We all learn to be vulgar in Surasi Kusolwong's market. In thinking about his extended installations, the idea of fun inevitably arises. The purpose of this essay is to show that there are more complex ideas behind this Thai artist's lively, good-humoured work, but that's stating the obvious, for operating beneath the fun lies an economy that is alternative to the market as we understand it.

Like many of his contemporaries, Kusolwong always works with a given space - a museum or gallery most often, but at times the outdoors, and even an airport in one instance. In this space he sets up tables, covering their tops with stretched fabrics of solid colours. Sometimes scaffoldings and poster boards go up as accompaniment and a shack may be added. Once the temporary set up is done, with utmost care and with certain sculptural sensibilities, Kusolwong stages hundreds of imported goods, which he previously shopped for at an open market in Bangkok and shipped to the exhibition site. What gets laid out, stacked up, and displayed are mostly mass-produced, gaudy household items, ranging from T-shirts to strainers, from plastic superhero masks to plastic tiny stools. In the centre of the bazaar, a transparent Plexiglas moneybox is placed. Video projections of Thai-pop karaoke and a recording of previous works may supplement the display. A vision of chaotic plenitude is created by the arrangements of flat images and round objects.

The opening of Kusolwong's 'market' is a high-energy but well-orchestrated madness, an unruly unravelling. Even if you haven't been to one, anyone who has seen a newly opened mega-retail store or mall already knows what it is like. With mixed music thumping in the background, the artist (or his stand-in sometimes) stirs up the crowd. Everything is up for grabs. All who are present blissfully descend down, if only momentarily, to the base levels of survival instinct and competitive compulsion. In this jubilant pandemonium, commodity consumption and conspicuous consumption collapse into one. As I witnessed at the recent installation of the artist's $1 Market (People Are So Fantastic) in San Francisco, even class distinctions seemed to disappear.¹ Stylish art-world insiders answered the call as dutifully as cute punk kids did. Flush with an adrenaline rush, we, the hoarders, compared our booties, vulgarly rejoicing.

What is the purpose of all this? To end up with yet some more mysterious objects of the late-capitalist universe? Well, a case in point: as a result of my participation in $1 Market (People Are So Fantastic), I am now richer by a few flimsy, made-in-Thailand articles including a plastic, multicolour-striped shopping bag stuffed with a fluorescent pink toilet brush, an iridescent green sombrero, and a drinking bowl of a pewter-like silver, whose appearance is vaguely traditional Thai and whose material composition still eludes me. If the articles themselves are not that mysterious in hindsight, my original intention with them seems so. Although I am tickled, stumped and embarrassed by my own shameless stashing, I cannot stop thinking about one particular triangular-shaped Thai cushion, which would have been perfect with my futon chaise. At the very outset of the melee it was snatched away by a quicker, surer hand.

After the opening the conjured architecture, aided by a projected video documentation of the event, serves as the remainder of the installation once complete and as a reminder of its all-too-brief previous life. It has to stand as a sufficient work. When the particular exhibition comes to an end and the temporary installation also completes its temporary life, one thing that incontestably remains as objet d'art is the transparent box with collected money. As the artist often acknowledges, always with tongue-in-cheek knowingness, the tabletops are monochrome paintings, and the transparent moneybox is a minimalist cube. (We will come back to this later.)

The cheerful title $1 Market (People Are So Fantastic!) is pretty much in line with other titles Kusolwong has given his works over the years: Night Market; Free For All Project; Everything Kr.10 (Money-Minimal); Everything 1000 Lire, Everything Must Go, 1000 Lire Market! (La vita continua) and so on. Since 1997, these temporary 'markets' have gone up in different European locations including Geneva, Vienna, Bordeaux, Solletuna in Sweden and Casole d'Elsa, Italy. As if evincing the truth that the market is always supposed to expand, Kusolwong created New York Night Market (Chaos Minimal), and Lucky Seoul followed by Lucky Tokyo in 2001-02.

The titles of Kusolwong's 'market' pieces may be guileless and upbeat, but their workings are more convoluted. Implementing them involves much calculation - a calculation that is not only mathematical but also intuitive and improvisational. As the realisation of each market entails a rather meticulous planning, let us hypothetically think about them in terms of numbers (these numerical factors may seem silly but are real concerns for the artist, curators and the staff of the museum or gallery where the work is installed and performed):

A production fee of X will purchase Y number of items, equalling Z. The items
will require C number of tables (and may be accompanied by E number of
scaffoldings to be erected alongside). When the opening performance takes
place, the items will disappear roughly in M minutes. The duration is
contingent on a number of factors, one of the most important being N,
the number of shoppers expected. Each item will sell at $1 or €1 (or
whatever is official currency at the site), which will generate Z dollars or
euros (or whatever), theoretically speaking.

A more mathematical mind will be tempted to construct a neat, logical formula out of these numbers. But did I mention that the opening of Kusolwong's 'market' creates frenzy? All of us are more-or-less conscious consumers who know to pay for what we get. When the furious, almost Bacchic urge to grab grabs you, however, there's no time to be precise and punctilious. What that frenzy also means is that the most obvious numerical equation - Z number of articles = Z currency - doesn't quite happen. The money collected is bound to fall far short of the items presented and taken, though it is unlikely that the artist or anybody has ever counted the money to see if that is in fact the case. The parties involved in making the work obviously come out in the red, but that concerns hardly anybody. There are, of course, a lot more variables that render this even rudimentary exercise utterly ludicrous and pointless.

Then why bother to hypothesise like this? After all, we are talking about an artwork, not the business of profit making. The point is that Kusolwong's 'market' impersonates the market and in it, audiences inevitably behave similarly, as they instinctively understand it. Kusolwong's work thus invites us to consider its working in at least ostensibly economic terms. Mathematically logical formulation may be perhaps futile. Nevertheless, a good political Marxist would think of a symbolic violence which this momentary, random and democritising system of exchange, in the guise of a work of art, incurs upon the basic logic of the capitalist economy.

I suppose a good Marxist - one who is more sociologically inclined - also may think of commodity fetishism above mathematical computation. For we are dealing with a work of art, in whose contemporary realm 'commodity' and 'fetish(ism)' are more familiar terms of interpretation. And once these terms are in place, it's easier to realise that the objects being snatched away could very well be 'mysterious'. Take the following tongue-in-cheek rhetoric directed to me by a fellow hoarder that evening: 'What are you going to do with that toilet brush? Use it in the bathroom or keep it as an artwork?' To paraphrase: Are you going to put to use the use value of that particular commodity or sever the thing from the system of exchange value and turn it into a fetish? In fact, when Kusolwong's 'market' unravels - or, shall we say, activates - the drive one experiences seems more akin to the non-numerical, incalculable power of fetish.

Commodity fetishism, of course, means something a little different in its classical usage. For Marx, the notion refers to the way in which we, in our economy, assign characteristics to things that are not their natural material properties; in commodity fetishism, human relations are masqueraded and substituted by relations among things. Thus transformed from mere made things to commodities, things in this economy are magically animated, standing in for humans and living on their behalf. Marx calls commodities 'sensuous things... at the same time supra-sensible and social', and as such, they are ready to '[enter] relations with each other and with the human race'.² It is not only that the social relations of human production take the form of things, but also that they can be expressed only through things. Kusolwong's 'market,' mimicking or troping the market, seems to highlight just that. If only through the duration of the performance, people's relations are almost exclusively with the things there, and interpersonal relations are also determined by these things. Good capitalists may rationalise their irrational behaviour like this: Everything is a dollar! It is $1 Market! What matters that they were poorly made and have no use for us? They are all only a lousy buck! (I myself am thinking that the pink toilet brush is worth less than a dollar, while the pyramidal cushion definitely more. Just my luck.)

In San Francisco, after the installation went through the transformation, the moneybox was placed, all too self-consciously, on a plinth inside a gallery. In its well-placed and lit spot, the box assumed the aura of a votive object, not without irony since it was filled with money. Money that is no longer currency. Currency is by definition not a consumable but good only in circulation, only as a medium of exchange. By agreement, it is commensurate to the variable value of each commodity. In Kusolwong's 'market', two things happen to the currency: first, its meaning is eradicated because this 'market' bankrupts any form of commensurability; second, the 'market' stops its circulation altogether. When it stops passing from one hand to the next, and being commensurate to one commodity after another, currency means nothing. What few of us thought about when surrendering (or not) the money so readily to the box is that the money will go nowhere. What, then, is it good for other than for boxing and exhibiting?

The moneybox is not quite a remainder in the way the architectural elements of the installation are. It is more a reminder of a complex net of relations of debt thrown out into the wider world - a debt we owe to the artist in an alternative economy. Consider the following quote:

We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and
so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an
acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring of power. Gift-giving has the
virtue of surpassing the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object
given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: he regards his virtue,
that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now
possesses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he
proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.³

The lines are taken from Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share. In it the author proposes 'general economy', a concept which, in opposition to traditional economics, posits that excess rather than scarcity drives economic activity: 'On the whole, a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal.'⁴ The main drive of Bataille's general economy is expenditure of that excess. (For this renegade French philosopher, this expenditure broadly includes various human activities, like ancient human sacrifice.)

The intellectual lineage traces Bataille's thesis to that of his teacher's, Marcel Mauss's The Gift, in which the anthropologist famously discusses the 'potlatch' of the Northwest Coast American Indian. In this 'archaic' ceremony a participant can 'acquire power' by giving away his possessions, and even by destroying leftovers. If the gift is not duly met with a counter-gift, the recipient can never reclaim that power back from the giver. It goes without saying that the transaction is utterly counter-intuitive for those of us in a commodity economy as, for us, endless accumulation is both the driving force and ultimate aim. In the potlatch, the bourgeois capitalist ethics of calculating, rationalist individualism does not apply. Also counter-intuitive is the idea that this economy seems to spiral towards self-destruction, rather than self-preservation and expansion.

Self-destruction may seem too strong a word for the quasi-economy of Kusolwong's 'market', but the idea better describes the way in which the money supposedly given in exchange for the things grabbed is taken out of circulation and mummified in the transparent Plexiglas box. At that moment, the economy we almost instinctively participate in ceases to exist, and a new economy of 'giving' and 'acquiring of power' dictated by the artist is clandestinely set in motion. Kusolwong's 'market,' after all, is not really a mimicry of the market as we know it. The box, per se an art object, a fetish, continues its life travelling to other sites. (From San Francisco, it travelled to Malmö, Sweden for Kusolwong's retrospective.) It may even take residence in some collection, but it will always be the weight of the expansive net of debt incurred by us to Kusolwong.

Importantly, indebtedness works in another way. Kusolwong's artistic act of giving material riches means very little if their visual, physical aftermaths are not taken into account. Not that working with the inheritance from art of the past is anything new. In this case, the art-historical matrices being mined are minimalism (the moneybox) and the monochrome (the tabletops), two fields where purity is a matter of utmost concern. For Kusolwong, that purity is an inheritance to be enriched and contaminated. This is no news either. Think, for instance, of Hans Haacke's anti-canonical canon, Condensation Cube of 1963-65. The work's conceptual conceit that relies upon the forces of nature - temperature and humidity - still seems so unoffending compared to Kusolwong's cube filled with wrinkled, torn bills. Remembering Bataille again, however, one can see that both cubes could very well be manifestations of the 'general economy': whether it is moisture or money, it is a surplus to be expended.

Then what about the monochrome tables that, one may claim, are as elegant as Ellsworth Kelly's paintings? The monochrome is the purest of the pure, the most modernist of the modernist arsenal to be deployed whenever arises the need to declare 'the death of painting'. This death is one of the most familiar clichés of modernism, and the return of the supposedly dead medium has taken place as frequently as its alleged deaths have. Since there has been recent desire to resurrect painting, again, it is no wonder that what Kusolwong is doing with monochrome is met with much excitement. How did the Thai artist get to the Monochrome anyway? The question about the progress of the artist's body of work may not be met with a conclusive answer, but a conjecture is possible. Witness the spread of photographic reproductions of Kusolwong's works in the catalogue for the 2002 group exhibition 'Urgent Painting' at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: installation photographs of Kusolwong's two works, Happy Kwangju (Free Massage), 2000, and its reincarnation Happy Berlin (Free Massage), 2001, flank an earlier work from 1996 titled For 12 Dipped Enamel Paintings. Twelve wood panels dipped in five colours of enamel paint are hung on the wall and five wood containers of the paint are placed on the floor in front of the panels. It therefore seems plausible enough to guess that sometime in 1996-97 the vertically hung monochrome paintings turned horizontal. And simulated memories of the din and bustle of Bangkok's street markets crept in.

The capital of Thailand, where Surasi Kusolwong lives and works, is a city wrecked by the brutal retributions of globalisation. In 1997-98 Thailand was one of the Asian nations whose currency was severely devalued, and whose economy was placed under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund. When the bubble, mostly inflated by a construction boom, burst, bodies fell from unfinished skyscrapers. These remain standing to this day, slowly rotting into melancholic decrepitude. Belying the extensive report of this recent debacle, Thailand's history of connection to the world stretches further back to centuries before we learned to like to use the word 'global'. From early on the island and mainland Southeast Asia was the junction of the two ancient civilisations of China and India, the entrepôt of the spice trade, and one of the hotspots on the map of competing European imperial interests. Thailand, the 'buffer state', was never colonised and this obviously is a source of much national pride.

The colonialists are long gone and modern sovereignties have been established in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the land remains crisscrossed with paths of legal and illegal trades, border disputes, and endless streams of refugees from Thailand's less fortunate neighbours left in tatters by political instability. Add to that another list of notorious infiltrations: tourism, sex trade and HIV. Thailand could be a prime example of the paradox of boundary and connectedness in our contemporary era. Bangkok, its epicentre, pulses with an unparalleled intensity of Buddhist piety and the capitalist greed seen the world over. Sensationalistic pens of journalists and fiction writers are kept busy narrating this stark contradiction and feeding our collective imagination of this place, a tradition of romanticisation that traces back to, among others, Joseph Conrad, who sailed up the Chao Praya River to visit the city, and Somerset Maugham, who sojourned in the plush Oriental Hotel on the bank of the river.

This history had already predicted and marked the paths of relations we would come into with Kusolwong and his market. The artist's willingness to acknowledge his debt to the shared art-historical inheritance by directly engaging with it - always with good humour - is what makes his art familiar and relevant at this moment. Through his work we, the viewers, become engaged with him in relations of debt expanding in ways that are alternative to the logic of the expanding market. Questions of dues and restitutions are too complex to figure out in economic terms. Let's just say, as a good Buddhist might, that all these relations are circular. If audiences see no more than a funfest where they can gleefully grab things and shove bills into the moneybox, I think that should be fine by Kusolwong as it is by them. Unfolding the rhetoric of the 'market' is optional. Having fun is an unavoidable requisite.

In Surasi Kusolwong's market, we all can be vulgar.
Thank goodness for that.

— Doryun Chon