change

At the Scrapyard Challenge, reported on earlier in this blog, I met an Amsterdam based artist called Sonja van Kerkhoff. She told me a great story about 'Change', a performance work she did in the UK in 1996, centred around the concepts of value, objects and human transactions. Sonja made a series of resin coins and took them onto the streets of London and Hull to convince people of their worth as art objects. She asked people to assess their worth, and to offer something comparable in value in return for one of them.

Her full account of this work makes wonderful reading and can be seen at http://www.sonjavank.com/change.htm, but I include an excerpt here, because it relates directly to the significances of jewellery. In this transaction, she has found another artist to be quite difficult to deal with. He has been finding strategies for hiding himself, including behind his own art practice, the notion of fakery, and in discussion about postmodernism. Finally, he relents, and looks for something of value to exchange:

As he searched over his body for pockets and things, I pointed to his ring covered fingers. His face lit up. He pulled off the ring from his little finger and said "yes, it had to be this one". He then asked me to read the inside, which read 'together forever' in French, and then he proceeded to tell me a long story about how it had belonged to his father who had found it as a boy. It seemed to be an old ring, but since his art was creating a fake history for objects, I wasn't sure about the story, but that gaze in his eyes told me he knew, as painful as it was, that this was a suitable trade, and I felt it too, even though I didn't really want to wear a bulky ring on my finger. His eight year old daughter was present during most of this discussion, and in particular when we traded the coin and the ring. She was very upset by this. Apparently the ring really did belong to her grandfather and for her it was a symbol of his presence, which was now on the finger of a stranger.

About three hours later, he came to me with his daughter and said that against his wishes we had to trade the items back because his daughter was getting more upset.

I'd like to thank Sonja for this contribution and for her very interesting discussions, not to mention the Edam cheese.