In 2004-05, a small group of artists, musicians, and designers in Baltimore, Maryland, formed a creative collective\u2014Creative Capitalism\u2014with the aim of producing and disseminating art and music. Working in Baltimore\u2019s fertile musical environment, the collective has since released several albums by Ponytail, Low Moda, History at Our Disposal, The Tall Grass and Noble Lake. The collective stands as more than a glorified record label, however, as the artists involved focus on modes of creative \u00adproduction that rely not solely on either the gallery system or music industry for exposure and distribution. More importantly, the specificity of what or who is included in the collective is completely shaped \u00adstylistically and \u00adaesthetically by a wide (socially and geographically) network of friends and friends of friends. For instance, Jon Brumit, a some-time contributor to the collective, invited Creative Capitalism to be involved in the art\/\u00adconcept\/guerrilla \u201cNeighborhood Public Radio\u201d broadcast project at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. While actions or works carry an individual signature, as a methodology they become folded into situations of mutual creativity; the idea is to provide the conditions for a creative public, wherein this public can be constantly invented and reinvented along lines it sets out for itself, at points that are initially undetermined. Creative Capitalism attempts to occupy a space somewhere between an event and a technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first project undertaken by the collective was a 192-page book\/CD entitled Friends and Friends of Friends<\/em> (2005), composed of art \u00adcontributed through a call-out to artists and musicians in Baltimore, their friends, and their friends\u2019 friends, which eventually included contributors from New York, Texas, California, France, England, Scotland, Singapore and \u00adelsewhere. The curatorial experiment allowed the network to move out from the \u00adcentre, and to touch on unexpected nodes; for example, after \u00adasking why so many packages were arriving around the time of \u00adsubmission, \u00adco-founder Peter Quinn\u2019s postal carrier took it upon himself to submit his own work: detailed Afro-centric paintings of semi-erotic female-animal hybrids with future-world backgrounds. Chance \u201c\u00adfriendships\u201d between artists established the project\u2019s experimental curatorial method\u2014but at the same time, the process erased evidence of the centre from which the network began in the final product. The concept driving the volume was co-operation, but a kind of co-operation that does not necessarily require a directing authority. There is a strong theoretical point (though one that falls short of being over-determined) linking these forms of \u00adco-operation to the types Marx describes, where a large number of activities (production) can be carried out over an extended space, thereby \u00adresulting in an equivalence of production.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy<\/em>, Vol. 3 (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993).<\/span> Here, however, the result is not so much Marxist as it is Deleuzian: the apparatus under-girding production is \u00adnothing more (and nothing less) than a threshold, one ballasted by the network itself.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).<\/span> (It is worth noting that the otherwise \u201cproletarian\u201d \u00adreading of the collective can easily be eschewed by the fact that one of the bands produced, Low Moda, was featured in the most recent runway show by Yves Saint-Laurent in Paris.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second project, Notebook<\/em> (2006), used the same \u00adcuratorial \u00admethod as Friends<\/em>, but focused on random notations, sketches, and notebook entries on paper, reproduced in a black and white book, and it included a DVD of short videos. The publication and launch of Notebook<\/em> clarified the nomadic, \u201cspectator-less\u201d ethos of the group. The books themselves were printed with plain cardboard covers and rubber-stamps forged with the title, the publisher, and the ISBN number were used to mark the books. In the gallery, long tables were installed and workstations were designated to carry out the assemblage. Contact-microphones were attached to the tables and a basic PA system was positioned in front of the tables. Then, as contributors, members, and an interested public filtered through the door, all were put to \u201cwork\u201d in the performance of the book\u2019s production. Passed from station to station, the covers were hand-stamped with the necessary information; the microphones amplified the industrial rhythm of the performance, with a member of the collective joining in on viola for \u201cmelody.\u201d Anyone in the gallery could stamp, uniquely marking the finished products that were then put on sale during the show. All of these actions were necessary in bringing forth the \u201cproduct\u201d<\/em>: therein lies the paradox of an audience-less performance\u2014the performance of an audience that is liquidated in the assemblage of the object itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Audience-less performance illustrates the deeply transformed \u00adconcept of \u201cthe public\u201d that drives the work of Creative Capitalism. The standard presumption that art or performance must \u201creach the audience\u201d is largely absent because the initiatives of the collective do not presume a public that is already<\/em> there, passively awaiting identification or activation. Creative Capitalism is not<\/em> a model for reaching \u201cthe people\u201d; it is a \u00adstructure of becoming that, through creative expression (art as detonator), seeks to constantly reinvent itself through an impossible engagement with a \u00adpublic that consists of people who are missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not to say that Creative Capitalism has no concern with \u201cbeing popular.\u201d In fact, the collective openly seeks to circulate the works it \u00adgenerates as widely as possible. It may not presume a \u00adpublic, but the \u00adcollective certainly invokes an engagement that brings real people \u00adtogether to produce and\/or experience particular forms of \u00adcreative \u00adexpression. Entering into the shifting space of the collective, \u00adparticipants become fabulists<\/em>, visionary mythmakers with the power (fleeting, \u00adcontingent) to pluralize engagements typically understood to be \u00adsingular.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Fabulation<\/em> is a concept developed by Henri Bergson in Chapter 2 of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion<\/em> (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).<\/span> Creative Capitalism\u2019s paradoxical desire to be popular is rooted not in \u201c\u00adfinding\u201d \u00adaudiences or markets but rather in strategies of overflowing itself, \u00adinventing and reinventing publics and the collective itself as it flows.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze, \u201cWhitman,\u201d Essays Critical and Clinical<\/em> (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). See also Daniel W. Smith\u2019s introduction to the same \u00advolume, \u201c\u2018A Life of Pure Immanence\u2019: Deleuze\u2019s \u2018Critique et Clinique\u2019 Project.\u201d<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n In an age when headless networks and asymmetrical organization structures evoke images and unending rhetoric regarding terrorist cells, foreign and domestic threats to particular visions of democracy, etc., Creative Capitalism can be read as a crank provocation. What is \u201c\u00adcapital\u201d in this context? The group plays on the habits of thought and action \u00adconnected to \u201ccapitalism,\u201d while never quite defining its relation to the term, other than each member containing all the capacities of \u201ccapital\u201d to be wilfully bartered for a larger creative gain. While the mysticism of capitalism is explicitly mocked by the group (giant papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 heads serve as the group\u2019s \u201ccorporate heads,\u201d a silent board of directors), the structures of a capitalist enterprise remain firmly in place. The group does not aspire to inflict a condescending \u201cpeople\u2019s art\u201d on the world and, for all of its aspirations to be \u201cpopular,\u201d Creative Capitalism does not seek out \u201cthe people\u201d to educate, convert, or speak for. Returning to and \u00admodifying Michael Warner\u2019s question, in this context, \u201cwhat are the limits of a \u00adpublic?\u201d\u2014here, a definition would have to incorporate circumstance as much as circumvention. In a sense, it is difficult to describe something so disperse, so simultaneously theorized and under-theorized, so wilfully and passively inclusive. It feels appropriate to end with a question from the collective\u2019s manifesto: \u201cWhat is your function?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/63_AC02_Meyers-and-Baxstrom_Creative-Capitalism_carries-Capitalism-scaled.jpg\")
Creative Capitalism Carries Capitalism<\/em> from Wall Street to the Whitney Biennial<\/em>, 2007.
Photo: John Ellsberry, courtesy of Creative Capitalism<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n