ATC's: Selling vs. Trading

Trading art with other artists, not exchanging money, is the fun part. I wonder where this card is now? I made it and traded it in 2004.

#8: Awakening

Artist Trading Cards: Sell or Trade?

Trade. It's right in the name. Purists say it is not about the money. Participants in trading sessions should not be charged any fees: the point of the project is the exchange of cards as well as the in-person or by mail exchange of ideas. The process of "trading" is central to the idea of ATC's. Interaction between artists is integral to the production /performance /exchange aspect of the art, and, by definition (it's right in the name), ATC's should not be sold. Thus, size restriction, sometimes thickness, artist contact information, and the "free" in-person exchange are the only "suggested" boundaries. Of course, there is now a collector aspect to trading cards, which is called ACEO (Art Cards, Editions and Originals). Some artists make their cards available to the public, usually at a very affordable price.

ATC Cards and Trades for January 2011, ART-4-Art, Lyons Depot Library

My ATC this month was a process using a Jet Printer with water bleeds on HP text paper and many type faces, water color paper cut to size 7" by 2 1/2" and folded in half to meet the 2 1/2" by 3 1/2" size requirement for ATC's, tissue paper blots (or color barfs, if you prefer), pasted text describing my sources of inspiration, and then placing all the contents in a baseball trading card sleeve, with a colored mircro binder clip to keep it all in place. See previous blog for the text of the sources of inspiration.



ATC for January 2011: "Everybody is a Ratist"

The idea for this journal entry has been building over the last few months. I decided to turn the journal entry into this month's trading card. I will publish my trades and my finished cards soon.

January 15, 2011:

ATC by Phyllis J. O’Rourke, M.A.

Title: “Everybody is a RATIST”

Series: Edition of 24

Trading Session: Art-4-Art, Lyons Depot Library,

Lyons, Colorado

Inspiration: Artist Gary Sweeney (b. 1952—  ).

Art work: “According to a Researcher” (2006), on display at the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas.

The text of Gary Sweeney's painting is translated as: “According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.” Note: The text of the painting was written to prove the point, but I did not copy down his wording correctly.

Inspiration: Artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)

Famous quote by Joseph Beuys: “Everybody is an artist,” from handout published on the occasion of Joseph Beuys Multiples at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 5 May—25 July, 1999.

Inspiration: The newspaper game “Jumble,” in which I learned that the letters R A T I S T can be arranged to spell only one word, A R T I S T.