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Sucking Marks $10

Marlene Haring’s Sucking Marks $10 makes a charming offer for a very reasonable price. The equipment is very simple: a handwritten sign, a chair, alcohol swabs, contract and cash box. Each piece is unique, an unmistakeable sign of affection, with immediate physical effect. Yours for only ten dollars: wear it with pride. When was the last time you got a ‘hickey’ or a ‘love bite’?

Like many of Haring’s works, Sucking Marks $10 engages directly not only her ‘audience’ but the rules society determines for the relationship between the artist and the collector, the producer and the consumer, the body and the commodity. The works resonate with the commonplaces and buzz-words of the contemporary economic environment where services are the new industries, ‘love marks’ are the new trademarks, ‘share your secret’ is an advertising campaign for deodorant , intimate contact is why you need a new cell phone, and where the porn industry in the US is worth more than the rest of culture put together, including Hollywood. Haring’s works and strategies scratch at the opaque surface of exchange.

Secret Service (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna and other venues, 2006) is based around a legally binding non-disclosure agreement in which Haring or her Secret Service Agent offer the Client the space for a 15-minute conversation which cannot be repeated. In Lickingglass (Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, 2006) Haring licked (yes, with her tongue) the gallery windows from the outside while the gallery owner hosted a reception inside. For Call Boys (carried out in partnership with Catrin Bolt when the two worked together as Halt+Boring, Galerie 5020, Salzburg, 2003) Bolt and Haring spent their exhibition budget on hiring male prostitutes and showed an installation in the gallery of videos of the two young women getting their money’s worth.

Sucking Marks $10 is also supported by contracts which are part of the work and describe the relationship between Haring, ‘hereinafter referred to as the Sucker’ and the art dealers ‘trading as MarcDePuechredon, hereinafter the Sucking Hosts’. The contract explains that ‘The Client referred to in this document is the client of the Sucker’ and determines the ‘terms of trade’.

Aias Vargas, Miami, 2006

 Sucking Marks $10
 contract between the Sucker and the Sucking Hosts
 contract between the Sucker and her Client