Third Hand is an anti-consumerist marketplace for the recycled, reused and re-appropriated. Any item not previously worn or utilized is not welcome here.
Third Hand is more than a thrift store because its purpose is greater than simply saving you a buck. Third Hand is not a “vintage” store because it is not concerned with fashion. Third Hand seeks to subvert the detrimental and incessant consumerist trend of First Hand consumerism by shaking some sense into the spellbound consumer and exorcising them of their impulsive desires for the shiny and new. The Third Hand philosophy strives to awaken the man or woman who is, in the words of Schoupenhaur, "In continual desire without satisfaction". Satisfaction is only to be achieved through a transformation in consumer understanding, a drastic shift in the beliefs that attach value to materiality. This brings us to the Third Hand aesthetic which exalts the timeworn and places a greater value on clothing or art works that tell a story through their frayed and tired features than on fresh-out-of-the-factory items that imitate these qualities, qualities that can only be produced through an intimate negotiation with time.
Third Hand encourages contributors to challenge the common buyer-seller exchange by sharing a brief memory that they experienced with the item that is being posted for sale. The memories that are bound to an item are worth more than the item itself and by offering up just one of them the contributor has the authority to turn a dreadfully cold and impersonal bartering process into a brief but relatively intimate relationship between buyer and seller.
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The Third Hand Marketplace is divided into three distinct shops. Work Clothes is an open exchange of used clothing where value is attributed to an item’s physical depreciation as well as the story behind its deterioration. The weirder the wear the better. Of major interest to Third Hand are clothes that have been worked in for any considerable amount time. Long enough for the Contributor to have collected some interesting memories with. Long enough for these memories to have left their mark in strange and exciting ways. Used clothing that has never actually been worn by a contributor is welcome for sale as well. For instance, clothing may be purchased from a second-hand store and posted for sale on the Third Hand Marketplace. Such threads may be of particular interest to those who enjoy digging through the racks of thrift stores for peculiar finds but have little time to do so.
Of supreme interest to the Third Hand marketplace are Third Hand Items. A Third Hand item is one that has been intentionally and creatively altered by its owner. An old work shirt stenciled with bleach or spray paint would be considered a Third Hand Item. Pants patched in kaleidoscopic patterns would as well.
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Miskelaney is a space for all items that belong neither to the Work Clothes nor to the Art Works shops. Posting A box of your old action figures alongside a brief story of an epic battle you had with them as a kid would be an excellent addition to the Miskelaney Store. Old bikes, TV’s and even cars could be sold in the Mikelaney shop so long as you are willing to share with us some memory hilarious, somber, life-changing or dull that this item holds in your mind. If such a memory does not come to mind, try to recall how you came across the item. You bought the truck from so and so, who says he "acquired" it in 1972, from the trembling hand of a gambling addict at the tail-end of a 72-hr high stakes poker game. Not being as concerned with the Third Hand aesthetic as the Work Clothes and Art Works shops, the Miskelaney shop is all about encouraging a more personal, albeit brief and digital, transaction between buyer and seller by exchanging memory with money.
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Art Works invites visual artists of all mediums to post their work for sale, given that it utilizes materials in ways that are contrary to their originally intended purpose. Blown tires on the side of the interstate, grimy PVC half buried in the woods, a kitchen sink, barbed wire, an abandoned dog house, box of cereal, bird cage, back alley television, old doors, old burnt doors, barn wood, tarps, surf boards, trash, one man’s trash is an artist’s treasure, an artist’s treasure is Third Hand’s delight. A toilet smashed to bits with all those bits being painted different colors before being reassembled would be quite a sight to see. Third Hand would have no objections to such a piece being sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Then again, it is you, the contributor, who sets the price, regardless the item, so long as it jives with the Third Hand Philosophy.
Inspirational quotes
“‘The materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasizing that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness.”
-Karl Marx, “The German Ideology”
“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shinning lined that coursed through the campus…The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets and shoes, stationary and books, sheets and pillows, quilts with rolled-up rugs; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartoons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins. Peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn, the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic Mints… This assembly line of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of a year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.
-Don Delillo, White Noise, Pg.1
“The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests in its pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, an so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this category consumption are not given up unless under stress if the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to deny themselves all gratification of
this higher or spiritual need.”
-Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption
“Articles may not be exchanged – We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something non-sensical and implausible about it; here and there even the children eye the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them brushes or soap.”
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
“Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the ‘good use’ of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre- or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital”
“The symbolic social relation is the uninterrupted cycle of giving and receiving, which, in primitive exchange, includes the consumption of the ‘surplus’ and deliberate anti-production”
-Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death
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