Carey Young: Speech Acts, installation view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009. Photograph by David Ulmer.

On a plane back from New York the other week, the traveler next to me was telling me about her position as Director of Innovation at her corporate firm. While she used to work as a graphic designer, her leadership role eventually morphed into one as creative director, and, finally, in to her current job, where she is responsible for structuring, fostering, and managing “creativity” among the employees in her business. Naturally, I invited her to visit the current exhibition at the Contemporary with Carey Young—whose work often centers on the increasingly blurred lines between the artist and the corporate body. London-based Young uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm, and she has involved specialists in fields ranging from conflict negotiators to lawyers and venture capitalists, who act as expert collaborators in her elaborate, participatory, projects. And for Speech Acts, her first solo exhibition at an American museum, Young has solicited the help, expertise, and time of a customer service center headquartered in the suburbs of St. Louis. Taking up the Contemporary’s public and administrative spaces, Young inserts a form of subverted customer-care, with a new body of work featuring specially-adapted call center services. The visitor, upon picking up each phone, becomes both a listener and a performer, in dialogue with live agents scripted and trained by the artist. An exhibition that is at once spatial, participatory, and playful, Speech Acts asks us to reconsider how we perform, and communicate, in the space of art and in our daily lives.

Last night British artist Tris Vonna-Michell delivered a dizzying fifteen minute performance in the Contemporary’s Front Room. Some of our guests were still seated in our new lobby cum living room, engrossed in conversation with Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, two guest experts on the road with Conversations About Iraq. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd crammed in to The Front Room gallery to catch Tris. Clutching a stack of 500 A4 photocopies, blank side out, he began to fire off an improvised narrative, dropping single sheets on the ground as if turning pages in a book. The result was a kind of vertiginous autobiography, told through stream-of-consciousness fragments, anecdotes, mappings, and repeat descriptions. Moving from Japan to Berlin, Tris pulled us through an abstracted landscape and personal history, which ended, very simply, with a conclusion that the story, however labrynthian and interconnected, could never be complete.

In the space now sits those strewn papers on the floor, illuminated at intervals with the projection of clicking white slides. On the wall sits a pair of headphones from which, standing among the fragmented photocopies, one can listen to a recording of last night’s story.