ByProduct
YYZ Books, Toronto
Spring 2009
Marisa Jahn & Joseph del Pesco

ByProduct: The Art of Transactional Disruption surveys contemporary artist's projects that directly engage in economic transactions, thereby making visible their underlying cultural values. While parasitically reliant on the socioeconomic structure and symbolic order of other dominant systems, these artworks -- or “byproducts” -- exploit loopholes, surpluses, and exceptions in order to affirm individual agency and complicate the mechanisms of their dominant “host.” The book focuses on artists' projects that implicate sectors outside institutionalized art world structures, thereby functioning as carriers for meaning across disciplines.

A late 20th century term used to describe art that seeks to disrupt everyday life, "interventionist" art practices were canonized by N. Thompson and G. Sholette's exhibition catalog entitled The Interventionists (2005). Since the publication of this book, “post-interventionist” artwork has sought greater tactical sophistication and committed methods of social engagement. This new genre shifts focus away from the artist's singular, anarchic gesture and instead towards the assimilation of intervented artworks into everyday life. ByProduct explores this emergent artform.

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Shopdropping: Studies in Reverse Shoplifting
The Collective Foundation
April 2007
edited by Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada | contributions by Terri Cohn, Alan Moore, Robby Herbst, Steve Lambert | introduction by Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada | Catalog essay ("The Paradox of Likeness") by Marisa Jahn
http://www.mucketymuck.org
A catalog contextualizing the work featured in "Shopdropping," an exhibition curated by Pond that explores projects that involve placing artwork into places of commerce.

Pond: art, activism, & ideas
all written copy (book, press releases, curatorial statements, etc.)
2000- (ongoing)
Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada
http://www.mucketymuck.org

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MetaFormances: The Hermeneutics of Play in Language, Art, Life
self-published book & Masters of Science thesis (Visual Art, MIT)
May 2007
Marisa Jahn
(in collaboration with Ronnee Holmes, manager of FlutterFetti Fun Factory; my mailman; Josh Greene; strangers in Boston/Tokyo/San Francisco/Philadelphia; a pervert; a Dutch man; a pinata maker; a lover of cars; various fetishists; and more...
Ute Meta Bauer &l Francisco Ricardo, & THE FBI!!!
http://www.marisajahn.com/art/MetaFormances/book/book.htm

Miming the protocol of business form letters, the letters request their recipient to perform absurd, erotic, and illicit behavior in order to transform the letter into something else. As I see it, the recipients' correspondence signals their readiness to play, to accept their role in the transubstantiation of the letter, to believe in the metaphysical force of the delicate printed word, their complicity in extending a joke.

Each letter was mailed via overnight express courier along with a disposable 35 mm. camera and self-addressed, self-stamped envelope. The project engaged a motley crew of 32 characters – a mailman, a confettiologist, a Dutch man, a computation origami expert (and his dad), a porn artist, a pinata factory, a psychoanalyst, etc. I knew about half of the recipients; the others I found after extensive searches for recipients who I thought would “play along.”

Shopdropping: Three Case Studies
Jahn, Marisa. published in Crosswalks, April 2004
http://www.pipsworks.com/crosswalk/ships/ss_shop.html
A precursor to the later essays I wrote and co-wrote about the notion shopdropping, this article contextualizes the work of Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Packard Jennings, and Conrad Bakker.

The Way Things Could Work: Prisoner's Inventions Project Finds Inspiration in Prisoner's Everyday Designs
Jahn, Marisa. Published in Clamor Magazine (Bowling Green, Ohio), January 2005
http://www.marisajahn.com/samples/Prisoners_Inventions.pdf review of a MassMoca exhibition by Temporary Services in collaboration with a prisoner named Angelo.