A rare image of the con artist Benjamin Marks outside his house in Council Bluffs Iowa. His gravestone is the starting point for ‘Spectres of Marks’, book 5 of my short collection Fair Use (notes from spam). Marks was an infamous exploiter of the patterns of human movement introduced by the nascent American railroad system and thus arguably a forerunner of some of the spammers and phishers of today.
Been thinking about him a lot whilst being in residence in Troy, working amongst the collection of pieces that make up my show/archive The Confidence Man at EMPAC. It’s an experience that came very hard on the heels of working in an intensely isolated way on the editing of The giSt n – which in some ways is a heavily filtered note to Marks sent via a contemporary group of actors, the cast and crew of The Sting, linguist David Maurer, and the numerous operatives of the late 19th and early 20th century big stores that were Marks’ legacy. I’ve been watching people respond to the film in the public spaces of EMPAC – watching them attend to it, ignore it, check their notes on it, etc. I’ve been meeting with individuals and classes over the last few weeks working in the space and we’ve been talking about the piece and how it relates to the rest of the work.
Normally if you finish a piece of work that’s for a particular show, you may work to deadline and finish it and then there’s this social event, an opening, where it becomes public and subject to all the contingencies that come with that. As much as it’s exciting to finish something and see people responding to it, it’s also a wrench to experience the transference from that intimate mode of working with the material. This tends to be compounded with the drop in adrenalin that’s there during production and installation periods.
At EMPAC though, there was no public opening and then I’ve been present and working in the space for the first few weeks of the show, so the wrench has been more subtle – more of a feeling of ebbing as I watch people come and go. There are two blackboards in the space for one of the other works in the show – they’re being updated with news of searches being called off or continued – the outdated news wiped off one of them with each status update. They’ve been making me think of each visit to the show as an act of erasure as well – a wearing away of my ‘ownership’ of the material as it becomes dispersed through the readings or neglect of other people.
Marks ran con games on Pacific Union rail cars, before extending the logic of his practice and opening the Dollar Store in Cheyenne. The Dollar Store had a window full of gaudy goods and a back room full of upturned barrels where 3 card monte was played. He would thus fleece travelers as they passed through town. He gave us the term ‘mark’ for victim.
Watching people interacting with my work, whilst I play the part of ‘visiting artist’, and watching its meaning and potential be shared, dispersed, disputed, I’ve been thinking of this image of Marks outside his house and of him in his dollar store – exploiting the potential of a fixed point on the network and yet in doing so consenting to the attrition of the traffic. Looking for marks. Making marks. Erasing Marks.
Filed under: Art, Fair Use (notes from spam), Uncategorized, Benjamin Marks, con tricks, David Maurer, Dollar Store, EMPAC, Fair Use (notes from spam), railroads, Spectres of Marks, The Big Store, The Gist n, The Sting
