Examining the parts that make the whole
Like most things mechanical and electronic items face a certain amount of wear and tear over time. Even still learning that your stereo has lost its play button or that your cellphone doesn’t make calls any longer has been known to provoke fits of outrage. The idea of investigating the problem or repairing it doesn’t cross the average person’s mind. Simply replacing it seems like a much more viable option. One Calgary-based artist however aims to turn these headaches into something more meaningful: art.
Renato Vitic inspired by a lifelong curiosity about what makes things tick has created an interactive piece based around human interaction obsolete electronics and the idea of non-monetary economics. Interchange: The Deconstructionist Market is a performance piece where people bring in old or unwanted items and exchange them for something else a small part from another item perhaps which might be of more value to them. The performance grows as items are brought in disassembled and then haggled over for something else.
“The space itself is a combination of workshop and display area” says Vitic who’s the director of Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary. “This sort of alternative economy takes place there.”
Loosely rooted in the post-structuralism theory of destruction by Jacques Derrida (look it up we don’t have room to explain that one) Vitic applies the idea of deconstruction to objects as opposed to language.
“If you were to take your iPhone take it apart and spread out all the pieces in front of you what one piece could you point to and say ‘that is iPhone’?” Vitic says. “This idea or this object that has a certain function is made up of things that define it but at the same time are insufficient to completely define it.”
Although Vitic admits the idea is confusing and that the piece itself has a number of elements that he doesn’t entirely grasp the idea of approaching the “individual components” of an object and trying to look at the meaning that they alone construct is a solid one.
“It’s not a rejection of the object” he says. “It’s seeking out a new relationship to it.”
Having kicked off the project with a few of his own surplus items — an old stereo and a printer — the piece examines the idea of excess in western culture or what Vitic describes as a “throwaway culture.”
“Our economy is no longer based on this idea of supply and demand” he says. “It’s to the point where we have to give things away.”
Although Interchange isn’t necessarily a direct critique of materialism it glances cheekily at a new relationship and a new understanding of it.
“It’s a surplus that is waiting to be taken apart deconstructed disassembled however you want to refer to it” says Vitic.
Philosophical and commercial theories aside Interchange brings to light the beauty and craft that can be found in tiny electronic pieces and allows for two people to come together over them. In a day and age where electronic advances are often thought to be taking away from human interaction perhaps that’s where the true appeal lies.
“The value for me are those exchanges those very human exchanges” says Vitic. “That to me has more weight than anything that I’ve taken apart or anything that anyone has lugged into the space.”
