Variable Capital

Abstract

Common Culture is a trio of artists based in Northern England. They take their name from the book Modern in the Common Culture (1996) by Thomas Crow, and share his assumption that avant-garde art and so-called mass culture have had an ongoing, elaborate, shared history. Two members, David Campbell and Mark Durden, have recently created an exhibition and an accompanying book that are both called Variable Capital. (1) The title comes from Karl Marx, whose analysis of the production process involved a basic distinction between constant capital that corresponds to the value of machines, buildings, and the like, and variable capital that is used to pay for labor power. The title also signals one central theme of this project: the exploitation of workers that underpins advanced commodity culture. Variable Capital gives generous coverage to artists who have dealt with the allure of commodity culture such as the appropriationists associated with galleries like Metro Pictures and the Sonnabend Gallery in 1980s New York City. However, Campbell and Durden have little time for the post-Marxist musings of Jean Baudrillard that were often used to give this work a radical frisson. They acknowledge the significance of a Richard Prince or a Jeff Koons, but their sympathies clearly lie elsewhere, with artists like Santiago Sierra who brings to light the routine subjugation necessary for the smooth operation of capitalism. DAVID EVANS: Why did you choose to call yourselves Common Culture? COMMON CULTURE: Common Culture emerged out of conversations between David Campbell and Paul Rooney and developed into the collaborative project that now includes Campbell, Mark Durden, and Ian Brown. It was originally conceived as a means of making art in response to the chauvinistic promotion of British Art by prominent sections of the art establishment. As artists based in the North of England we were intrigued both by the claims of radicalism made by the cultural administrators in London for this new art and the notion of Britishness it proposed. As a response, Common Culture began to make art that explores notions of Britishness, class identity, and commodity culture from the perspective of our own social and geographic situation. The name Common Culture was prompted by reading Tom Crow's Modern in the Common Culture and reflected our wide-ranging interest in popular forms of culture. Since we are living in Britain, our cultural references reflect specific local experiences associated with this country that are nonetheless framed and determined by global forces. DE: Why the interest in fast food? CC: We were only interested in illuminated fast food menus to the extent that they provided us with ready-made and familiar forms of commercial signage that could be adapted to reflect our interest in issues of taste, consumption, and cultural identity. Our motivation was the opportunity to pit different forms of cultural consumption against each other, creating an awkward and self-conscious reception of the work for the viewer. We saw the light box form of the menus having corrupting allusions to Minimalism--the work of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin especially. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We first exhibited this work in New York at the time of global interest in the Young British Artists. The Menu series (1999) was about staining and soiling the pure forms of American High or Late Modernism with a vernacular trace of common transaction. And the whole fast food cuisine was in some ways an affront to the more refined tastes of the wine-sipping gallery visitor. DE: Recently you have been working with bouncers. So has Melanie Manchot, making videos of club bouncers on Ibiza who are asked to strip for the camera and in the process become uncharacteristically vulnerable. How does your project differ from Manchot's Security (2005)? CC: There is no relation for us. …