Delos Reyes:Fulford:Gordon:Guttin:Hilton:Kleker:McCready:Neese:Purbrick:Randolph:Slack
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This is not the first time artists have given things away. In the world of high-priced, highly commodified art objects, making a gift of a piece has been a gesture of resistance or conversation, or sometimes simply an integral part of a work itself. Fluxus artists wrote scripts
for circulation and recreation; Edward Ruscha made early artists books in large numbers, available on the cheap for interested viewers; Feminist art practice proposed exchange and work as a central aspects of art making and performance; printers and graphic artists of the Chicano Arts Movement built centers for mass-production of silkscreened posters given away and put to use throughout their cities; Felix Gonzalez-Torres stacked posters and candies with instructions for
visitors to remove them from the gallery or museum, take them home, make them theirs. The possibility for free and inexpensive art for giving or trading is, of course, made that much more possible by the multiple—the more there are of a thing, the less it’s worth individually, or, seen another way, the more there are to circulate, distribute, the better the thing proliferates and affects.

The artists in You Can Have It All are in great company, then, even as they make their work in a new era of hyper-commodity. With ideas of interaction and “giving” well-known and increasingly folded into contemporary art practice and, in particular, art exhibition, a show made up entirely of freebees takes us to another level. The curators and artists in this exhibition have worked the challenges of giving and receiving into their pieces: How can you offer something that will have
meaning beyond you?, How do you take of someone’s personal memories or belongings?, How will greed, desire, personal sentiment, or hesitation change the work, the artist, or the visitor? Rather than offering a straightforward challenge to the idea of art as commodity, or to commodity culture itself, You Can Have It All enters into a conversation with consumerism and economies of exchange. The artists become gift-givers, and depending on what’s being offered and what will
be taken away, this process begins to raise the specters of intimacy, intrusion, compulsion, memory, and wealth. Collect them all.

Shana Agid, guest author.

Shana Agid is a visual artist, activist, and cultural critic with an MFA in Printmaking and an MA in Visual Criticism from California College of the Arts. His critical writing has been published in FLOW
(flowtv.org) and Clamor Magazine. Her visual art has been shown at The San Francisco Center for the Book, Southern Exposure, Art Caucasus 2005, and Fresh Meat. Shana is currently in residence at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City and teaches printmaking and book arts.