In the past week, I went to seven art fairs, seven open bar parties, seventeen galleries, and read seven hundred articles on the money flowing through NYC during the fairs. For a lucky few, the “seven minutes in creative heaven” spent drawing, sculpting, meditating, and creating with INNER COURSE will be the only lasting memory from just another week in the world of art. The collaborative team installed the piece, entitled Knowing Me, Knowing You, at the PULSE Art Fair. Visitors could step inside the glass room of art supplies, objects, and junk for seven minutes each, and whatever they created was theirs to keep in exchange for just about anything, from the scraps in their pocket to the watch off their wrist.

Artist Tom Beale, who runs Honey Space, an alternative space in Chelsea, wrote: “INNER COURSE invites you to join them in a psychic playroom to engage in seven-minute problem solving sessions composed of live-action drawing and sculpturing exercises. Moving through the performance, dealers, artists, and collectors are variously encountered, embodied, inverted, and entertained. Pan-gender/specific costuming, role-play, work, and commerce supply the capital toward the ultimate return: the potential for personal discovery and transformation ever latent in social exchange.”

Beale expanded to us, “Upon invitation to create a piece within an art fair, it only made sense to compose an experience that critically reflected that environment, offering a cautionary tale of art and commerce. The transaction that occurred within the project, in which the idea of value was explored and exchanged in so many ways, of which money was only one, upset and unsettled some people; surprisingly, often those most invested in the business of art. For others, the experience proved to be the most pleasurable and memorable moment of their day. In the end, I think, Knowing Me, Knowing You said as much about the vast variety of human attitudes and the expectations we carry with us as anything it itself represented.”

Guest performers included Anne Koch, Daphane Park, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Grant Krajecki, Jim Hedges, Ladyfag, Lisa Lozano, Maynard Monrow, Paul Sado, Ryan Kelly, and Victor Jeffreys II.