Carey Young
Carey Young (born 1970, UK/US citizen) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows at venues including the Whitechapel Gallery (London), the ICA, (London), and the Munich Kunstverein.
Carey Young I am a Revolutionary 2001 Single channel video, colour, sound. 4.08 minutes. Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella in association with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
In \I am a Revolutionary\ we see the artist undergoing a presentation skills training session with her own personal trainer. Within the stage-like environment of an empty office space, its glass wall offering a cinematic view onto an atrium of architecturally epic proportions, we can see other office workers immersed in their business day in identikit cell-spaces. Young and her teacher work hard at perfecting one line from what appears to be a larger speech intended for an unknown audience. Young is having great trouble with the line - \I am a revolutionary\ - words which could equally come from heroic 'business leadership' rhetoric as from the words of political or anti-globalisation agitators, equally as it seems also to refer to the legacy of the avant-garde. Repeating the words again and again in a series of fruitless attempts to sound credible, Young tries to internalise the message so that it becomes something she personally believes. To her trainer, the words seem unproblematic, as if they are just another message that can be spouted to an audience like any other within the realm of popular or political culture. Referring to the iconography of Joseph Beuys, especially his lecture-based works, I am a Revolutionary presents Young and her trainer in a somewhat pathetic quest for a 'radical' position. The work refers to the ways in which modes of dissent have become increasingly commodified, with Che Guevara's face, for example, a familiar icon on tshirts or advertising hoardings and 'revolution' a familiar boardroom mantra in these days of increasing business competition. It seems there is no 'outside' left, no clear position for critical distance that is not soon incorporated back into the flow of capital around the globe. I am a Revolutionary points to this in a cyclical sense: the artist and her helper appear suspended in a continuum of repetition, effort and belief that change may be possible.
All Inside Maria Lind http://www.kunstverein-muenchen.de/ To what degree can you affect a system from an outside position? Very little, according to Carey Young. She behaves like a chameleon, moving swiftly between two worlds which are traditionally understood to best stay apart: art and business. But in order to affect a system from the inside you have to have special knowledge. As she has for a number of years earned her living as a consultant within a global management consultancy, and now is moving into working with a high profile think tank, she has deep professional knowledge of the structures she appropriates for her less lucrative art work. Her creative capacities, which are well-trained since art school-days, are however a major asset in her corporate activities. Referring to Joseph Beuys' notion of social sculpture, albeit in ways which most likely would not have gotten his approval, and taking the tactics of General Idea some steps further, she worked with the staff at Virgin Megastore in London in a seminar-like situation, explaining her own art practice and asking for their participation in completing and contextualising some of the works. Particularly the project she did for their own working environment, 'My Megastore'. For six weeks the electronic infrastructure of one of the biggest music and entertainment stores in the world was permeated by works by Carey Young: video screens, audio and till displays and receipts transmitted her special brand of ambiguous play with methods and iconographies from global capitalism and the service economy. While wanting to listen to some new music you had to endure motivational self-hypnosis from the store stock on the in-store speakers. During the exhibition opening, whilst the store was open for business, this made the 'private view' visitors and shoppers become one crowd and everyone was wandering through the store consuming and browsing. When just having completed your purchase phrases such as 'raise your passion for product' and 'always smile at the customer' from Virgin's staff manual were grinning at you from the electronic till displays. You even had a chance to ponder them later, on the receipt, an artwork printed for all customers to the store. To transmit information in the most efficient way is not only one of Carey Young's bread-winning professional specialities. She also latches onto ready made formats prevalent in corporate culture, such as communication skill courses and using ready made motivational posters, such as with the series entitled 'When Attitudes Become Form'. At KM she is, as one of the so-called sputniks engaging with the communication strategies of the institution. Her work will develop in several stages, the first involving the staff at KM as its raw material. We have been offered a negotiating skills course where a professional trainer from Munich will teach us to become better at brokering between people, as well as among ourselves. Negotiating productively involves looking for common ground, so in some senses the work is overtly spatial, as well as something which could potentially have a real and even thorough impact on how KM is functioning in general, and communicating in particular. Literal effect is also important in 'Everything You've Heard is Wrong' (In Exchange & transform (Arbeitstitel)). This 6.35-minute long video shows the artist at Speakers' Corner, dressed in a smart suit with a ladder and some notes in her hand. She climbs the ladder and starts to give a speech about how to give speeches. Slowly she wins an audience, in tough competition with a white fundamentalist Muslim. Having proved her point she steps down and asks for questions from the crowd. You would imagine that the piece closes down on itself, but it is a curiously self-referential video which nevertheless manages to point in other directions. Instead it creates contact surfaces to for instances notions of self-presentation and its increasing importance in contemporary culture, changes of public space and the status and development of free speech today. While making this piece Carey Young took the process of combining art and business one step further. Being commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella in the UK, there was a 1000 pound fee involved, which the artist used with the consent of the commissioning body, investing it in the stock market: 31 shares in ART (AC Neilsen Corporation) and 48 shares in LIFE (Lifeline Systems Inc). On her web site www.careyyoung.com you can follow the developments. The ART stocks were the most successful, consistently beating LIFE. Doing the 'real thing' is also the approach of 'Incubator', where she asked a venture capitalist, whose normal job it is to 'incubate' new businesses, to do a brainstorming session, or a 'visioning workshop' in his own words, to test the suitability of applying corporate methods to the marketing and selling of art with the directors of a commercial gallery, Anthony Wilkinson in London. Questions were discussed around how art could be defined as a product in competition with other products, and how using contemporary product marketing strategies might help art reach more people, whilst at the same time helping the gallery - or any gallery - gain money and success. The resulting transcript (available for sale at the gallery) and video documentation show how difficult and yet desired it is to keep art and business apart, even by the most commercial sector of the art world. These are examples of what the artist herself would call an 'insertion', in a Cildo Meireles-sense, as opposed to 'intervention,' the more commonly used art-world term. An intervention implies some kind of disruption, and in her case it is more about precisely making an insertion, smoothly and smartly. It goes hand in hand with her understanding of the role as an artist as someone who is a functioning part of a system, but a system which in itself is in a process of change.
It is not a coincidence that Carey Young chose to stage Everything You've Heard is Wrong at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, a world famous arena for low-key free speech, but also for cheap freak-spotting. It is at the same time the place where Marcel Broodthaers made a film in 1972, carrying signs saying \silence\ and \visit Tate Gallery. He elaborated on and questioned the staple goods of the art world - museums and exhibitions - and argued for art as a philosophy of actions. In most of Carey Young's work there is a conscious connection to art history, especially to conceptual positions of the 60s and 70s, and to concerns with the function of art, as she seeks to establish moments where art and business can rub shoulders. In a time of mergers, hybrids and collapsing categories in general her take on the relationship between art and business does not allow for what we normally understand as a critical distance. There even seems to be no outside.
This is certainly anathema to any classical form of institutional critique. In relation to this the question whether she is complicit with the global capitalist system is highly relevant. Is she so to speak \doing their job for them\? At the same time as she is questioning classical institutional critique she is refering to it while looking for a different critical position, which may not best be found within old binaries and black-and-white images. The massive growth in power of the global capitalist system is a development many of us watch and participate in with discomfort and fear. But if art is understood as something which is intrinsically related to society in all its aspects, and business concerns and economic considerations permeate every corner of our existence today, then you have to take the issues Carey Young is raising very seriously. You could even argue that if art is to do with everyday life and everyday life is 'businessified' and increasingly commodified then her work operates right at the core of that situation. Being situated exactly, knowingly, provocatively there, it disturbs the idea of a presumably comfortable critical position and proposes a move 'inside'. The chilling question is: What is the choice beside the chameleon?
Carey Young: Business as Usual By John Kelsey First published in Artext magazine, Spring 2002
Carey Young is in the corner of this Riemannian, or maybe Koolhaasian interior without an exterior, dressed in a suit and repeating over and over again the phrase, “I am a revolutionary.” At her side is some kind of motivator or counselor - upbeat, coaxing her past embarrassment into what begins to approach assertiveness. The moment is video taped and later presented as a projection (I am a Revolutionary, 2001), in Young’s first major solo show, “Business as Usual,” at John Hansard Gallery in October last year.
The Avant Garde, Again Alex Farquharson Carey Young, dressed in a smart business suit, paces back and forth in a slick office space. The wall behind her is made entirely of glass. It looks out onto the vast central atrium of a sparkling post-modern office complex. Beyond the atrium are similar offices to the one she’s in, where executives in shirt-sleeves sit before computer monitors. Young is alone in the room with a tall middle-aged man, also smartly dressed, who is in the process of offering her instruction — coaxing her, giving praise and supporting her efforts with constructive advice. “I am a revolutionary,” Young exclaims for the n’th time, weary but determined to better her delivery. Again, but with different emphasis: “I.....am a revolutionary.” She doesn’t sound quite certain, and knows she needs to believe what’s she’s saying herself if she is to convince the prospective audience. Alisdair Chisholm of Marcus Bohn Associates, a company that specialises in business skills training, sketches out a scenario, and, improvising, alludes to passages of the speech we haven’t heard that are supposed to have preceded this declaration. He encourages her to step a couple of paces towards her audience on reaching the tricky phrase; towards us, in fact, since, when the work is projected, the room appears life-size, and we seem to occupy the other half of the office space that the screen seems to bisect. Carey Young’s ‘I am a Revolutionary’ is, on one level, a delirious post-modern reading of Keith Arnatt’s Wittgensteinian ‘Trouser Word Piece’ (1972) - a photo of the artist holding a sign that reads ‘I AM A REAL ARTIST’. Young’s video performance includes Arnatt’s original tautologies while overlaying them with contemporary corporate versions of each term: artist/businesswoman rehearses artistic statement/corporate speech about herself in an art video/corporate training video for a small art audience/imaginary business audience. As well as Arnatt’s work, the substitution of ‘revolutionary’ for ‘artist’ evokes Joseph Beuys, implying that today’s corporate guru is the progeny of Beuys’s now antiquated radical shaman routine, his legendary persuasive powers and inexhaustible ego now re-directed from participatory democracy to profit. But why are these four words causing her so much trouble? Is it, as artist, because she can’t quite bring herself to believe in either the avant-garde or political utopia, if that is her message? Or, as executive, does she doubt that she is indeed a radical leader, a visionary? Or, can’t she bring herself to accept the co-option of the rhetoric of radical politics by modern day business, and the redundancy of opposition that that seems to imply?
Pictures: Production stills from ‘I am a Revolutionary’ Carey Young 2001 Single channel video, colour, sound. 4.08 minutes. Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella in association with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
