Phyl Payne

News

GIFT WILL OPEN FOR A FURTHER WEEK

One hundred artists have contributed to GIFT, a new project by Daniel Simpkins and Penny Whitehead. Each artist has contributed an object that they bought or found with the intention of using in an artwork, a source of inspiration or a starting point for a work that was never made. Recently exhibited in Objects in Waiting, this abundant and diverse collection of unused objects and unrealised ideas will be given as gifts to visitors at a two-day event at Museum MAN, Liverpool, 17-18 November 2006.

When gifts are given, as when goods or money exchanged, the giver places the recipient (albeit inadvertently) in his/her debt, with the initial act of giving setting in motion a series of exchanges not dissimilar to that of an exchange of goods or capital, yet the terms are less easily defined. The recipient is bound by an implicit duty to reciprocate, just as we are all aware of the social pressure to send greetings cards to those who send them to us. This process of exchange will be revealed by the encounters activated by GIFT.

Visitors are invited to request an object that they would like to keep as a gift; if accepted, they will enter into a verbal contract that will make explicit their duty to reciprocate the act of giving, and their responsibility for the fate of the object/idea. In return for taking home the object, the visitor will be required to document their use of it, and this documentation will be given, as a gift, to the original contributing artist. The documentation will also be published in a bookwork, as a record of the collaboration and exchange between artist and visitor, mediated by the event and the object.