Rogue Trades (2014) — Social Art Library

By Harald Smykla

A photograph of the artist standing behind a market stall in a town centre, engaged in a game of chess using different fruits and vegetables.

During the summer months of 2014, I delivered a series of participatory live art projects from a stall on Barking Market. The street market setting provided an opportunity for artistic interventions that allowed me to take ideas to, and work with, new audiences (market visitors and fellow traders), while expanding and subverting the economic principle of exchanging goods for money in favour of exchanges of time, communication, ideas and generosity.

Individual projects included:

- Fruit/Veg Chess: Market visitors play chess with me, using a set of 6 different kinds of fruit and vegetables. Everybody is a winner.

- Face Value: "Re-facing" actual banknotes with meticulously drawn portraits of market visitors

- The Barking Apples of my Eye: Customers commission ink drawings on dry-ironed apple slices

- Local Heroes Digest: Customers explain what makes them a 'local hero' and get their statements and portraits 'engraved' on suitable produce (apples, pears, bananas etc.

- Model Fee: Customers can commission a drawing and only pay for the exact time I spend on it at an artworker's payrate of £20 per hour. Even 10p would buy a swift sketch of 18 seconds.

- Dental Portraiture: Eating portrait busts of customers out of apples

- The VOracLE: Association game based on illustrations of words that contain the four letters of LOVE (e.g. VELOdrome, VOLE, OliVEs, cLOVEs etc.

This project led to subsequent CBD commissions for interactive live works at Dagfest (Dagenham), including Bad News Flowers (Floral Print Makeover): From my stall, festival visitors selected press images that meant bad news to them, which they'd rather 'unsee', and commissioned me to transform these into floral scenes evolving from the source images' forms and textures.

More information:

http://www.creativebd.org.uk/artist-commissions/harald-smykla

Featured

Harald Smykla

Harald Smykla studied painting and printmaking at Karlsruhe Academy, Germany before moving to London in 1988. His practice generally merges live art and installation with unorthodox notions of ‘traditional’ media (especially drawing), exploring materiality, time/process, context and interaction. He frequently works in the public realm (street markets, parks, urban and rural spaces, institutions etc), using site -responsive interventions and concepts to engage people of all ages and backgrounds as incidental audiences and active participants in individual and collective art experiences.

Involving low-tech, often ephemeral processes and techniques, narrative invention, play, collective creation, and other methods of communicative exchange, such works generate outcomes from sheer memory to tangible artistic residues, products, documents and pictorial re-interpretations, e.g. through “re-facing” money, chess with produce, collective cardiography, art/emotion research, dental sculpting, drawing on reality with light (‘Reprojection’) and many more.

Featured