Zoe Troughton

I would like to offer "my foreskin".

Alix Janta and Lauren Jones' Art Barter interrogated notions of value and worth in art, and demanded an answer from its audience, signed, dated and placed in a sealed box. The above was a contractually binding bid for a piece of work exhibited.

Entering the space as an anonymous gallery goer I was faced with two rooms of untitled work by anonymous artists. Despite the absence of marked identities I have never felt more surrounded by vitality and individuality.

The lack of plaques inscribed by some omniscient being, displaying carefully distilled information, left the art itself to ooze personality; and instead of reading predetermined contextualisation, I became immersed in reading colour, texture, and form. I thus found the effervescent presence of the artists embedded in their work, rather than in a lacklustre history of their training.

I felt liberated; emancipated from the draw of swarms huddled by the eminent work of extolled artists, I was free to pass by anything that didn't speak to me personally. The exhibition thereby relocated art in the visual, the aesthetic, the emotive, rather than in the realm of pecuniary success, status, and worth.

This transformed me from a passive viewer, lethargically swallowing the didactic gallery experience, into an engaged participant in the definition and valuation of the work. I felt invited into a relationship with the artists' various expressions, as my role and responsibility to decipher was no longer asphyxiated by given expositions. My willing laziness in reading artistic merit was shaken off by the avoidance of prescribed meaning.

The porous boundaries between creating and viewing immediately allowed me a sense of ownership, before I had even considered what I might offer in order to secure the work for myself. This decision in itself allowed me a degree of self expression; a piece of me for a piece of you.

The content of the exhibition ranged from painted portraits, to fluorescent scrawls, from intricate wire sculpture, to illuminated images of anuses (which were almost floral from a distance!) I was particularly drawn to number 49, and unless you went to the exhibition that means nothing to you. But this, for me, was the heart of the event. The value of number 49, whether artistic, aesthetic, political, functional (I could go on), was defined by me, for me; I cannot enlighten you with an objective assessment of meaning or worth. So what did I offer? Certainly not my foreskin.