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| Jenny Brown, Learning the Ropes, 2007 |
Forms of Responsibility - Recent Projects by Jenny Brown
by Gary Sangster
In early 2005, an elegant gesture of product repatriation was conceived
and produced by Jenny Brown as a way of both describing certain elements
of a working global economy and tracing the efficiency of a path of
distribution. It was a modest act of economic anthropology that engaged
research, performance, and documentation, as well as articulating an
imagined or real cultural narrative of a concept of homeland and the
actual journey of anonymous artifacts to their site of origin. The
somewhat poignant, yet deeply ironic, pursuit of a homecoming, for near
valueless materials or objects, small stones, garden decor-purchased
inexpensively from a down-market, transnational department store in
Sydney-heightens the sense of disconnection and inauthenticity produced
through a global economic marketplace. The project, Placing stones as they are found,
suggests a sense of loss, or alienation, as objects of value, objects
of use, objects of function, and objects of desire, large or small,
voluble or mute, are interminably transferable, anonymously
interchangeable, dislocated and redefined throughout the trade routes of
mass-market capital. The work is an action of little consequence, a
specific kind of elusive gesture of futility towards irreversible
systems and processes, which makes sense only as a poetic or aesthetic
form of art.
