Wirtschafts-werte
(Economic Values)
2003
Foamboard,
contact paper, industrial shelving
108" x 72" x 79"
I
am in the process of making things that are at once counterfeit
and paradoxically unique. This has included remaking (or “covering”—as
in what a "cover band” does) a large-scale Joseph Beuys
installation “Wirtschafts-werte (Economic Values),”
but using my own visual vernacular and updated materials. I used
a single image of the work taken from a book and scaled it up
to what I thought would be the right size, and to the best of
my ability. Originally executed by Beuys in 1980, “Wirtschafts-werte”
used everyday packages of food (rice, dried peas, etc.) from East
Germany as a symbol for units of social exchange--the worker’s
productive and creative power, and the distribution of the product
itself being alluded to in the work.
As
an updated and “covered” version of this work, I am
using my own “products” (the handmade foamboard “components”
I’ve been producing for several years now) in an attempt
to insert myself into a dialogue of how to re-address issues of
social and productive exchange in a further complicated world
of global capitalism and commodity exchange. How does one begin
to approach Beuys’ ideas of social utopias, political activism,
symbolism, and creative expression today? Can materials and commodities
still be called upon to symbolize worker creativity? How have
my own commodities/products/artwork entered a marketplace? As
a reconfiguration of Beuys’ original work, I want to call
attention to potentially generative and resuscitative applications
of his concepts several decades later.
>>More
information on Beuys' original work
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