All My Life For Sale

An Interview with John Freyer

 

            Awhile back, I heard an interview with John on NPR. He’s in the midst of selling of all his possessions on eBay (an online trading community).  I was intrigued, to say the least.  I mean, here’s a guy who’s my age, shares some similar viewpoints as I do, and he’s doing something I had always thought about (well, I didn’t really think about disposing of all my stuff, but I certainly wanted to get rid of a lot of it) but never had the guts to go through with.  Even at my most stripped-down state, I still owned enough to fill my friend’s closet and a portion of his attic.   

            I contacted John, and he agreed to an interview via email.  John has a really neat website where you can see pictures of everything he is selling and what he’s sold so far.  It’s definitely worth a visit.  The address is www.allmylifeforsale.com.

 

To start off, how about sharing some things about yourself before we start talking about your project?

            I am an MFA Candidate at the University of Iowa. My primary area is photography, but most of the work that I have done has been with interactive forms, mostly on the web. I am also a certificate candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where I have focused on making artist book projects. My undergraduate work was in Political Science, so it will be a few years before I fulfill the art history requirement for my MA/MFA. 

 

 Ok, I guess, for the benefit of those who haven't heard about your quest, why don't you give a brief synopsis of what you're doing and your initial motivation for doing it?

            When I arrived in Iowa City for Graduate School, in the summer of 1999, I had been living more or less out of the trunk of my car. I had spent the winter and spring of 1999 working on a ski and snowboard film, and had filled my car with only the barest of necessities.

            When I moved to NYC to work last summer, I similarly filled my car trunk with only what I thought necessary to live for three months. The original idea for the project came to me when I was driving back to Iowa from New York City. I started to think about how unnecessary the items in the apartment that I was driving back to were to my daily living.

            I am a collector of junk. I can't go to a thrift store or surplus sale without buying at least one thing that I could wear or eventually make something out of. So my house was pretty much overflowing with stuff from heart monitors to Iranian Bowling Shirts.

            The original idea was to create a web-based catalogue of my stuff and sell off my unnecessary items. I had decided that I was unhappy in Iowa, and would rather live in NYC and get a job in the then exploding dot com world. That was until I registered the domain name allmylifeforsale.

            Initially, I typed in domain searches for yardsale.com, garagesale.com, junkyard.com...and steadily kept reworking various strings until allmylifeforsale.com came up available. It has a certain ring to it and I registered it on the spot. In the months that followed, I started sharing my idea with my friends and colleagues at school, and started to realize that my original idea would not really fit a project called allmylifeforsale.

            In October, I had an inventory party to help me figure out how I would go about listing, selling, and categorizing what exactly constituted my entire life for sale. It worked out great, yielding about a thousand individual items and lots, including a number of intangible experiences. I spent the next two months trying to photograph everything that was tagged and started the task of writing descriptions for as many items as I could.

            Then I launched the project in December, with the listing of my family’s wrapped Christmas gifts, which each of them had to bid on if they wanted to get their own gifts.

                I plan on being finished when my lease ends at the end of July, then I'm moving into my friend Margaret's Airstream trailer for a little while. 

 

Was that your first time being interviewed on NPR? For me, talking to Todd Mundt would be pretty exciting, but then again, I’m kind of an NPR geek. How did you go about getting an interview on his show?

            I'm a huge NPR geek myself. We have an all New and Information station here at AM 910 WSUI that I listen to non-stop. If fact, I have no idea what is on the FM dial here in Iowa. I hate commercial radio...

            The first time I was on NPR was Minnesota Public Radio's "Future Tense," which is a four minute program that runs nationwide. I heard the technology-based program on NPR and thought that they might be interested in what I was doing, so I sent them an e-mail at about 2 am, when I was installing my show in the Drewlowe Gallery.

            And they called me and interviewed me the next day, which was a little crazy because I had not slept at all the night before. It was a pretty strange experience to have somebody besides my friends and family asking questions about a project that I was working on.

            As for The Todd Mundt Show, they contacted me about a month after the foxnews.com piece. I had so many radio people calling me after that press that I had stopped answering my phone for a while. But I really liked The Todd Mundt Show, and I'm all for NPR... 

 

 I’ve been reading through the media stories on your project and it’s interesting to see the different slants the media has applied to it. Have they been missing the points you want to make or focusing on the wrong themes?

            Some have missed the point and some have it right on. The project is open ended enough that it lends itself to multiple interpretations. Some see it as the "Monkey" of the week kind of thing, which I've tried to avoid, but even then sometimes its kind of fun talking to the FM Radio jocks that just want to know who bought my underwear and my brick. When you start to explain that it is aimed at critiquing the consumer culture that they foster, sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't.

            I like the idea of a large number of people participating in the project. On one hand I want them to look at it as an art project and take it relatively seriously, but not so seriously that they don't participate. I think that the project only works when the items are dispersed as widely as possible. If I only talked to the NPR types, then the follow-up project of visiting everything would result in me meeting a few hundred over-educated 28 eight-year-old NPR geeks.

            So things are open to interpretation. The project really takes place on the web. So even if Good Morning America portrays this wacky guy in Iowa selling his stuff, when the viewers type in Allmylifeforsale.com, they get involved in my project, where I can explain in greater detail what I am up to. 

 

Has the media attention you’ve garnered put any pressure on you to take the project more seriously or be concerned about finishing it? Has it made you think about different interpretations of what you’re doing?

            Certainly. When I started the project I had no idea what type of reaction I would get. But I was fairly certain that the project would work via eBay alone. Most of the items that I put up for sale sold for a fair price even before there was any media attention.

            The NY Times article was the kicker for me.. Suddenly this was not just a project that my friends and family would see. In talking to people about the project my interpretation started to evolve. I started to see that my stuff was selling to lots of people that I didn't know. I started to correspond with many of the high bidders, and started to think about the community that was forming around the project. 

 

How has the reaction from the media been different than the reactions of your friends and family?  As you had expected or not?

            My folks are used to me doing things "like this," and the media attention has resulted in a fair number of high school friends sending me " ....and now I am married and live in......" [letters]. The media attention/reaction was completely unexpected.. And the vast majority have no interest in the art side of the project.  They are mostly interested in my two front teeth. [he auctioned them off—ed.] 

 

Some people might see this as a clever way to make some easy money. Do you think this is going to end up being a losing venture financially?

            Well, the money really isn't that good. If I was to pay myself minimum wage for the time that I have spent on the project, I would owe myself a few thousand dollars...and I would no longer have much of the stuff that I loved so much. 

 

The descriptions you’ve included with your auctions each tell a little story and often end up making some comment on an aspect of society. They’re all well-written and often humorous, written as if you were paying tribute to each piece of your life that was disappearing. Any comments on your descriptive technique?

            The descriptions make it possible for me to let go of that object. After something is photographed and up on the site, I start to make decisions about what I can let go of, and the writing of the description is the final part of that. Often I write a description and list the item on eBay the same day. That is why some of the descriptions are so topical. It kind of acts as a journal for me. 

 

You have some pretty sentimental one-of-a-kind things up for sale that probably mean (did mean?) a lot to you. When an item sells on eBay, do you feel like it is actually another piece of your identity being taken away?

            I'm not sure if I'm really selling my identity off. As the project has gone on, I've sold hundreds of things that I would consider "quintessential John Freyer," yet I'm pretty much the same person; I make the same jokes, eat the same unhealthy food, like the same music. I have been wearing the dregs of my clothing of late. And some of my friends have joked about the strange things that I am wearing (actually my clothes are more normal now because much of the good stuff has been sold). 

 

Some of your descriptions address corporate labor practices and you've expressed the fact that you might not buy from certain companies again. Since you're being offered a rare chance, that of starting over with a clean consumer slate, do you plan to be more conscientious in your future purchases?

            I have stopped shopping (except for food/toilet paper) until the project is over and I plan on shopping almost exclusively second hand, and, when I shop retail, to investigate where everything I buy is produced. 

 

I'm in the midst of graduate school, and I feel like once I graduate, I’ll be at a definite starting point for a new and unfamiliar section of my life. Do you feel that what you're doing could provide a stepping stone into a new stage of your life?

            I am in graduate school, too, and the original idea for the project was to finish it and drop out of school. Now I am going to try and finish my degree...so it will be a new start of sorts. 

 

 One last question, since you're trying to limit new acquisitions, would you prefer if I don't send you a contributor copy? I suppose you could auction it off...

            Send me a copy. I'll send it to my dad...thanks...John.