Thursday, May 24, 2018

Financial Instrument at Go Build Business


Here is a flow chart superimposed on a Damien Hirst painting. (Vallance)
This show was a pop-up show in Chatsworth, California at Go Build Business, a rental office and rental business meeting space.  Jeffrey Vallance thought it would be synergistically profitable to rent an office there to exhibit art and circumvent the art world.

This was an infiltration/exhibition/intervention.  This means that these artists wanted to twist the context of art and perception of art and the definition or meaning of art in order to see more clearly their external world and internal worlds.  But the infiltration was secondary to the creation of wealth. The show was primarily about money.

Here is the show description:

"Financial Instrument is an exhibition/intervention/infiltration at Go Build Business in Chatsworth, California. The group show of "essentialist" artists includes Victoria Reynolds, Paulette Nichols, Jeffrey Vallance, Holly Boruck, Carlos Rodriguez and Ken Jones. This dynamic group of artists completely bypasses the art world and goes directly to the business world."

"Essentialism" was stumbled upon and then taken out of the dictionary and redefined to mean "art that has no frills, art that you want to see when you go see art, art that isn't totally boring."  It means meat and potatoes art with some ice cream and maybe some chocolate and coffee and broccoli or spinach.
Punk rock flyer (Reynolds)

Vallance's and Reynold's graphic art created a context for the other, more traditional paintings and drawings of Vallance, Reynolds, Boruck, Jones and Nichols.
Ice cream painting (Reynolds)

Bad Trump drawings. (Vallance)
Fantastical Chasm painting (Jones)
Birthing Kittens in a Dream (Boruck)

The exhibition featured many performative aspects.  There was as a white board with financial equations drawn on it in dry erase ink.  The principle equation congealed by the mind of economist whiz kid, Jeffrey Vallance, was "Art + People = Money."  The seminal pathetic band, Colon Cowboy, sang a song which explored the tonal and rhythmic possibilities of this financial equation.  The rental space's lazy boy was moved into the center of the space and became the unavoidable center of attention.  It was very comfortable.  Participants were leveraged to join in on the exquisite corpse drawings.

The show's pinnacle was when a chicken painting sold because it showed how the equation worked in reality.  The whole goal of the show was to create income, so the show was a total success.

Donald Trump was in the show too because he had a poster of one of his quotes up on the wall.  Same with Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin.






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