Perfect Modern Subject

In 2019 I exhibited a series of studio portrait still-life photographs that depict basic goods of everyday life. There are rules: the goods must be brand new, I must buy them, and--importantly--they must be the cheapest available version of that good that I can possibly find. There is text printed on the photo that says “the least expensive brand new _____ I could find, __ cents”.

The project is about the hyper construction of modern life, the amassing and availability of material culture to the point of excess. The sometimes inconceivably low prices of the basic tools for health and nutrition create a paradox. On the one hand, the availability of these tools might suggest an optimistic democracy, as if to say ‘look how great we are; everyone with a nickel has access to a fork of their own.’ On the other hand, the hyper ubiquity of these basic tools--‘we’re flooded with forks!’--suggests a departure from craft and care, a disposable material culture.

Hyperbolically low price-points are a red herring. Social engineers use them to show how seamlessly and perfectly capitalism functions materially. If a bowl is only three cents, why should a capitalist want to pay an employee more than $5 or $7 or $10 per hour? Low prices give capitalists an excuse for depressing wages, putting the onus of living as a perfect subject on the worker, while skimming more and more cream from the top.

There is a dystopic sense of perfection when I imagine one’s entire life filled with the cheapest available tools, all of them brand new. It’s a fancy poverty, where the outward symbol of upward social mobility--‘brand newness’--cloaks, and is itself at the very same time, the symbol of being taken advantage of by strategies of planned obselesence and charlatanism.