Argentine Boys for Sale with music by Xiu Xui
format: PDF and MP3 bundle
contact: nigel@nigelnolan.com
delivery: customer will be emailed a download link
argentine boys for sale is a 500 page graphic account by Nigel Nolan with a 20 minute soundtrack by Xiu Xiu. It invites viewers to participate in the lives of the artist and his subjects. Through text, music, photography, and painting, the digital project offers intimate portraits of DANIEL, FeD, JOEL, NIGEL, OMAR and SEB. This book is available for sale and download in a PDF and MP3 bundle.
argentine boys for sale chronicles the Canadian artist's three year project in which he shared space with five Argentine men. Parts of the account were previously hosted online and viewers were invited to interact and participate, sponsoring the “boys” by buying images of them. Nolan shared the profits from the work with each subject, and in return DANIEL, FeD, JOEL, OMAR, and SEB contacted the buyers to detail how the money was spent
Sold primarily to collectors in the North, Nolan used this project as a communicative tool in what seems to be a dirty business. Chat-logs, client emails, private moments with the boys, installation photographs, reproductions of Nolan's paintings, polaroids, and updates about their lives and troubles, hopes and losses are all included. The neighborhood of Consititución, Buenos Aires, hardscrabble and working class, bleeds into the work, and Nolan’s subjects move through it and seem to bleed for the viewer. Is it real? A social experiment or sociological research? A comment on the art world or commerce as a whole?
In a graphic account that veers between exploitation and tenderness, argentine boys for sale allows the audience to draw conclusions, make assumptions, and finally, perhaps to judge.