A critical text composed by Heath Valentine for the project Economy of Dissonance, Naples Italy, 2010.

 

This project seems to blur the property lines of aesthetic creation and cultural engagement, while tracing an economy of determining social forces. It assists us in confronting a multiplicity of artistic and critical challenges anew, while it also helps us surmount concrete social barriers. This is its unique dynamism: the quiet geology of a disciplinary shift, coupled with transgressive social potential.

The fabrication of counterfeit designer goods, in collaboration with displaced peoples in the Neapolitan community, in the context of ‘art’, revitalizes a variety of tense debates concerning art and culture, real and fake, class struggle, and immigration. How does a handmade counterfeit leave traces of its maker while simultaneously seeking to eradicate that singularity, that identity? How does manufacturing these goods affect the major manufacturers, counterfeiters, distributors, and buyers – in short, a vast dynamics of society and economy? How does a normally precious object, here created with quotidian materials, affect our conceptions of consumer products, of art, of original, of replica? More importantly perhaps, with whom does this project resonate? Surely, these questions traverse the realms of both art and criticism, and the goal is to render them visible to an audience that spans the local community. These debates not only foreground pressing issues, but also the people that make up the tissue of Naples. It appears that this project does not presume to provide definitive solutions to these difficult problems: simply, it looks to transgress the boundaries that frequently ensnare creativity and freedom.