Interview with John Freyer
October 28, 2009 1:45 pm
Interview with John Freyer, who presents Allmylifeforsale at Share Festival 2009 Market Forces exhibition curated by Simona Lodi
Simona Lodi: Allmylifeforsale is an online project that explored our relationship to the objects around us, their role in the concept of identity, as well as the emerging commercial systems of the Internet. Using the public/commercial space of the online trading community Ebay in conjunction with your online catalogue Allmylifeforsale.com, you catalogued and sold nearly everything that you owned, from your kitchen cutlery to your personal hygiene products, your Star Wars sheets and finally even the domain name Allmylifeforsale.com itself.
To date you have sold more than 600 items including your false teeth, a full size office copier, personal photographs, and your winter coat (in the middle of the winter).
What does this project mean and why are you interested in developing art and e-commerce ? Have you learned anything from all the projects and the journey to visit the various places where your items have ended up? I mean what do you want to prove?
JF: As for what the project means or meant at the time that I completed it, its meaning for me evolved over the year and half that I worked on it. I saw it initially as a rejection of my consumer identity by purging all of my worldly possessions, but very quickly it changed to what I began to call a genealogy of objects. In order to sell the items on eBay I had to write a description for each object, and as you can see from the archive on rhizome.org the descriptions ended up being an ad hoc auto biography. The project was also open to change/participation and the travel component was never part of my original plan but grew organically out of the network of buyers who happened upon my listings. The buyers were from all parts of the United States and objects went as far as Japan, Korea, Australia and the UK. I’m trying to remember if anything went to Italy.
Simona: could be interesting to know if someone got something.
JF: I checked all of my email and I could not find a buyer from Italy. I did find lots of correspondence with Italians but no sales. There were a few articles about the book and project in the Italian Press:
http://www.repubblica.it/online/esteri/vitavendita/vitavendita/vitavendita.html
I continue to work in the “market” space, including a television pilot called Second Hand Stories which I completed with filmmaker Christopher Wilcha (This American Life TV Series). Which was an investigation of the vast universe of the second-hand economy in the United States, including Thrift Stores, Yard Sale, University Surplus Centers and the like.
I just proposed a Fulbright to do a collaborative project in Sweden with filmmaker and Anthropologist Johan Lindquist, titled “The World Is Flatpack” which will investigate the global reach IKEA through the top selling piece of flatpack furniture in the world, the humble “Billy Bookcase.”
S.L. do you know this: http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com?
JF: I’ve seen that Blog. Its pretty great. There are hundreds of photos of people’s Billy Bookcases on Flickr.
Simona: but why did they buy the objects?
JF: Some people knew it was an art project in advance but most people where just searching for something on eBay. I did send them description of project when I sent them the Object that they won, and many of them became interested in what I was doing and started sending me updates and eventually invitations to visit. Most of the people who I stayed with did not necessarily see what I was doing as art but wanted to support my project in some way. Americans have complicated relationships with their stuff, so lots of people wanted to talk about what it was like to be unburdened from the bulk of my worldly possessions.