Black Market Next to my Name
Black Market Next to my Name
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Artist
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Production Date
2007
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Medium
mixed media - series of materials including books, records, tapes, ephemera
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Size
9000 x 6500 mm
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Credit
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2007
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Accession Number
C2007/1/22
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Accession Date
24 Aug 2007
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Department
New Zealand Art
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Classification
Installation
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Collection
Chartwell
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Chartwell Notes
Black Market Next to my Name comprises the entire contents of Daniel Malone’s flat, then located in the former site of the artist-run gallery Teststrip: complete and half-finished artworks, letters, clothes, furniture, homewares, and collections of records (approximately 2,500), razor blades, corks, and cigarette packets. First shown at Teststrip’s spiritual successor, Gambia Castle, the work was exhibited shortly before Malone left Aotearoa for Poland.
Malone writes, Black Market… “simultaneously presented a fiction of living autobiography with a narrative of collective consumption and a tone of obsessive archiving. [The artwork] is imbued with materialistic desire; it negotiates meaning, situating that meaning somewhere between potential and obsolescence.” When first exhibited, Malone anticipated the artwork being subsequently dispersed back into the world as non-art objects: “stuff”. Instead, “thanks to the enthusiasm and initiative of a number of individuals”, Black Market… was acquired in whole by Chartwell.
Ingesting Black Market… into a collection brought obvious challenges. In conversation with Liv Barrett ahead of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki exhibition Made Active: The Chartwell Show, Malone notes, “The logistics of it being put into storage and coming out of storage is also another part of the work’s problem [...] how do you now fit this work into a museological context? [...] Is everything going to be put on its own in a box? Is everything going to be photographed and noted? [AAG] have written to me with questions — ‘you did empty these containers of various cleaning detergents and things that were in the shower didn’t you?’ And I’m like ‘why would I have?’”
