by Barbara Browning

Associate Professor, NYU Performance Studies

09/20/08

Raul Vincent Enriquez is a visual and conceptual artist. He is also very cranky and he hates to be called a conceptual artist. Visual is okay. He doesn’t mind if you say that he is a fabulous maker of burritos. His work could perhaps most obviously be compared to his contemporary, Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Thai-Argentine artist often cited as a representative of “relational aesthetics,” in which social interaction (eating meals together, listening to music) is understood as artistic practice. There have been, of course, precedents for this work, including, for example, the work of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who created environments for sitting around, listening to Jimi Hendrix and swinging in a hammock, or later, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose mounds of candy invited audiences to consume the work of art.

Of course, all these works ask us to understand the relationship between art and consumption in both literal and figurative ways, and they have profound implications regarding the economic politics of the art market. This is what makes the work not only conceptual (sorry, Raul), but also political. In a week in which the global financial markets crashed, Damian Hirst just made $200 million. It’s an interesting moment to think about art, the market, consumption, and commodification.

Hirst’s work, as you surely know, is largely made of animal matter – raw material that more typically would be understood as foodstuff. But by suspending it in formaldehyde, and by calling it conceptual art, Hirst moves it into a different realm of consumption.

I’m teaching a course on fetish this semester, and was saying to my students this week that the term “commodity” is a tricky one. Of course, when Marx talks about the commodity fetish, he’s trying to lay bare the mystification in the process by which human labor is suspended, something like the unfortunate pig or cow in Hirst’s vats of formaldehyde, when an object becomes a sign of market value. But the word commodity as it’s used in the commodities markets pretends to be about ostensibly “raw” value – the prime material, unworked upon by human hands, which is the basis of all other economic value. This would include gold, oil, iron ore – but also, kind of bafflingly, pork belly.

No one really understands how you reach the ground of value. What is the worth of pork belly? What about if it’s a pork belly in one of Hirst’s vats of formaldehyde?

Even though Raul doesn’t like to talk about his work as conceptual, sometimes we do end up talking about his burritos in the context of power and social relations. We have an ongoing dialogue regarding two seemingly oxymoronic phrases: in my case, the bewildering term “the gift economy,” and in Raul’s case, the equally confounding notion of “the hospitality industry.”

The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has written that the concept of “the gift economy,” first propounded by Marcel Mauss in the classic Essai sur le Don, has been misunderstood. Economic and social theorists insist that Mauss was suggesting that any gift, while ostensibly an act of generosity, is in fact part of a social contract that will demand, eventually, repayment at an even higher value. That is, if I give you a gift, you will be obligated to give me back an even better one. This reading has been used to argue the case for the so-called “free market,” in a kind of economic Darwinist argument that assumes that ultimately all human exchange is based on competition. Graeber calls this interpretation cynical. He says, sometimes we really do give gifts as an act of generosity.

Raul’s hospitality, likewise, is an act of generosity. You don’t pay for your burrito. He’s giving it to you. This, he says, is “what my people do”: take pleasure in making exquisite food and feeding people. It doesn’t mean, however, that he doesn’t get cranky. He gets very cranky. When you receive your burrito, whatever you do, don’t try to ask to “have it your way.” It’s a gift. It’s handmade. You’ll have it Raul’s way, or not at all.

It’s also a work of art, and it’s very very delicious. Enjoy.