of an
experiment for her, in social exchange and re-evaluating time and work in a capitalist
market economy. She admits:
and that
includes the way she constructs social space, economic exchange and interactions with
publics.

So when I decide to live 3 weeks without money in Vienna, I know I am not a
pioneer, not even a promoter because I am not trying to start an exchange club or
develop an alternative economy theory, but I do approach it as an experiment,
with the city as a research platform where to test my own limits and
communication skills and those of whoever I encounter in Vienna. I do think of it
as a creative project that will help me find a solution to my everyday basic
necessities, because I am fed up of working and I do not believe in the separation
of time into work time and leisure time…and have now decided to shift my entire
life slowly towards this direction.
77

The question that arises asks if the very personal motivations and interpersonal
exchanges of Daytoday are adequate to the task of rethinking the value of human
relationships through non-monetary negotiations. While Caycedo’s work did not arise in

76
"LatinArt.com - The Definitive Online Source of Latin American Art," interview by Bill Kelly Jr.,
LatinArt.com || an Online Journal of Art and Culture, accessed December 07, 2010,
http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=102.

77
Carolina Caycedo, “I Could Do With A Little More Chaos Myself” in Daytoday 2002-2009 (ed. Carolina
Caycedo) www.Lulu.com (2009), 74.
42
response to, for example, a specific national crisis in Colombia (where she began her
practice with Cambio Cambalache), it is influenced by issues of economics experienced
and understood from her own position and concern as an artist. She has been able to
experiment with her ideas as an art and social practice for over seven years with the
assistance of artist residencies and museum exhibition funding. Daytoday functioned
mostly as an artistic experiment in cities as a way to explore the different possibilities of
human interaction and social engagement without money as the motivating factor.
Caycedo,’s day-to-day living in Los Angeles with La Cholota as her vehicle of
mobility also assisted in her meetings and interactions with diverse and creative
communities and in some cases created a social space for exchanges. Daytoday was not
an alternative economy in resistance to the market as much as it was an experiment
toward a model of an economy of independence of time and space; it explored a practice
in cultivating a network to engage in local non-monetary experiences of exchange.
Instead, Daytoday was an economy based on sharing and social exchange in parallel to
the dominant economy. Although the Daytoday project no longer exists as an art project,
it is still located in the memories of its participants or, as Caycedo referred to them,
“allies in space and time” that were involved in the negotiations and exchanges.
Caycedo’s 2009 artist residency in Los Angeles at the g727 Gallery motivated the
conclusion of Daytoday. While in Los Angeles, she wrote that she saw how there were
individuals, communities, artists and organizations committed to the generation of social
spaces based on sustainable practices. Examples include the Echo Park Time Bank and
the Ecovillage among others with which she interacted and from which she learned.
43
Caycedo admits that the experiment of Daytoday was undertaken more for her own
benefit than in pursuit of wider change and has said that she was inspired to bring her
artistic strategy of non-monetary exchange into a more sustained practice within the
Puerto Rican community where she currently lives. In a letter Caycedo wrote to Ted
Purves on September 1, 2009, she declares;

I will close the daytoday project, after 7 years of swapping within and out the art
realm, I have decided to stick to the non-artistic realm. Not that I think these kind
of interventions are not relevant in the art context, but I want to concentrate my
efforts in starting an effective time-bank/swapping network here in Puerto Rico,
after seven years of experience I feel I can jump from hosting a personal barter
network, to hosting a communal one.
78

Caycedo is interested in exploring how to generate autonomous solutions to benefit
economic inequalities and injustice.
79
“Her decision to work as an artist over the last decade was more determined by a clear
sense of the freedom it would grant her, the freedom to make things happen in the world,
things that she wanted to see for real.”
It could be said then, that her art practice and
experimentation in exchange is being brought into life as a social practice beyond the art
world. As suggested by Ted Purves in his article “Realms”:
80

78
Ted Purves,“Realms”in Daytoday 2002-2009 (ed. Carolina Caycedo)
Art provided Caycedo, among other artists
engaged with broadening the definition of what art could be, with the time and space for
creative experimentation to develop a practice. In Caycedo’s case she developed the
www.Lulu.com (2009), 79.

79
"LatinArt.com - The Definitive Online Source of Latin American Art." Interview by Bill Kelly Jr.
LatinArt.com || an Online Journal of Art and Culture. Accessed December 07, 2010.
http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=102.

80
Ted Purves,“Realms”in Daytoday 2002-2009 (ed. Carolina Caycedo) www.Lulu.com (2009), 80.
44
practice of barter and social exchange as a practice that also allowed her autonomy of
time and space detached from the corporate market. Her project exemplifies how her
“practical experimentation” offers models to “determine when and how the possible
becomes real.”
81

Caycedo’s art practice influenced a shift for her and potentially for her
“allies in space and time” towards another possible paradigm of economic sustainability
as a way to resist the capitalist corporate market. While Caycedo concluded Daytoday in
2009, within the same year a new project that positioned a time bank as an art and social
practice was being initiated for cultural producers to engage and explore the possibilities
of non-monetary exchange.

81
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "The Multitude Against Empire," in Empire (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 411.
45
CHAPTER 5: E-FLUX: TIME/BANK
“This is again also about artistic autonomy, about creating systems that look like
other systems, but remain artist-made systems—which means they’re made to
satisfy an artist’s intended scale, an artist who may be interested in communality
and questions of “the public” as opposed to, say, monumental sculpture or grand
gestures.”
- Martha Rosler
82

Artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle introduced their project time/bank at the
Creative Time Public Practice Summits of 2009 and 2010 in New York City.
83

Individually Aranda presented in 2009 as part of a panel on Alternative Economies,
which interestingly was followed by a presentation of Carolina Caycedo’s Daytoday
project. While Vidokle presented in 2010 as part of the “Markets” category introduced by
Julia Bryan-Wilson. Unlike the previous year, the 2010 summit included time for
audience participation after each thematic section. When the “Markets” section
concluded Vidokle’s presentation prompted discussions, online and in real space, about
current practice, strategies and experiments with alternative economies in contemporary
arts practice.
84
The concept of a time bank is not a new invention, but Aranda and Vidokle
position the idea within the broad framework of participatory and social art practice and

82
“Martha Rosler, "“Martha Rosler and Bosko Blagojevic: A Conversation”," ed. Brian Sholis, in Anton
Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat, by Bosko Blagojevic (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,
2009), 94.

83
Presentations could be viewed online here: http://www.creativetime.org/programs/?v=programs

84
The discussions are available here: http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/

46
the specific frame of e-flux, an online announcement distribution service that functions as
a space of common interest for the international contemporary art world.
Julieta Aranda is a multimedia artist from Mexico City who lives and works in
New York and Berlin. She is co-founder, with Vidokle, of e-flux, an online network that
distributes announcements about and around the art world. Her latest project, part of the
first of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s “Intervals” emerging art series in 2009,
was an installation of time-keeping mechanisms.
85
In a conversation with Sarah Hromack
published in Art In America, Aranda state that those works grouped under the title There
Will be Time reflect her “interest in the notion of subject formation -- how this is tied to a
politicized subjectivity and, in turn, to the assertion of one's dominion over one's time as
a condition for individuation...I like to think that the group of works at least describes the
possibility of claiming sovereignty over one's experience of time, and not to have it
inexorably linked to an authority.”
86
Aranda’s interest in disassociation from authority leading towards a self-
sustaining and independent subjectivity has also been explored in her collaborations with
Vidokle. With Vidokle and Liz Linden for example, she organized PAWNSHOP, and
with Vidokle, e-flux video rental (EVR). Both projects began at the e-flux storefront in

85
Julieta Aranda, "Alternative Economies" (Presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, New York Public Library, New York City, October 2009), accessed December 18, 2010,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/09/28/julieta-aranda/.

86
Sarah Hromack, "There Will Be Time: A Conversation with Julieta Aranda - Conversations - News &
Opinion," Art in America, September 4, 2009, section goes here, accessed February 2, 2011,
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-04-09/there-will-be-time-a-
conversation-with-julieta-aranda/.

47
New York City and have been exhibited internationally. In 2007, PAWNSHOP turned the
store into a temporary “pawnshop dedicated to the pawning of artworks”
87
. More than 60
artists exchanged their works for quick cash, leaving them at the store where they were
available to be bought and sold.
88
With “nearly 500 art films and video works” EVR
offered “a free video rental store, a public screening room, and an archive”
89
Vidokle, from Moscow, Russia, is an artist and a founding director of e-flux who
currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. e-flux, an outcome of the Internet,
began in 1999 as a way to send content immediately to a mass e-mail list. Not specific to
any genre, it consists of an organized list of press releases about contemporary art
exhibitions, conferences, events, job openings and open calls. It also includes links to
contemporary art magazines that pay for representational space on e-flux’s website. In
addition, e-flux publishes books and a journal of articles relevant to contemporary art
discourse.
.
In a 2006 e-mail conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist,
90

87
"PAWNSHOP / E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed February 25, 2011,
Vidokle describes e-flux
as a long-term artists’ project and as an extension of his early interest in using non-
http://www.e-
flux.com/shows/view/4687.

88
"Projects / E-flux." Shows / E-flux. Accessed February 25, 2011. http://www.e-flux.com/projects/.

89
"E-flux Video Rental / E-flux." Shows / E-flux. Accessed February 25, 2011. http://www.e-
flux.com/shows/view/1872.

90
Ever.Ever.Ever.- Shows/ e-flux, Accessed February 25, 2011. July 2006
http://www.eflux.com/files/Hans_Ulrich_Obrist_Interview.pdf

48
conventional spaces and/or places for art exchanges. It had, he states, no initial plan or
strategy, just the “pure pleasure of improvisation and mass communication...”
91
Because e-flux has been profitable, as an owner/director, Vidokle has been able to
finance, produce and curate creative projects and exhibitions independent of art
institutions. As he describes it, he has been able to remain independent of the “normal
power structures that are just killing every thing these days: the market, government,
funding organizations, collectors and sponsors.”

92
Prior to his work on Time/Bank, Vidokle’s most recent collaborations have
included the unitednationsplaza (Berlin 2006-07, Mexico City, 2008) and Night School
(2008-09) in New York

93
. He refers to these projects as “exhibition as school” where the
audience participants become students.
94

91
Ibid
The projects functioned as a free temporary art
academy that consisted of a year of free seminars and discussions with over a hundred
artists, writers, curators, philosophers and diverse publics. The “exhibitions,” including
its seminars and readings, have been archived on unitednationsplaza.org and can be
accessed for free.

92
Ibid

93
Collaborators for Unitednationsplaza were; Boris Groys, Jalal Toufic, Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler,
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nikolaus Hirsch, Tirdad Zolghadr and Walid Raad. NightSchool included:
Boris Groys, Mikhail Iampolski, Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Carey Young, Maria Lind, Tirdad Zolghadr,
Okwui Enwezor, Hu Fang, Xu Tan, Zhang Wei, Paul Chan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Natascha Sadr Haghighian
and Raqs Media Collective

94
Media Farzin, "An Open History of the Exhibition as School”," ed. Brian Sholis, in Anton Vidokle:
Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 31.

49
Free information, the cultivation of networks, projects that are independent of the
market, free art and educational institutions are a common form and intention of
Vidokle’s work. Unlike the unacknowledged multitude of self-organized, non-
institutional, autonomous artists and activists that Sholette describes as “creative dark
matter,” Vidokle’s self-organized projects are largely recognized by the “formal art
world.”
95
His credibility and the attention he receives are at least partly a result of the
70,000
96
people who subscribe to the e-flux daily news digest and the significant art
institutions who purchase advertising space on the e-flux website. Conceptually, as
Vidokle suggested in a presentation about the history of the project in one of the
Unitednationsplaza seminars, e-flux also functions as an archive, a survey of the past ten
years of exhibition making and, in a way, reflective of the market, a public sphere of
discursive cultural production.
97
While e-flux is self-sustaining as a result of the market, Aranda and Vidokle’s
most recent project, Time/Bank, experiments with a system of non-monetary exchange
that exists partially as an alternative economic model, but mostly as micro-economy
parallel to the market. On October 15, 2009, as part of the Frieze Art Fair, Aranda and
Vidokle presented Time/Bank as a one-day exhibition of original designs of time-based

95
Sholette, Gregory. "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere%u201D." 2005, 1-23.
Accessed November 7, 2010. http://www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writingpdfs/05_darkmattertwo.pdf.
96
Brian Sholis, in Anton Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,
2009), 7.

97
Unitednationsplaza - Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Julieta Aranda and
Anton Vidokle, Unitednationsplaza - Archive, accessed February 12, 2011,
http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/video/41/.

50
currency. Titled Impossible Exchange and organized by curators Filipa Oliveira and
Miguel Amado, the exhibition included designs by
98

Aranda, Vidokle and Caycedo
among 30 other artists.

Figure 6.5 Hour Notes, 2009 by Lawrence Weiner

Figure 7.5 Hour Note prototype, 2009 by Carolina Caycedo

The Time/Bank now operates online with over 500 members. On November 6, 2010,
Time/Bank and e-flux opened the Time/Store in New York City, modeled after the historic
Cincinnati Time Store created by American anarchist Josiah Warren in 1827, as a three-
year experiment in alternative economics.
99

98
"Unitednationsplaza - The Best Surprise Is No Surprise," Unitednationsplaza - Archive, accessed
February 12, 2011, http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/event/8/.

99
Grand Opening / E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed January 28, 2011, http://www.e-
flux.com/shows/view/8775.
51
With Time/Bank, Aranda and Vidokle intend to create an international network
based on exchanges of time in the form of skills and services. It would, they planned,
operate as a parallel and alternative micro-economy for artists and cultural producers. In
their own words, the Time/Bank e-flux:
is a platform where artists, curators, writers and other people in our field, can
exchange time and skills— help each other get things done without using money.
In a more idealistic way, the Time/Bank can become a place where certain types
of actions and ideas, that seem to have no value in our market-driven society, can
gain a sense of worth.
100

The notion of working in parallel with and/or outside of the market that the
Time/Bank project implies can be viewed as a practice that encourages autonomous and
self-organized actions. Echoing the way in which Caycedo’s Daytoday project requires
self-identification and determination of the notion of value, Time/Bank requires that its
participants negotiate actual value and the notion of value for themselves in non-
monetary terms or conditions. Participants position the value of their knowledge, skills
and time detached from the limited space of monetary market-driven notions.
Unlike barter, which is a characteristic of pre-capitalist societies and perhaps
informal economies, time banks operate by replacing currency with time dollars. The
concept of time dollars is often credited to Edgar S. Cahn. In his 2004 book No More
Throw Away –People: The Co-Production Imperative, Cahn suggests the idea that, free
from monetary dependence, time dollars have the capacity to valorize the time, skills, and
knowledge that individuals share with each other for mutual benefits, thus strengthening

100
Time/Bank / E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed September 17, 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/8587.
52
human relationships and community. He hopes it "would enable individuals and
communities to become more self-sufficient, to insulate themselves from the vagaries of
politics and to tap the capacity of individuals who were in effect being relegated to the
scrap heap and dismissed as freeloaders."
101
While Cahn is most often cited for introducing the concept of time dollars, the e-
flux Time/Bank website provides a page about the history of time banking that traces the
origin of time-based currency to American anarchist Josiah Warren and British
industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen.
According to Cahn, time banking evolved
when money for social services and programs were, as they are today, scarce.
102
According to Aranda and Vidokle, from
1827 through 1830 Warren administered the Cincinnati Time Store, while Owen, along
with others including Warren, created the “New Harmony” community in Indiana, 1825-
1829. Although they worked together in New Harmony, Warren and Owen took different
approaches to time-based currency. Warren’s approach was specific in the measurement
of value of goods equivalent to labor-time while Owen’s was not. Owen’s system, for
example, declared that three hours of labor would be equal to three to twelve pounds of
corn
103

101
Edgar S. Cahn, No More Throw-Away People: the Co-production Imperative (Washington, D.C.:
Essential Books, 2004), 5-6.
, with the final determination of poundage being negotiable. In Warren’s system,
the exchange rate was set.

102
"About | Timebank by E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed October 9, 2010, http://www.e-
flux.com/timebank/about.

103

Ibid
53
In their on-line history, Aranda and Vidokle also provide information about
contemporary time banking and credit Paul Glover with starting “the first successful
contemporary time bank” in Ithaca, New York in 1991. Like time-dollars, “Ithaca
Hours”, which are still in operation, are exchanged between local community members
and local businesses. An example of “hour notes,” Ithaca Hours function like dollars but
denote measurements of time that are circulated among a network.
Time banking is a model of an alternative economy that replaces money with
time. Premised on the cultivation of a network and a community with values based on
sharing, it operates in contrast and in resistance to the dominant capitalist market
economy where value is measured in relation to the accumulation of monetary wealth.
Because time banking has been practiced among localized communities since at least
1827 (although not consistently), it could be perceived as already undergoing “practical
experimentation” toward a model of “how the possible becomes real.”
The e-flux Time/Bank offers a way for individuals to connect with others involved
in the contemporary art world by way of a free account on the e-flux website and engage
in non-monetary exchanges of goods and services. Every Time/Bank account holder
creates a profile, which, in addition to their name, can include their image, location,
profession and skills. Each account has an overview that shows the member’s current
balance of hours, which are gained by providing a service for another member. Accounts
also track “exchanges in progress” and provide e-mail functionality between members.
Clearly the e-flux Time/Bank adapts an already existent practice – time banking –
into the art world to function as a social practice in the service of the participants. How
54
does the Time/Bank model differ from its precedents, and what are the advantages of
positioning a time bank within the framework of a social and participatory public art
practice?
e-flux’s Time/Bank website garners listings that read like classified ads and/or
Craigslist postings. Time/Bank members are free to propose anything from conceptual art
projects to practical service or advice. Among recent listings for example, the
“Crowdsourcing Art Project” offers one time/bank hour in exchange for an image based
on the participant’s interpretation of a “word of the day”; while the “Stars Project” offers
24 hours to participants who will display the night sky in real time, via webcam, on their
computer monitors. Job related listings include such requests as: “Need a P/T Developer
for GIFTFLOW.org,” and offer anywhere from six to forty hours in exchange for website
coding. Other offers and requests encompass shelter, transportation, proofreading and
translations. Someone in Chicago who has access to “a university library proper” for
example, offers one hour of their time to scan articles and PDFs for anyone working on a
research project and in need of assistance. A listing under the category “general advice”
from a member located in New York City asks: “I just moved to NYC and need help and
advice about how to make it here (in the arts). Should I try to find an internship even
though I've been out of grad school for two years? Should I work at American Apparel or
nothing at all? Help!”
104

104
"Start | Timebank by E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed February 26, 2011, http://www.e-
flux.com/timebank/start.

55
Pointing to a lack of paid opportunities for recent (or not so recent) graduates
looking for a place in the art market, this last entry exemplifies the very real need for
Time/Bank. Time banks are most commonly practiced in the local context to cultivate a
network based on the mutual benefits of sharing and exchanging time in the form of
service. The e-flux Time/Bank has over 500 members registered online, all of whom are
located in cities around the world. The advantage of e-flux is its already established
international online network of 70,000 subscribers who often travel the globe for art
related events and opportunities.
Unlike a locally-based time bank, the e-flux Time/Bank has the advantage of
operating, and growing from inside an existing, expansive international art network. e-
flux also has an advantage that they are not tied to an art institution with a specific
mission. e-flux does not function like most art institutions that are also non-profit
organizations dependent on grants and donors, which can limit and influence the kinds of
projects the institution supports based on a grantees specific mission. This allows them to
experiment with projects without having to fulfill philanthropic funding responsibilities.
Along with its various collaborators, e-flux has produced numerous projects that
are archived on the e-flux website under “projects”. The list includes the Mejor Vida
Corp.’s free student I.D. cards. A recurring theme of e-flux’s projects is the provision of
free services to the public. Whether it be the announcement distribution service, a free
school, or the Time/Bank, what e-flux seems to be concerned with is self-organization, the
provision of free services, and the generation of an autonomous resource for artists and
cultural producers to exchange ideas and services autonomous from art institutions and
56
their specific missions. e-flux and Time/Bank do not outline a specific mission other than
the commitment to continue to experiment with ways of exchange in the realm of arts and
culture. Projects are funded through the monetary capital that is gained from e-flux’s
clients.
Perhaps the strength of e-flux is its openness to experiment, explore and evolve
without being limited or confined to a specific institutional mission. Nonetheless, it is the
monetary aspect of e-flux, the digital and discursive space within which art institutions
pay to have a presence, affords Vidokle and his associates the opportunity to experiment
with artistic projects and self-sustainability. Vidokle considers that e-flux is an extension
of his artistic practice and also a business, which depends on the market for is monetary
success. Vidokle, aware of the paradoxical position, shared in a conversation with Ulrich
Obrist;
I think for e-flux, the idea of liberating space and time consists of not being at all
concerned with exhibitions, but entirely occupied by other types of activity…
This is possible in part because our economy allows this…from the start
independence was a key goal. I really don’t think it’s feasible to think of
alternative practices or organizations without rethinking their economic links and
dependencies on the existing system.
105

The need for monetary capital cannot be ignored. In fact, survival in a capitalist
society depends on acquiring money. What the e-flux Time/Bank points out is that
cultural and social capital are also valuable. e-flux, being financially self-sustaining, is
able to provide a participatory space for experimentation with social non-monetary

105
Ever.Ever.Ever.- Shows/ e-flux, Accessed February 25, 2011. July 2006
http://www.eflux.com/files/Hans_Ulrich_Obrist_Interview.pdf
57
exchanges. With Time/Bank it is their hope, as stated by Aranda and Vidokle, “to create
an immaterial currency and a parallel micro-economy for the cultural community, one
that is not geographically bound, and that will create a sense of worth for many of the
exchanges that already take place within our field—particularly those that do not produce
commodities and often escape the structures that validate only certain forms of exchange
as significant or profitable.”
106

106
"About | Timebank by E-flux," Shows / E-flux, accessed October 9, 2010, http://www.e-
flux.com/timebank/about.
58
CONCLUSION: CREATIVE ACTIONS TOWARDS THE POSSIBLE

“The idea of sharing is not a difficult one to grab, and I believe that once you
understand it the more you want to share, because it is beautiful, satisfying,
ecological, friendly, revolutionary and generous…The principle of sharing is also
a political, social, economical and artistic statement, because you can replace the
dependence upon authority with it.”
Carolina Caycedo
107

“The freedom to experiment, and to make models and sketch possibilities, has
given itself over to a more specific task, a real-time, communal barter network. I
hope that it will permeate the lives of its participants at such a level that permits
them to live in another realm of exchange, one as unlike the world we have been
given….It might be difficult to leave this realm for another one, but we can see it
on clear days.”
Ted Purves
108

The e-flux Time/Bank can be viewed as one example of artists’ responding to
economic collapse in the United States. At a time when state and social services have
been downsized due to economic crisis, the projects I have described can be viewed as a
form of oppositional practice that creates local solutions with a network of people in
situations where non-monetary exchanges and social capital are already informally
practiced. Perhaps the initiation of Time/Bank is a reflection of the economic crisis, a
result of mass unemployment, and the underpaid or undervalued and precarious status of
cultural workers, including artists and educators. There is potential for the models
provided by such networks of social exchange to encourage others towards self-
sustainability and autonomy from institutions. On the other hand, how is it possible to

107
“I Could Do With A litte More Chaos Myself” in Daytoday 2002-2009, (ed. Carolina Caycedo)
www.Lulu.com (2009), 77.

108
Ted Purves “Realms” in Daytoday 2002-2009, (ed. Carolina Caycedo) www.Lulu.com (2009), 80
Purves reflects on Caycedo’s conclusion of Daytoday.
59
experiment with models of non-monetary exchanges without the monetary support of
institutions or monetary capital? For now, it seems that social art practices that model
forms of alternative economies are functioning more along the lines of parallel micro-
economies than as a viable alternative to profit driven market economics.
My exploration of various creative ways in which non-monetary exchange is
being operated as a social and participatory strategy in arts practice is motivated by the
possibility that these strategies have the capacity to affect change through the practice of
ideas. The arts and art production offer the freedom to explore, experiment, communicate
and participate with concepts that might well be rejected outside the creative space of the
art world. Art nurtures spaces of freedom in which to explore concepts of alterity; spaces
in which the apparently impossible becomes possible and, to again quote Hardt and
Negri, “the possible becomes real.”
109
As I have presented, artists are exploring concepts and actions that are critical of
the dominant economic system, the cause of social and environmental injustices and
damage. The space of art that they and their projects inhabit provides a space of
temporary autonomy, which affords the freedom to not only voice dissent and imagine
what else might be possible, but also to create alternatives and invite others to share in
both the imagining and the experience. In that space of liminality there is potential for
transformation.

109
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri Empire Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
411.
60
Feminist artists created work that criticized the dominance of patriarchy and,
using their art to collaborate with activists and others, they generated sparks that affected
change towards a paradigmatic shift. Similarly, the projects I have described generously
grant space for participants to themselves engage in acts of generosity and non-monetary
exchange. By providing the experience of social interaction outside of the dominant
market economy, these projects have the potential to ignite sparks of generosity that
affect change away from corporate capitalism towards a more sustainable economic
practice. When gifts are offered, these art projects suggest, there is potential for
transformation.
Among contemporary global voices of resistance and dissent there is the
persistence of a movement towards change that is imagined. For if something can be
imagined, then the potential for that imaginary to be realized exists. In the space of
creativity and “practical experimentation” they generate and occupy, artists, activists and
cultural producers are motivated to explore strategies of social and participatory art
practices. In the space of dreams and imagination there is the potential for that imaginary
of another possible world to be realized through creative experimentation as a social
practice.
In a market-driven economy people’s skills and knowledge are not always given
the value they deserve. In barter practices like that of Caycedo or time banking, ideas of
skill- and knowledge-related value are reevaluated. An advantage of the creative projects
I have discussed is that they engage directly with the social and in the city space (for
Cuevas and Caycedo), giving and exchanging services and objects for free directly with
61
the public. Throughout history art has functioned as a form of communication to, with,
and for the masses, in parallel with and in contrast to art’s status as a luxury commodity
of the bourgeois. Along with feminist art, examples can be traced back to the Mexican
Mural movement of the 1930-40s, the tactics of the Situationists International or the use
of images in such street art as political posters and graffiti like the work of Emory
Douglas of the Black Panther Party. All of these artists share with the understanding that
art offers the means to inform, educate, express dissent, and protest, while invoking and
inspiring mobilization towards other possibilities.
By positioning the works of Cuevas, Caycedo, Aranda and Vidokle in the context
of feminist tactics and social practice, it has been my intention to situate their work in a
historical continuum of art activism, while highlighting the ways in which contemporary
practitioners are utilizing art as a tool by which to imagine and enact possibilities for
economic and social change.
My inquiry comes from an optimistic place that feels the necessity of thinking
about the solutions that these projects propose. Although these solutions may not offer
complete answers to the problems associated with the global corporate market, they do
propose models that are worth consideration. Cuevas’s subversive acts of generosity in
her free practical products, Caycedos’s barter economy and social exchanges and the
Time/Bank’s cultivation of a network which values time in place of money, present
models that are still being used by the project artists and participants. At the very least the
models these projects propose and explore enable participants to think about moving
beyond the confinement of a pervasive and dominating economic system. To begin to
62
think about ways of moving out of confinement or towards an ideological shift or
paradigm, requires an acute awareness, a consciousness about one’s position.
The creative actions of the artists discussed in this thesis exemplify experiments
in social and participatory practice that have the potential to not only raise awareness, but
to also provide a space for publics to experience, through action, models towards
economic and social change. Through their social practices in generosity and non-
monetary exchange, artists and participants alike perform collaborative resistance and
alternatives to the capitalist market. The creative spaces they generate together provide
opportunities for the “multitude” to engage in “practical experimentation” and offer
“models that will determine when and how the possible becomes real.” As suggested by
Hardt and Negri, the projects discussed here provide opportunities to act against the
confines of empire, even if the acts are “poetic gestures” and, as suggested by Lucy
Lippard, to discover a choice of “ways to live without dropping out”. In other words, the
cultivation of social networks, both online and on land, that are based on generosity and
non-monetary exchange, can generate possibilities toward an ideological shift in the
understanding and practice of “value” and “wealth”. Such a shift must be a prerequisite if
market economies, to paraphrase Julia Bryan Wilson, are to cease being the oxygen we
breathe and give way instead to economic sustainability and social change
110

.

110
Bryan Wilson, "Markets" (keynote presentation, Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice,
Cooper Union Great Hall, New York City, October 9, 2010), accessed February 07, 2011,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/julia-bryan-wilson/.
63
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The current economic crisis has brought attention and criticism to a dominant global economic system that is characterized by the goal of exponential expansion in pursuit of private monetary profit. In this thesis I explore the possibility for social and participatory art to invoke, inspire and mobilize action towards alternative sustainable systems of economic exchange. Generosity and non-monetary exchange as a social practice and artistic strategy provide a space for artists and audiences to perform models of alternative economies in the social/public sphere. While they also cultivate a network of social and cultural capital that values shared time and resources for mutual benefit. Using tactics evocative of feminist artists of the 1970s, the art projects considered in this text experiment with ways to live independent of, and in resistance to, the corporate market. My discussion focuses on the socially engaged art projects of artists Minerva Cuevas and Carolina Caycedo, and the Time/Bank initiated by artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda of e-flux. I reveal how their art projects perform creative models towards an economic paradigm shift, while positioning social and participatory public art practice as models towards sustainable lifestyles.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Anderson, Joy Angela (author)

Core Title Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/06/2011

Defense Date 03/08/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative economies,art activism,barter,conceptualism,DIY,economic sustainability,environmental and social justice,environmental sustainable lifestyles,feminist art,generosity and non-monetary exchange in contemporary art,gift economies,global corporate capitalism,global economic paradigm,Globalization,Interventionist art,Latin American artists,Mexican artists,non-object art,OAI-PMH Harvest,paradigm shift,participatory art,public art,public practice,relational aesthetics,social capital,social practice,temporary autonomous zone,time bank,time currency

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Decter, Joshua (committee chair), Gonzalez, Rita (committee member), Owen Driggs, Janet (committee member)

Creator Email joy.anderson@usc.edu,majikalnature@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3921

Unique identifier UC1407457

Identifier etd-anderson-4448 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-469478 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3921 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-anderson-4448.pdf

Dmrecord 469478

Document Type Thesis

Rights Anderson, Joy Angela

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu