Christian Alborz Oldham: Prices Realized Between Bridges Residency July–December 2023: Viscose Adalbertstraße 43 10179 Berlin
29 September–23 October 2023
Wearing Pillows
Marvin greeted me at the threshold of his apartment, at the end of a dark hallway. His gigantic body filled the door frame in a three-quarters pose. He was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and an intarsia sweater. In front of his stomach, he held a throw pillow, which appeared as a tender support or a small fortress. The view of the space around his edges was filled with light. My curiosity about the interiors of Manhattan emboldened me to enter.
I was responding to a classified advertisement in OutWeek magazine seeking a houseboy, and this was an interview of sorts. The tasks at hand were less obvious. Marvin no longer had the nerve to leave the house and required medication to go outside. He lived by the telephone. Though I was applying for experience, I didn’t write about this job in my journals. I remember the details by recalling the tonality of the space, a gray-hued light with touches of mustard, almond white, steel, and glass.
The clothing PDF is unexpected, and nervousness is embedded in its form. The content deployed by its opening is a recreation of the shock of engorgement. In architecture, this passage is referred to as compression and release. The moment the PDF is perceived as too large has been orchestrated by the author to both delight and burden. Fear of an insufficient capacity to coalesce around the needs of an artwork is a recurrent action in studio production. In a 2010 interview, Lawrence Weiner remarked upon the removal of Tilted Arch by Richard Serra, stating, “The thing is, I don’t want to fuck up anyone’s life on their way to work, I want to fuck up their whole life.”(1)
It was conceivable that Marvin thought he could pull off holding a pillow over his belly as if caught in the middle of decorating. But this is just another way of imagining why he held the pillow at the door, the list of possibilities for syntagmatic dress when first meeting someone. Though I have never recreated this silhouette for a greeting, I have worn pillows for other reasons and continue to think about wearing pillows.
The PDF format works for all viewers; it is universally available in computing conditions. The copious writing included in the series of PDF-formatted works is elucidating and suggestive. We are invited to imagine ourselves as the author and as the author imagines us. By wearing his shed garments, our bodies will fill the space previously inhabited by the author's body. When we imagine all human relations as a series of material exchanges, we could then ask why we don’t expect a sort of menu or a PDF from more people in our lives. However, when confronted with the transactional nature of interdependence, it can come across as No Ordinary Love.
In a talk at Google about the history of debt, David Graeber acknowledges the existence of different moral registers, and that exchange is just one; but he returns to the premise that debt is based upon the idea of two equal partners working in reciprocity, acknowledging from time to time that one person is getting something more and the other is then owed an outstanding balance. The unfinished business keeps them connected, and it has become the basis for morality. The implication is that sociality itself – human relations – only exist when somebody's wrong.(2)
Marvin couldn’t leave the house due to agoraphobia, though he was able to venture out once to a car. It was my job to place phone calls at his request to galleries and auction houses in an attempt to sell a few extant prints in his collection to support his living expenses, including myself. My recollection is that they were editioned lithographs by Calder or Oldenburg. In any case, they were unimportant, but I was surprised that they retained enough perceived value that the calls were accepted and then transferred to Marvin, who wanted too much for them.
What I find ruinous is that when we receive the clothing PDF, we know what it is, though we may not understand why, so the ontology of the instrument becomes less available the more involved our interactions become. It is a stand-in for a method of conducting relationships, an interview that never ends. Journaling for cash. Which is another way of saying, in part, it is simply shopping.
The chorus of the PDF returns to the body. Catchy, repetitive evocations of the hand, breast, back, legs, and their size predict our interest in what is missing, what is withheld alongside what remains. A meditation on concealment as meaning, in character but entirely out of view. I do not remember seeing a finger or a wrist, but I remember looking for them. When one buys or hires a person's labor, by implication, one purchases the person's body for the negotiated period. There is no such thing as a disembodied service, only the discreet willingness to suspend all disbelief in such disembodiment.(3)
For some invented reason, Marvin needed assistance bathing. The reason he gave for this bizarre arrangement wasn’t based on reality, which makes it even more interesting and bathetic that I didn’t document it. Though I have forgotten the pretense that Marvin used to arrange us together in the shower, I haven't forgotten the shower. Eucalyptus green tile, dimly illuminated by a chrome and frosted glass fixture above the sink. Afterwards, while he sat on the toilet, I stood and looked up at the ceiling.
By extracting forms from their original site of production and combining them with signs from extraneous, radically juxtaposed sources, the procedure of commodity exchange itself is put on display. The work heavily burdens the viewer with the condensation of postmodern culture, aestheticizing not only the ruin but also taking the political stance of admiring fragmentation. The PDF pulls the system of apparel even further away from the sentences we create by getting dressed, they have been thought for us, and the wilting truth of the document is that commutability is not endless.
Getting money out of Marvin was difficult. It rapidly became evident that he didn’t have as much as he used to. He would call me on my days off, demanding that I return, or he would cancel our arrangement. The power he wielded made me throw my phone across the room. But I also knew that I always wanted to live in New York and throw phones there. I would keep returning until I was compensated. The hoary truth of most employment is that you don’t get paid until after you have worked, but this ancient structure of debt and slavery that binds humans doesn’t have to be dehumanizing.
When a friend or stranger asks for money to alter their jawline or brow bone, the presumption is that the situation of your own jawline and brow bone is sufficient to ensure your safe egress in the world, therefore, you owe them a debt. The debt for Brazilian Butt Lifts is structured dynamically along more gendered but equally libidinal axes. I won’t always pitch in for ass, but if we disregard cBay and then purchase a garment on eBay, who are we?
After two weeks of visiting Marvin, I insisted on being paid. He already had a houseboy who was scarcely around, but he still considered Marvin’s apartment his home. When I met him, he gave me a knowing look that made me feel professional. Then he offered me drugs. On payday, Marvin made an arrangement with his bank over the telephone, a complex maneuver where he would drive me to the bank to collect the envelope within sight of the Bank manager, so that he wouldn’t have to leave the car. Before returning to his apartment, when he handed me the cash, he said he had delayed paying me because he knew that after he did, he would never see me again.
Inside the 21st-century peer-to-peer marketing demands, we bend ourselves to become the epitome of a consumer profile, the confidant in the fitting room, or the freshest, dewy face in need of mutual aid. A Kickstarter campaign with 286 rewards. Graeber states that the function of debt is to create the illusion of equality between bargaining partners. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson identifies generalized dishonor as one of the constituent elements of social death. Executive turned writer Seth Godin valorizes marketing as storytelling. When Hoping by Shopping, we come into contact with the gummy surface of all three. With the recreation of a marketplace, we are confronted by the inescapability of the model and our own participation within it for survival and social legitimacy. To be outside the market is to be outside of the law, something less than human, indescribable. If, as Roland Barthes has written, clothing is a system and dressing is an act of speech, then selling and buying are the bond that enables discourse.
1. Art in America, 2012 Lawrence Weiner Is Looking Up, Adam Oreilly https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/lawrence-weiner-marian-goodman-56165/
2. Graeber, David. “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” YouTube, February 1, 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs
3. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death : a Comparative Study / Orlando Patterson. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982) pg. 24-25