“All My Life for Sale,” is a project that includes a book, an online site and a 2005 museum installation at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.  In 2000, John D. Freyer decided to sell the entire contents of his apartment on the auction website eBay in an effort to move away from Iowa City, Iowa. His sold possessions numbered more than 600, not including the hundreds he parted with at a subsequent yard sale. Freyer wrote histories for each of his objects, among them his favorite shirt, false teeth and Jesus nightlight, to entice potential online buyers. This became the online performance project known as AllMyLifeForSale.com, which became a national phenomenon among collectors of popular culture and internet enthusiasts alike who competed for a piece of John Freyer’s life.

After tracking his sold possessions, Freyer visited and interviewed as many of the new owners as he could to ascertain what had attracted them to the objects. He maintained an online travelogue at temporama.com to keep interested participants updated on his cross-country adventures, developed a project Web site, allmylifeforsale.com, and released the publication All My Life for Sale (Bloomsbury USA) in 2002.

As a media artist, photographer, storyteller, documentarian and performance artist whose art is predominantly digital and Web-based, Freyer and his work continue to challenge the role traditional museums spaces play in an increasingly Web-based society. To convert the performance project into a museum installation, Freyer e-mailed hundreds of participants worldwide from the AllMyLifeForSale.com project who had purchased his personal belongings on eBay four years prior.  He requested that they loan his former objects to the Everson Museum for an exhibition. A varied selection of fifty objects was reunited for the exhibition, including Freyer’s “Star Wars” sheets, matchbook collection, “Beat Street” album, pink barber shirt, waffle iron, fake dollar bills and a suspect brown towel (the owner was uncertain which of her brown towels had previously belonged to Freyer).

Brian, a buyer from Texas who loaned Freyer’s yellow bowling shirt and an unopened box of taco shells (still shrink-wrapped), was so inspired by his purchases that he launched allmylifeforsale.net to sell his own life’s possessions. He questions whether or not Freyer has started a movement, noting that the experience has changed his life regardless.  “I believe John’s exploration of objects and identity challenges people to examine how they live. It made me realize that having less doesn’t make you less of a person. It also inspired me to question what is important in my life.”

Freyer’s possessions also made their way into public institutions where they have been categorized as art objects. His false teeth, an accessory he had long forgotten about until they were rediscovered and tagged for sale in 2000, were loaned to the Everson exhibition by The University of Iowa Museum of Art, where they enjoy a place inside a Plexiglas case in the gallery’s permanent collection installation. The museum also loaned the allmylifeforsale.com domain name from their permanent collection installation, the final item Freyer sold. The Museum of Modern Art loaned Freyer’s U.S. Army chair that currently resides in their Library and Archive, his original sales tag still tied to the backrest, as part of the Franklin Furnace Collection. Reports from the staff indicate that despite three reasonably comfortable, ergonomically correct chairs in close proximity, curious visitors often choose to sit on Freyer’s slightly unstable wooden seat.

2011 is the 10th year anniversary of the project.

• Go to Project

Opening the Flatpack: Ethnography, Art, and the Billy Bookcase

Opening the Flatpack is a research/art project that explored the cultural significance of a specific object, namely IKEA’s Billy Bookcase. Fifty years ago, IKEA opened its first store in Älmhult, Sweden. Today, it operates 278 stores in 35 countries and is the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world; its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, is one of the richest men in the world. IKEA: a brand synonymous with affordability, mobility and functionality, introduced the Billy Bookcase – the quintessential item of flatpack furniture – in 1978, and has sold more than 28 million units worldwide since.

In his book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, David Edgerton argues against our attraction to novelty and “high-tech” in innovation and design. Instead, we should direct our sights towards what Edgerton terms the “invisible world of technologies” that people actually use, many of which have served the poor and middle class more than the wealthy. The condom and the sewing machine, corrugated metal and flat-pack furniture. Forget bioscience and nanotech, writes Edgerton, “Think of cheap PCs, mobile phones and IKEA furniture. Mass production is now so common it is invisible.” IKEA directly and indirectly employs more than a million people selling wooden furniture. This global triumph of “old” technology yields a compelling yet unexplored picture of the substantive relationship between human beings and their tools, technologies, and culture.

Co-organized by artist and author John D. Freyer (University of Iowa and 2011 Fulbright Fellow) and anthropologist Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University), in collaboration with design and architecture firm Uglycute, Opening the Flatpack investigated and developed methods for approaching the Billy Bookcase; an object that is pervasive in everyday life but rarely taken seriously as a site of conceptual concern. Following Edgerton’s lead, and using multimedia and interdisciplinary approaches drawn from the disciplines of art, anthropology and economics, the Opening the Flatpack project and course explored the global reach of IKEA through the lens of this humble domestic object: the top-selling bookcase in the world.

In an attempt to disturb institutional boundaries and generate novel forms of inquiry the course brought together art and anthropology from 13 countries students who conducted research on how the Billy Bookcase is produced, circulated, and, in particular, how it is used in everyday life. Readings on IKEA, from anthropology and art and social theory, were combined with lectures and discussions with invited guests. In particular, students were asked to conduct ethnographic investigations and interviews, while documenting the Billy Bookcase in and across Stockholm.

Dress Up

John D. Freyer’s ongoing project “Dress Up” is a series of vertical HD videos of his two daughters and their friends taking turns posing for the camera – for periods of several minutes without moving. At first, the static video images of little girls in Cinderella skirts or mom’s high heels appear as cute clichés familiar from advertising and family photo albums. However the children’s mild discomfort at standing still and silent becomes increasingly unsettling over time. The girls struggle not to fidget or speak, opening a space for a more complicated reading of their self-presentation. Their chosen objects of ‘dress up’ – the clutter of pink hair curlers and ballerina frills – become a costume that liberates, rather than obscures, the personality beneath. Dress Up deploys an everyday visual vernacular to explore this deeply human ritual that is fundamentally about the expression of the self in the world of Others and objects.

• Go to Project

Second Hand Stories from John Freyer & Christopher Wilcha

Second Hand Stories is a television pilot developed for national PBS that was co-created by John Freyer and Christopher Wilcha in 2003.  The pilot originated out of a collaborative web/video project called Superannuate, where Wilcha and Freyer travelled across the United States exploring the second hand, thrift and re-usable economies.  They interviewed collectors, sellers and bystanders, bought and sold objects, and posted photographs and video updates along the way to: http://adaptivereuse.org/.  “TV Guide” called Second Hand Stories a “very cool road trip;” Tom Vanderbilt, writing in “Artforum,” included the show in his end of the year “best of” list, writing: “It’s as if Alan Lomax launched a recovery mission of polyester-age relics.”

• Go to Project

Here are links to an assortment of NPR audio postcards that I produced for Weekend All Things Considered:

On the Spin Cycle for Iowa’s Ragbrai Race
by JOHN FREYER
July 30, 2005

Walm-Art.com is a conceptual exploration of the interdependent relationship between art and commerce and how museums address the need for corporate sponsorship while striving to maintain curatorial integrity of public exhibitions and educational programming. Freyer critiques the increasing presence of art-based merchandise available in museum stores located at gallery exits as the over-commercialization of art, yet recognizes these shops as a welcomed source of added income for struggling museums. As visitors conclude their art-viewing experience, they have no choice but to shop for commercial reproductions of original artwork, related books, postcards, mugs, ties and a selection of items with no connection to the exhibition whatsoever.

Walm-Art.com was a fully functional “museum store” curated by Freyer—one that solely “sells” objects from a local Wal-Mart Super Center at museum store prices.  Within his creation, Freyer is sole marketing agent for the store for which he has produced an array of promotional materials, including a glossy, color brochure, reminiscent of retail store circulars, available in the exhibition space for viewers/consumers and a Web site for online shoppers.  By removing and isolating the banal—a rainbow-colored umbrella, ice cube trays, a soup thermos—from the gray homogeneity of the super store shopping experience, Walm-Art.Com invites museum-goers, online participants and legions of Wal-Mart shoppers to reflect on our personal and cultural relationships to the singular object in an environment of near-suffocating mass production and consumption.

• Go to Project

Motion Picutres is an assemblage of overlapping video snapshots in constant flux which reference earlier travel photography and landscape painting. In this work, Freyer created several short animated video loops of natural places and public spaces, then reassembled independent segments to form a completed image that conflates time and space. The layering of images from multiple vantage points shifts from Niagara Falls to New York’s Times Square to the “New York” Casino in Las Vegas, taking the viewer on a shared journey across 21st century America.