Eldorado: Pratchaya Phinthong

Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong's first Italian solo exhibition, Give More Than You Take opened at GAMeC in Bergamo on May 26. The main work that gave its name to the exhibition (and which stands at the crossroads of all the works on show) consists of dug-up soil strewn out in the museum's project room. A long, narrow pile runs like a loosely made furrow along the walls of the room, neat but not overly precise and just a few centimeters high and across. Made up of a mixture of stones, a few twigs, broken crockery and more, it looks loose and like it was taken from who knows where.

Phinthong's solo exhibition Give More Than You Take opened at CAC in Brétigny on 5 December, 2010. The core work that gave its name to this exhibition consisted of a number of waste materials—timber, a discotheque light, old electronic equipment and cardboard boxes—laid randomly down the middle of the room to form a sort of elongated rectangle. The assortment of objects seemed to have nothing in common except for the fact that they appeared, at first glance, to be rubbish.

Similarly, although theoretically the same, the two versions of this exhibition, curated in the two institutions by Alessandro Rabottini and Pierre Bal-Blanc, seem to have nothing in common but they are the same work. In both cases, Pratchaya Phinthong asked the curators to exhibit 549 kilos of waste material in the space, as they desired and retrieved and how they saw fit. GAMeC accumulated half a ton of earth excavated during the preparatory works to extend the Accademia Carrara; Brétigny gathered waste materials found by the curator. Are they the same thing? No but they are the same quantities.

The weight was fixed by the artist when he spent two months in Lapland, working as a labourer for a Thai company that outsources workers to pick cloudberries in the summer months. Every day, Phinthong exchanged emails with Pierre Bal-Blanc (displayed on a wall in the exhibition), updating him on the weight of the crop and asking him to do the same on what he was finding. He came back from Lapland without a work but with a dismantled hunters' sighting tower, which was mounted in both venues alongside the main work. But what is the main work?

It is not an object but a quantity—not of things but of work. The only element that Phinthong's "research in the field" had in common with what Bal-Blanc and Rabottini accumulated first and then displayed is the toil and effort of searching, lifting and distributing. It is not strictly speaking an "instructional" work (following in the footsteps of much conceptual art) because the artist provided a parameter not instructions or, to use corporate-financial speak, a quota (hourly, daily or monthly). Little does it matter what is gathered (cloudberries, strawberries or soil—it makes no difference to the person paying you so long as you gather!); little is known about the person collecting (exported Thais, hired hands or artists); the destination does not matter (supermarket or European museums). What matters is the weight because it is the only parameter of consequence in the attribution of value.

This interchangeability or, rather, this possibility to give a measure to real things on the basis of the only important parameter, in itself a financial parameter, lies at the heart of Give More Than You Take. It is also at the heart of Underworld, Don DeLillo's novel-world. After several hundred pages of minute descriptions of the changes seen in 20th-century America—in the art world, in the metropolitan suburbs, in remote desert towns and in New York—the last part begins with a tautological and concise phrase which is the summary, the climax and the atrocious just-goes-to-show of the whole novel. "Capital burns off the nuance of a culture", writes DeLillo. The capital accumulated by Pratchaya Phinthong, who picked 549 kilograms of cloudberries in Lapland in two months, amounts to 2,513 Krona or 283 Euro. The money is displayed in a frame in the exhibition. It can be exchanged for anything that has the same value, what that is does not matter. Vincenzo Latronico

Eldorado I. PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG
On show until July 24, 2011
Curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Alessandro Rabottini
GAMeC – Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo