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So Feral it's Tame

By John Millar, 21 September 2009

 

In her recent show, Kate Rich harnesses the spare baggage capacity of the globe-trotting art world to create a ‘feral trade' network of human scale exchange. John Millar has trouble suspending his disbelief

 

and lo the giant absolved them, and charged them a fair price.

- Roberto Bolano The Savage Detectives

 

In 2004 Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon started producing a homemade cola for sale at the Cube Microplex in Bristol.1 The Cube was ‘opposed in principle to the business and environmental practices of the Coca-Cola corporation', and, having tried other brands and finding them unacceptable, Brandon and Rich decided to produce their own ghost-product. James Flint covered the story for The Guardian:

Having found their liquid gold, Brandon and Rich plan to sell concentrate kits to other small bars and businesses. They maintain that they are not out to challenge the Coca-Cola hegemony, but they ‘do hope that along the way we'll help produce a small reality-shift. It's social change through science and baking. Sort of DIY aesthetic meets the WI.'2

Image: Cook at the Feral Trade Café, HTTP Gallery, Summer 2009

Cube Cola has been on sale at Rich's recent exhibition at the HTTP Gallery near Finsbury Park, North London. Entitled the Feral Trade Café, the show is a working café selling products ‘brought in over moving social networks, including vacation, commuter and funded cultural exchange'3. So alongside the Cola there is: Montenegrin Turkish Delight, hot chocolate from Teposcolula, Mexico, coffee from El Salvador, tea from Panchagar, Bangladesh, cake from London, ‘transnational sandwiches' and a watermelon jam that on our visit we were advised to steer clear from, although apparently ‘the coffee really is delicious.' The café also contains displays of packaging, charts showing how the products were transported and several digital screens including one that displays an ‘online database, handcrafted (sic) by the artist, where couriers log their journeys.'4

Rich's first Feral Trade activity took place in 2003 when she imported 30kg of coffee direct from a farmers collective in San Pedro Nonulaco, El Salvador for sale at Cube. The gambit is that if this coffee were brought through conventional trading routes the producers would receive only 30% of the retail price whereas in this case they received 70%. So far so ethical consumer; however, as we shall see, Rich's project has evolved and now diverges quite dramatically from the notions of fair trade (or Fairtrade) that have come to dominate liberal narratives.

The original concept of fair trade was pioneered by Mennonites in the United States and by Oxfam in the UK during the 1950s. Then it was entitled ‘alternative trade' and it dealt primarily in crafts rather than foodstuffs. In 1988 the first certification label, Max Havelaar, was trialled in the Netherlands and since 1997 the Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International have sought to determine common guarantees of ‘fairness'.

The grounds on which these guarantees are established are as follows: in the case of products from small farmers, importers have to agree to cut out middlemen and trade directly with the producers' co-operatives. Market fluctuations must not affect the minimum price agreed and a long-term commitment must be demonstrated. On the producers side they must prove that they are democratically managed and that their agricultural methods are sound and sustainable. If these criteria are met a product may carry the Fairtrade mark.5

Ethical shopping has evolved into a Sunday supplement concern and is no longer the preserve of attendees of church bazaars and charity shops. Fairtrade products have come in from that gentle sepia world and now find themselves perched on the faux Hollywood chrome of a Pret A Manger counter and under the sterile white lights of supermarket shelving. The story of how this happened intersects with some of the issues Rich explores with her Feral Trade project. In the aftermath of the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation the consumption of Fairtrade coffee sky-rocketed in the US. However, this was not due to the ‘hidden hand of the market' operating as demand increased supply, rather it was due to the direct intervention of activists, particularly the Global Exchange group in San Francisco, who lobbied Starbucks to offer Fairtrade coffee at every one of its then 2,300 outlets. Having been the bogeyman of the Seattle protests, Starbucks saw a PR opportunity and rapidly capitulated. Since then major multinationals have seen forays into Fairtrade as a beneficial and highly effective Public Relations technique. McDonalds for example now sells a range of Fairtrade products and, controversially, in 2005 Nestle launched its Partners Blend coffee. Since 2006 several regional councils throughout the UK have branded themselves as Fairtrade.

Image: Kate Rich, Feral Trade Hamper

Since then, in tandem with the growth of the Fairtrade project, critiques have evolved on both the radical left and the neoliberal right that from the same premise, draw predictably divergent conclusions. The Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a London based Neoliberal think-tank, released a report in February 2008 to coincide with the annual ‘Fairtrade Fortnight' that maintained the system was ‘little more than a marketing exercise intended to maintain fair trade's predominance in an increasingly competitive market place' and that a significant majority of farmers are in Mexico, a relatively ‘developed' country while ‘few are in places like Ethiopia.'6 The ASI's conclusion to this is ,of course, that the best way to ‘aid international development [is to] abolish barriers to trade in the rich world, and help the developing world to do the same.' In other words, Fairtrade is an interventionist stance that distorts the natural forces of the market while free trade ‘is the most effective poverty reduction strategy the world has ever seen.' However, the critique from the radical left suggests that Fairtrade is part of a ‘forever to come' attitude towards global justice, the ever out-of-reach promise of a moral economy is seen to provide a false reconciliation with the world that sanctifies our advanced capitalist lifestyle. Fair trade, then, is the perfect embodiment of what Boltanski and Chiapello term the ‘new spirit of capitalism', the ‘capitalist response to growing anti-capitalist and ecological critique that, ultimately, sustains the functioning of market ideology.'7

So to Kate Rich, the title of whose project plays at the interface between Fairtrade, Free Trade and black market dynamics. If Fairtrade presents a stable narrative open for critique, then Feral Trade denotes something fragmentary, spectral, something that collapses at the point of narrative comprehension. The information held in the database suggests a formal system or a catalogue, but it is a catalogue of the random and kaleidoscopic. Feral Trade is an elusive guerilla concept. The rules of the game fluctuate as they are formed ‘on the fly', avoiding the tendrils of authoritative narratives.

The narratives bought with Feral Trade products are not fixed and whole but difficult and often problematic. What you get is a story of transport that can serve to make the actual nature of the transaction opaque. Goods are traded through social networks by primarily white, western artists/art-workers in what is described as a parasitic system ‘feeding off the surplus energy emitted by the art world'.8

Since the reality of global economic collapse became inescapable last September, there has been considerable discussion about the ‘sustainability' of the art world. The economy of dramatically inflated prices for artworks, and more and bigger galleries for showing and selling them in, suddenly appears anachronistic. At the same time, the (un)ecological model on which this economy is based is beginning to be questioned, where artists and curators must constantly travel to international biennials, festivals and fairs to exhibit and see art and be seen doing both.9

The ghost, the illusion, the cosmopolitan thief, these have become increasingly prevalent models for artists in their efforts to avoid neutralisation. Contemporaneity in culture is viral. A constant mutation is necessary in order to avoid being subsumed by the solipsistic behemoth of art world economics and normalising media tendencies. ‘On the fly', that term comes to mind again, under the radar, phantasm. Rich's project seeks to critique various economies of sale; art market, free trade, fair trade. It is a deeply problematic show. Let us start by looking at its physical manifestation.

At the café, on a white plinth, there is an example of the packaging used for the Montenegrin Delight. Designed by the producer, it sits there dumbly, a piece of global kitsch akin to a packet of South Korean condoms or a brightly coloured Japanese sweet wrapper. Indeed in the global economy, where design is defined by western norms, a Japanese lollipop wrapper appears comic because it is a ‘failed' or somehow mutilated version of its western archetype. There is something troubling about this wrapper and it has to do with the ironic distance it opens around it.

At Feraltrade.org one can view a series of digital photographs showing the process of transportation. The first photograph shows a young woman who is the courier and a man, the producer. The girl smiles and the man appears to be slightly ill at ease. The photographs continue, showing the machines for producing the confectionery, the packaging, shots of the Adriatic taken from a ferry, shots of clouds taken from a plane, the grey mundanity of the UK and so on. It is difficult not to feel a wave of nausea when viewing these photos. They have the saccharine quality of gap year photos from a school leaver. One cannot help but feel that accusations of dilettantism might not be entirely inappropriate. The difficulty in any critical analysis of the Feral Trade project is that it is so desperately self-aware; it does not seek to cover its problematic and often contradictory nature. But it can also be accused of a failure of engagement.

Image: Feral trader with producer of Montenegrin Delight

In an article published in the London Review of Books, Slavoj Žižek lists various positions taken by the left in the wake of the hegemony of capitalism and its ‘political supplement, liberal democracy', these include: defending what remains of the welfare state, giving up and waiting for a Heideggerian moment of ‘divine violence', refocusing the field of struggle onto everyday practices and so on and so forth. He then writes:

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true' radical Left politics - what they are trying to get around is indeed, the lack of such a position ... . The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm': the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left. 10

The Feral Trade project fits neatly into this paradigm of withdrawal. It negates any radical narratives wherever they might appear to develop. It is both bubble and pin. We might return to the quote that opens this review: ‘we do hope that along the way we'll help produce a small reality shift. It's social change through science and baking.' The twee sentiment expressed in those lines locates us in the world of micro-politics, the Feral Trade café's aims are perhaps even less, it withdraws completely from engagement even at the micro-political level. It is difficult not to take a cynical view of the project as its own aim appears to be entirely cynical. The relationships with producers are problematic, the scale is absurdly small, the critique might function better as a book and the show at the HTTP, if can be regarded as an art show may, in Rich's own words, ‘just be bad art'. If one views it as a show in the anti-art vein then it might be viewed as a complicated prank and nothing more. The idea that it is just a bit of a game is hard to shake, with art world movers (or variations thereof) taking part whilst on their holidays: it's a giggle, but the uncomfortable smile of the Montinegran Delight producer is a hard one to forget.

John Millar <Millar16 AT hotmail.co.uk> is a writer and critic based in London.

Info

Kate Rich's Feral Trade Café was at HTTP Gallery, 13th June - 30th August 2009

HTTP Gallery - http://www.http.uk.net/

Feral Trade website - http://www.feraltrade.org

Footnotes

1 Cube Microplex: http://microplex.cubecinema.com

2 See www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jul/28/foodanddrink.shopping

Also, it is worth noting the twee homespun note sounded in this quote (social change through baking and science; DIY aesthetics meets the WI). There is a discernable friction in the language of the literature produced for the Feral Trade project between grand, emancipatory statements and bubble bursting homily.

3 Quoted from the Feral Trade Café menu.

4 From the gallery's press release, May 2009. Available online at: http://www.http.uk.net/exhibitions/FeralTradeCafe/index.shtml

5 See, http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/what_is_fairtrade/faqs.aspx

6 See, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/25/fairtrade.report

7 See, L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2007. The summary of their argument is from: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/826/

8 Quoted from the exhibition catalogue.

9 Ibid..

10 See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html