Techniques of Aberrant Extraction: Transacting Surplus Acts in an Age of Speculation

a response to #TransActing: A Market of Values
Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground
Chelsea College of Arts, London
11 July, 2015

Written in 2015 as a reflection on Critical Practice’s event TransActing: A Market of Values (2015), this essay questions how the experimental image of a concrete, stalls-and-sellers marketplace it presents relates to recent developments in financialized capitalism. Rather than serving as a quaint, regressive image of tangible, exchange-based economics, the experimental stalls-and-sellers market TransActing offers acts as a metonym, not a microcosm, for financialized modes of valuation – inviting thinking on the unexpected ways in which financial values intersect with both acts of buying and selling, and tropes of social engagement in contemporary art.