“Consider, then, the figure of the laborer caught within the rules of circulation of variable capital....”

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 2000, p.113.

     On Thursday, May 31, 2001, I recreated P.T. Barnum’s 1860s era Brick Man advertising stunt by “purposelessly” rotating bricks around the intersection of Broadway and Ann Street in Manhattan for one full 9-to-5 workday (184 circuits, 736 exchanges). The original performance’s lively and clever form of commercial speech was designed to draw an audience into Barnum’s American Museum on the southeast corner. Barnum wanted to show that he could create value out of thin air by making money from “nonsense” labor.

    To do this Barnum hired an unemployed working man to place bricks on each of the four corners of the intersection in front of his Museum. According to his autobiography, Barnum then commanded his Brick Man “with the fifth brick in hand, [to] take a rapid march from one point to the other, making the circuit, exchanging [his] brick at every point.” As crowds would form to see what the trickster Barnum could be up to, his Brick Man would enter the Museum each hour with dozens of paying customers following behind him – and Barnum’s point was “proved.”

     As an artist engaged in the creation of “intangible” value through the use of commercially unproductive labor, I sensed an affinity with Barnum’s proto-dada shenanigans. My goal, instead, was to use my own artistic practice to create an artist’s micro-model of classic liberal economic practice - the closed circuit of capital – and to make that model a crucial first step towards examining the mechanisms that shape our current system of free-market capitalism. As in Barnum’s original stunt, the bricks became physical stand-ins for human labor, for the potential of that labor to build the world anew, and for money itself.