David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, describes how until recently human societies operated on a system of credit, extended between people who knew each other and wanted to maintain good relations with each other. Everyone was both debtor and creditor, part of a web of inter-relationships. When metal coinage was first introduced in around 400 BC, it was as a means of exchange for soldiers on the march; in mediaeval English villages, the only people who paid cash were travellers passing through and ne’er-do-wells.
The temporary custodianship that Maurice Carlin has invited for his 4m x 10m relief print Endless Pageless is an attempt to bring relationship into our experience of art, expanding our sense of what it means to have and to hold. The artwork Endless Pageless is a relief print of part of the floor of the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool, made using the traditional CMYK sequence of screen printing and created during the exhibition The Negligent Eye (2014). The artwork Temporary Custodians of Endless Pageless is an evolving process in which Endless Pageless is gradually dismantled into its constituent sheets of paper, from A0 to A10 in size, and distributed among an open, self-selecting, group of temporary custodians who agree to hold their piece of the work without owning it. Carlin hopes that the work will continue as a single artwork with distributed ownership – something like a CMYK internet, and with similar issues around the levels of trust that can be expected and experienced between strangers.
At the first distribution of Endless Pageless, during the Liverpool Biennial in 2014, some potential custodians were deterred by the fact that they wouldn’t own their piece; instead, taking the piece would be the start of a relationship with the artist and the other custodians, of indeterminate length and nature. Buying the work would mean that the transaction and relationship ended then and there, in the way that we have now come to see as normal; being a custodian was something altogether different and unknown.
We are still pretty comfortable living as both debtor and creditor when it comes to the stuff of human relationships, but many find it uncomfortable to be beholden to others practically or financially, not least because we can’t control when that debt might be called in, or what form the repayment might take. Maybe this is an aspect of a loss of trust, a fear that we might be asked to repay something that we can no longer afford. Temporary Custodians brings this difference into focus: custodians don’t really know what they’re letting themselves in for, how long they will be holding without owning, what unexpected aspects may be involved, when the piece will be called back. The transaction hasn’t been closed.
Temporary Custodians deliberately places itself outside usual artworld practices. In Carlin’s words, it “puts forward the idea of an artwork as a collection of interdependent relationships and as yet unknowable dynamics, inviting custodians to explore what it might mean for a work of art to become a shared entity held by audiences, artists and commissioners”. The pieces of Endless Pageless are not commodities, they can’t be resold (although of course this is hard to police, in the absence of any contract except that of trust). Instead, it presents an opportunity for custodians to reconsider their relationship to art and artistic production, and in so doing to question and extend standard modes of ownership.
For more information about becoming a custodian, email custodians@islingtonmill.com
Jane Lawson is a writer based in Manchester.
Published 13.04.2015 by James Schofield in Reviews
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