The ‘business’ of art

Published Dec. 30, 2009 at 7:21 p.m.
Carey Young’s ‘Uncertain Contracts’ at the RISD Museum
...You could be forgiven if you sometimes thought that corporations are the root of what's wrong with the United States...

SWEET BUT SLIGHT Khebrehzadeh’s A Swim.

You could be forgiven if you sometimes thought that corporations are the root of what's wrong with the United States. Enron, AIG, Blackwater, Monsanto. Need I go on? But one of the curious facts about our country is how corporations were central to our founding. We praise the Pilgrims' 1620 pledge to "combine ourselves together into a civil body politic" in their "Mayflower Compact" as a model for our Constitution. But it is also a corporate contract by people pledged to founding a money-making colony for their financial backers in Europe.

I found myself mulling these notions during a visit to Carey Young's "Uncertain Contracts" at the RISD Museum (224 Benefit Street, Providence, through April 18). The Zambia-born, London-based artist's pieces here adopt the trappings of contracts as a variation on the basic format of conceptual art, from Fluxus performance scripts to Sol Lewitt's instructions for making drawings. Young recognizes that these scripts and instructions are a sort of contract, and then bends the format toward critiques of our nation of laws and business agreements.

Her most striking and biting piece is Declared Void (2005). A wide black line runs along the floor and up the wall, outlining the edges of an 11-foot-tall imaginary cube. Printed in large letters on the wall is this text: "By entering the zone created by this drawing, and for the period you remain there, you declare and agree that the US Constitution will not apply to you."

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