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Art

Friday, 25. January 2013 | 00:00 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Uselessness, Refusal, Art, and Money (encounters with David Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value).

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On Reading  Alone

I report here on an encounter with a book, and an encounter with the problems of reading itself.  The book: David Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value.  which I picked up following the trail of Marcel Mauss' The Gift (Graeber's book is a meditation on the differing visions of Mauss and Marx for economic life as read through the lens of anthropology).  If you operate outside of institutions, which I typically do, one book leads to another and another along solitary and idiosyncratic paths.  You often find yourself in a cloud of companionship with people you've never met, some living, some dead, some speaking native languages you have no acquaintance with.  This is thrilling, but a little surreal. As you'll see, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value was a pleasure to wrestle with and test ideas against, but for me it also represented the moment where I turned from an ideal of books engendering books in the future, to books as a way of making relationships in the present.

 

Sal Randolph

Sal Randolph lives in Brooklyn and makes artworks involving gift economies, social interactions, public spaces and publishing. Her Money Actions in which she gives away money to members of the public as both provocation and invitation have been featured in the 2011 Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Live Biennial, Open Engagement, and in Cabinet Magazine. She has recently been doing research and teaching on the topic of attention as a visiting fellow at Princeton University and is writing on art for The American Reader.

 

Rich Streitmatter-Tran

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R. Streitmatter-Tran (b. 1972, Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He received his degree in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. His work, solo and collaborative, has been exhibited in several cities in the United States, Europe and Asia including the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, the Singapore Biennale 2006, the 2004 Gwangju Biennale, 2005 Pocheon Asian Art Festival, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, Asia Art Now at Arario Beijing, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the Blue Space Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, the 7th Asiatopia Performance Art Festival in Bangkok, Art Tech Media 06 in Barcelona. Current and upcoming exhibitions for 2008 include the Singapore Biennale 2008; Post-Doi Moi: Vientamese Modern and Contemporary art in the 90's at the Singapore Art Museum; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai at the Eslite Gallery in Taiwan, and Strategies from Within at the Ke Center for Contemporary Art in Shanghai..

 

Competition of Ideas