Karike Ashworth, Jenna Green and Cassandra Toscano
Brisbane’s James Street shopping corridor is a four-block stretch of posh boutiques, cafés, wine bars, and stark, glass-walled salons. In two empty shops in the James Lane development, under the Natalya Hughes mural and past the smart jeweller, was an exhibition titled Propriety Limited, or Shop Pty Ltd. Organised by artists Karike Ashworth, Jenna Green and Cassandra Toscano, Propriety Limited was a temporary installation-cum-shop-cum-game-cum-happening that was, when at its best, a savvy analogue to the dematerialisation of e-commerce, social network exchanges and digital monetisation.
Visitors to Pty Ltd were greeted by an ‘attendant’ who gave a cursory explanation of the rules: earn tokens—smooth, blank plastic chips called ‘units’—and spend the tokens. A glass of wine cost five units, or seven units, or three units depending on fluctuations in the ‘market’ that were continuously updated on a large digital board at the entrance. Products called ‘desirables’, by Luke Roberts, Easton Pearson and others, were also prominently displayed (and would instigate a slapdash auction late in the opening evening). Units could be procured legitimately by a number of small exercises in participation; for example, confessing sins to artist Richard Bell; or wearing a Pty Ltd t-shirt emblazoned with ‘I’m getting paid to wear this’; or selling bodily detritus: hair, fingernails, saliva—commodities whose values were also constantly shifting. Units could also be procured illegitimately. Over the course of the opening evening there were thefts, anarchist distributions of fistfuls of units, and a few panhandlers and grifters working the crowd.
Shop Pty Ltd managed the difficult feat of creating a meat-space site that neatly approximated the experience of social network transactions. Participants were rewarded for divulging personal details, having lengthy conversations, posting candid snapshots