On the last day of the Moving Image Contemporary Art Fair, project The Shortest Video Art Ever Sold! #SVAES sold a Vine. You may have read in the Guardian about it today, lulz. Yesterday, the transaction was made by Magda Sawon at the Postmasters Gallery.
Tits on Tits on Ikea (2013), Angela Washko, #SVAES. Collection of Myriam Vanneschi vine.co/v/bdugbvxYtYO
— Myriam Vanneschi (@MyriamVanneschi) March 12, 2013
This is the first Vine ever sold, Angela Washko’s Tits on Tits on Ikea (2013): filmed in Helsinki, emailed to Brooklyn, sold at the Moving Image fair in Chelsea and Vined from the Postmasters Gallery. (No, you’re not “supposed to” Vine-it-later, but we hacked Vine.) As my co-curator Kyle Chayka and I schemed, the artist will receive the full price, “hundreds of dollars” — $200.
“The restrictions allowed me to make something I wouldn’t have otherwise,” Angela Washko told us. The looping 6-second video is fast shot, a continuation of the absurdist, contra-salacious, fleshy balloon theme Washko played with in our first attempt to co-opt Vine for art — the NC-17-ish #VeryShortFilmFest.
The collector — art advisor, writer and curator Myriam Vanneschi — has already bought a Washko print at NurtureArt. She knows Washko’s work and especially appreciates Washko’s actively interferences in male-dominated environments like the digital space of gaming with her Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, where Washko attempts to engage fellow WoW players in feminist discourse.
“I was just at the Armory, overloaded from the clusterfuck of works mashed together,” Vanneschi said to me and Magda as we sat tinkering with the hacked app. She bought a sound piece earlier that day. “And then I went to the Independent Fair and it was also mostly a clusterfuck, just like the Armory.”
“The work was just so… tasty,” Sawon says. “Nobody messes with nothing!”
“Traditional collecting is just a bit screwed in the head,” Vanneschi explained, referring to luxury commodification. The #SVAES USB disk was sitting on the desk next to a humble pile of $20s. The tape was coming off a little bit. On the screen, Angela Washko’s stoic friend Eleni Tsitsirikou continued to hold the Tits. “We could build a micro-economy by supporting each other!”
We continued like that for a bit. Vanneschi lives New York and Ireland, works Holland and Switzerland, and is currently working with Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar who has been stamping people’s passports of with “State of Palestine” stamps. And she got what we were selling — that is, “net” art, “net” art for all. Why just buy and hoard art, when you can own it and liberate it at the same time?
