BEGLEY NGUYEN ART PRIZE LOTTERY: GAMBLING AS A WAY TO FUND A SUSTAINABLE ARTS PRACTICE IN COLLABORATION WITH CIARAN BEGLEY.
Diasporic communities like the Vietnamese and Irish diaspora have regularly participated in organised gambling and money saving schemes to gain economic stability, starting new businesses in Australia and elsewhere.
Vietnamese people have a pracice called Hụi, and Irish migrants might engage in the Christmas Club. New migrants with limited means might self-organise to collectively pool and save money. Each month they would contribute to a group savings collection. Those requiring funds urgently would pay a slightly higher ongoing contribution and therefore continue to pay a higher interest to the collection. Those only collecting at the end of the cycle would benefit most by paying the least interest. A system of honesty and commitment under the threat of violent collective enforcement through coercion, gang involvement and intergenerational shame reduced the likelyhood of reneging on payments and defaults.
Ciaran Begley and James Nguyen are developing an artist led savings scheme to bring artists with precarious incomes to support each other through ongoing forms of gambling and resource pooling. The interest is used to “Pay the Rent,” and the social outcomes of regular meetings to collect the contributions will allow for a level of creative and economic agency outside of established artworld funding bodies and institutions.
In addition to this, we are running a series of gambling events to supplement and pay for quick turnover art projects and invert the hierarchies of artworld world competitions that rely on so-called experts to decide on a handful of grant recipients. We use gambling as a tool to push concepts of risk, trust and critique of the artworld. We have been using the nationalistic game of TWO-UP, and colonial era games like Fan-Tan, Mahjong and cards to appropriate how the colony has absorbed and deployed various forms of gambling as a national sport and form of funding the arts.
