Kim Sawchuk | Concordia University | Monday December 19, 2005 | Download PDF

With: Rob Lendrum, Vanessa Chu, Andrea-Jane Cornell, Donald Goodes

The Salvation Army, Notre Dame, Montreal, 2004

The Salvation Army Thrift Store is a five-storey red brick building located on Notre-Dame Street in Montreal. Gigantic picture windows resplendently display a variety of wares to catch the eye of passers-by. Some routinely visit this particular Sally Anne, the largest in Quebec, to hunt for hidden treasures to add to their collections. Some shoppers, on their way to frequent the very expensive and very chic antique shops that now line the street, walk through its doors on the off-chance that some object of inestimable value lies in waiting. For some, a trek to the thrift shop is not an outing. It is not an adventure. It is not an investment. It is a necessity.

In November of 2004 this particular Salvation Army became the site for the USED/Goods exhibition organized by curators and artists Lorraine Oades and Gisele Amantea, working together as the Cut Rate Collective. During the three-week exhibition twelve installations, drawing on the rich history of art and recycled materials, were scattered throughout the store. In addition, a series of public events – from classes on finance and nutrition to others on fixing small appliances – were scheduled to create an interactive environment and to promote a community-based mandate that was integral to the exhibition.

Sewing Bee at the Salvation Army, 2004

The Salvation Works project was created within the context of this exhibition. Initially the project was to have been a catalogue essay exploring questions of work, production and the ascription of value to used goods. Cultural theorist Will Straw has described these goods, the obsolete objects that clutter our drawers and closets, as “exhausted commodities.” ⁱ No longer needed or desired or completely functional, their owners are not yet ready to throw them in the garbage or to repair them. Instead they are donated to thrift shops to be priced, sold and given a second life. As Straw points out the over-production of goods, often made overseas for North American markets, have created a boom in the tertiary economy of charity stores, pawn shops and garage sales where commodities do not disappear, but “persist and circulate throughout the commercial markets of everyday life.” ⁱⁱ How do these tired commodities, which shoppers see on shelves and racks, get there?

bin of skis

For the majority of shoppers who enter into Salvation Thrift store these articles appear as if by “magic” and not as the collective efforts of an organized division of labour, to echo Marx’s classic definition of the fetishism of the commodity. Absent from the recent critical literature on thrifting, including that produced within cultural studies, is a description and analysis of these invisible and inaudible labours within the tertiary sectors of commodity culture. The Salvation Works project set out to shift perspective away from questions of consumption and circulation at a macro-level of capitalism. Influenced by Studs Terkle’s Working: people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do, the project was intended to take an intimate, micro-logical look at the production and re-production of value by conducting interviews, site visits and historical research.

baler of clothes for export

Mere months before the exhibition the curators posed a challenge: they requested that Kim find a way to insert her research into the exhibition itself. A team was assembled, quickly, under the rubric of the Happenstance Institute and a ‘wiki’ using the open source software, tikiwiki 1.7. was set up. This modular (and free) content management software became a tool to document and depict the Institute’s collaborative research process, which employed multiple media formats including digital photography and video, soundscapes, cartooning and our blogservations,(including individual and group blogs). As we discovered these technologies are not only research tools: they are symbolic objects themselves imbued with value and meaning. The contradictions of working as new media researchers in the context of The Salvation Army highlights the necessity of considering questions of class as both a socioeconomic variable and as an integral part of lived experience for the research subjects and for the researchers. These tensions will be the focus of this paper.