In the documentary video Vera by Jason Simon, recently exhibited as a video projection at Orchard, the young woman who is its subject engages in a revealing monologue regarding her consumer habits and aspirational desires. An incessant shopper, Vera craves the comfort of plentitude and the status that she believes is achieved through the acquisition of particular kinds of goods. Orchard was founded in 2005 as a three-year experiment in hybridizing for-profit and alternative gallery models. The Lower East Side gallery is run as a collective by a group of artists (including Simon) who are also Orchard’s investors and curators, and operates as a discursive opportunity as much as commercial space. Both challenging and reproducing market conditions in which contemporary art is conventionally exhibited and sold, there might be, paradoxically, no more fitting and no more ironic setting for Vera.
In the video, which Simon calls “an assisted self-portrait,” Vera appears only in close-up, prompted by occasional, off-screen questions. Seated on a couch, against a wood-panelled wall, an anywhere-in-America setting, Vera reveals that, having saddled herself with devastating debts, she is struggling to develop new standards of financial responsibility. Her extravagant purchases encompass designer fashions, household products, foodstuffs, and cosmetics in hordish multiples, staving off the threat of scarcity. Nevertheless, Vera largely skirts psychological explanations for her shopping mania. It is not her appetites that are undergoing rehabilitation, but rather, only, money-management techniques: “How can I get what I want and not create so much debt?,” she asks. Is her pleasure found in acquiring, or in having? As it happens, the greatest pleasure may be found in exhibition of her collection: Vera describes the “awe” her possessions inspire among friends and store clerks as her reward. But fashion’s short shelf-life diminishes the value of her collection; old stuff begs to be replaced with new to keep the compliments flowing.
In 1899, Thorstein Veblen, in his book “Theory of the Leisure Class”, described the rise of a leisure class that takes subsistence for granted, based on its exploitation of working classes for whom the acquisition of food and shelter remains at stake. That leisure class consumes at will. In such a society, “unproductive consumption of goods is honorable . . . especially the consumption of the more desirable things.” Vera grasps through credit forthose desirable things (Prada, Fendi, Rolex and Louis Vuitton) truly affordable only to a bourgeois leisure class. She does not consider herself engaged only in consumption but rather connoisseurship, a form of consumption through which one exercises distinctive, even honorable, cultural capital. But she also identifies her practice as productive: “I think you become an artist of acquiring stuff.” It is, of course productive: of consumer debt, of new consumers of her ilk as friends copy her stylish ways, and of identities based on distinctions among people and groups of people based on consumption.
During the exhibition, the Orchard collective programmed two video screenings in response to Vera. In the feature-length Threads of Belonging (2003), Jennifer Montgomery deftly directs an expertly improvised script with a documentarian’s restraint. Drawing on actual case histories, this fictional portrait of a therapeutic community was inspired, in part, by the anti-psychiatry movement, especially the work of R.D. Laing. Individual psyches and relationships within the group home falter, as the film explores the extent to which institutions can nurture fragile human alliances. In Ivan Navarro’s short Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker, two performers push a shopping cart made of fluorescent lightbulbs along streets in Soho and Chelsea, both once-industrial New York neighbourhoods overtaken by art galleries, and, in turn, by upscale retail outlets. The cart — which is both a frustrated nomadic homage to Dan Flavin, and a rarefied but unusable version of a utilitarian object — is illuminated by power siphoned from streetlamps. The singer Nutria accompanied the screening with a corrido, performed in both English and Spanish with the Mexican genre’s typical poignancy, the exhilarating potential of revolutionary movements and potentially stultifying post-revolutionary realities.
Each of these works tells a story about desire: for consumer goods and class mobility; for identity and community; and, like Orchard itself, for a way in — and a way around — a market-driven economy. Bringing these works into dialogue with one another, the setting performed at its best: as a site for public discourse on entwined artistic and social practices of the early twenty-first century, in which culture abounds in promises of fulfilment, but desires prove difficult to satisfy. Stylistically disparate, these pieces are unified by their voracious curiosity about the contexts in which they operate — and in their capacity to imagine solutions to seemingly intractable trends shaping those contexts.