Review: Luis Maldonado at Three Walls

Behind, beneath, above, and in front of, a flourish of scrap plywood, plastic tarps, collaged paper floor tiles, and a karaoke machine, is positioned an exchange of things between real persons. Immediately upon entering the space it’s easy to get the feeling one's just unwittingly entered the set of some low budget game show or the next postulate for realty on TV, due in part, but not completely, to the fact that before one can think, one’s already being addressed by the artist-host (standing no more than a few feet away) whose voice is amplified by the karaoke machine that doubles for a loud speaker. “So let’s meet our game show host, Luis Maldonado, and our lucky contestant, so what’s your name?” “Uh, my name is _____, I’m a student, uh… 20 something, I live in Chicago.” “Great!" Welcome! So let me tell ya what I’m doing…!”1
     Born out of his MFA theses (SUNY Purchase College, 2005), It’s All About Things Chicago: Barter Days—A New Type of Auction House, is Maldonado’s most recent attempt to display the insertion of his art objects into the system of exchange we call bartering. Throughout the month long exhibition people are invited to join in the fun and barter almost anything, including song & dance performances, with Maldonado for his art objects (small landscape and abstract paintings, political drawings, dioramas, and miniature protest signs). Resembling a peddler or a circus ringmaster, and using such phrases as “and over here we have… and over there you’ll find…” Maldonado introduces his shtick as he gives a tour of the environment he’s constructed inside the Three Walls gallery. Surrounding the main viewing space is a video room, research room, collector’s private viewing room, and of course, a lounge. Eventually, it’s learned that the bartered objects that Maldonado collects are archived, and that someday in the future he plans to exhibit them alongside his original art works.
     “I’ll take Marx for $100.” “That which things, in an exchange relation, through their qualities, satisfy.” (ping… ) “What are human needs?!” An exchange of any kind presupposes the following scenario: two subjects encounter one another, each in possession of a different thing, i.e. of qualitatively different use-values. Each thing, by circumstance, is of no use to the subject who possesses it and therefore is of a surplus use-value to them. Each subject, like all good subjects, is unfortunately still in possession of many unsatisfied human needs. Luckily though, and by pure accident, each subject sees across from them, another subject who’s in possession of the exact thing that will satisfy at least some of the other’s needs, and because both things are of a surplus use-value to the subjects who possess them, an exchange between them is viable. “Cha-ching!” (I’m not quite sure what the proverbial sound for a successful barter would be, but maybe… “High-Five!” or “Deal!”)
     Of course what’s missing in Maldonado’s work is that whole part about human needs and the satisfaction of which things should represent. Does this consequently deflate the project, reducing whatever “realness” that it had going for it, to simply another gesture towards, or sign for, a real barter exchange? I’m not quite sure, at least not completely. If I were forced to make the argument that human needs and their satisfaction were indeed at play in Maldonado’s bartering, it would probably sound something like this: Maldonado’s need was to authenticate and make more current his art work by extending it out into the realm of the everyday and its relational aesthetics while at the same time attempting to insert the everyday into his artistic practice. In this kind of symbolic economy the everyday paradoxically seems to function like "the exotic" of years ago anytime it gets close to the rhetoric of the art world today; and weirdly enough, such close proximity of one to the other, seems only to make stronger the distinction between both.
     The need and satisfaction on the part of the public/viewer/participant is much harder to locate. Here I think it would be helpful if we’d all just admit that if Maldonado were an actor, his performance as a painter and draftsman would be the best example of an actor who’s “phoning it in.” The only thing of any aesthetic quality of which Maldonado had to offer for barter was his little dioramas. One would be hard pressed to convince me that anyone’s bartering was motivated by the aesthetic beauty found in his art objects or that the artist himself was aspiring for some kind of aesthetic anything, which should lead one to figure that his art objects where to function simply as un-qualified generic signs for art as such. We’ll return to the implications of ‘art as an idea’ later.
     Moving on, obviously Maldonado’s skill as a painter is not at stake here, nor is his aesthetics. What’s motivating the exchange on the side of the public/viewer/participant, could quite simply be boredom, ADD, or the narcissistically perverse desire to watch themselves exhibited as art, all quite easily satisfied by the kind surplus-enjoyment that comes from direct participation in something like contemporary art, where one’s surplus stuff, indeed one’s self, can magically be transformed into cultural artifacts worthy of our attention, where you’re allowed to indulge in the cloudy vision of your at-one-time stuff collecting dust in Maldonado’s cramped New York apartment, or possibly, in the future, in some distinguished museum collection.
     “Art Analogies for $1000.” (ping, ping, ping… Today’s Daily Double) “I’ll bet my plastic woodpecker lawn ornament and this button I just found in my pocket.” “Content is to form as ______ is to practice?” (suspenseful pause) “What is… theory?” It’s All About Things bet’s everything on the wager that when Maldonado barters one thing for another, what happens is not simply the exchange of things between hands, but also ideas between minds. I get the sense that Maldonado doesn’t care what he gets in exchange for his paintings. Though he talks about being emotionally touched by receiving some things, like a copy of someone’s PhD thesis, a set of keys, a story, a song & dance performance, or someone else’s art, he admitted that he sometimes barters for whatever people happen to find in their pocket or purse. When asked why he chooses to only barter his art work and not other things (maybe of use to someone) his answer was not unlike “because that’s just the way I chose to go about it.” In this kind of economy meaning seems restricted only to the formal act of the blind exchange of one anything for another anything, of intrinsically surplus this for intrinsically surplus that. How cool is this trade, not very.
     There is of course one other thing that could potentially be motivating an exchange with Maldonado, that being, the things that have drawn people to art for centuries, the want for a new perspective on—and the reframing of the perennial questions posed by—the world that surrounds each of us. But, at the end of the day, It’s All About Things never seems to question its own answers; all of what exactly is about things and just what kind of things is all of it about? In the hands of a better artist, It’s All About Things, would (one would hope) move one to ponder the way context and circumstance determines how value accidentally finds itself embedded in some things while not in others, the differences between need and desire (why we exchange in the first place) and how both can be suggested, subscribed, and indoctrinated through ideology, and the mediating role of money and its effects on the subjects of a capitalist exchange (where is the discussion about bartering as an alternative, and to what?). Lastly, in exchange for my attention I would want in return from this better artist, some kind of nod to the economic context that allows for such a surplus of stuff and for the exhibition of the going-through-the-motions of an event, that in many parts of the world, is born out of a necessity, instead of between quotation marks.

1All quotes in this review have been paraphrased.



- Curt Bozif
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Luis Maldonado's exhibition, It's All About Things Chicago: Barter Days—A New Type of Auction House, was on view at Three Walls from March 2nd to the 31st, 2007.