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Variable Capital: A conversation with Common Culture

Commissioned by Bryan Biggs, director of the Bluecoat Gallery, Variable Capital was co-curated by Campbell and Durden for the gallery’s exhibition programme celebrating Liverpool’s status as European Capital of Culture 2008. The exhibition was a critical response to the specific context of the gallery’s location within Liverpool One; the recently completed multi-million pound redevelepment of Liverpool city centre’s shopping complex and the wider context of globalised commodity consumption. The exhibition ironically explored the definition of ‘capital’ in the context of the city’s status as European ‘Capital’ of culture and the promotion of its revitalised shopping centre as a ‘culture of capital’. The exhibition included thirteen international artists identified through their practice and response to their localised encounters with globalised forms of commodity consumption.

The interplay between the local and global experience of commodity consumption is a recurring thematic in Campbell’s work within the group Common Culture. Variable Capital was also a critical curatorial response to their participation in 'Shopping: A century of art and consumer culture' (2002) at Tate Liverpool, which tended to present an acritical celebration of art’s relationship with the commodity. In contrast, Variable Capital counterposed two approaches to the experience of consumerism: art which is alert to the process of exploitation and alienation underpinning commodity consumption; and art’s critical engagement with the seductive allure and spectacle of the commodity through resistance and subversion.

The exhibition featured work by: Edward Burtynsky, Common Culture, Louise Lawler, Wang Qingsong, Larry Sultan, Hans Op de Beeck, Alexander Gerdel, Richard Hughes, Melanie Jackson, Julian Rosefeldt, Santiago Sierra and Andy Warhol. The exhibition attracted 15,000 visitors; was accompanied by the symposium Damaged Goods featuring the curators, Michael Bracewell and Carol Mavor; generated commissioned essays in: Art and Consumer Culture. EXTRA, Antwerp, Armchair Romanticism, Photoworks and Variable Capital: A conversation with Common Culture. David Evans, Critical Dictionary, Black Dog (2011)