The End of Money

T h e End of Mo ney

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art

The End of Money Edited by Juan A. Gaitรกn

Content

Introduction

4

Juan A. Gaitan

Mark to Market Value, Inc. (1st of 9 text works spread through this publication)

10

Tonel

The Theory of Money

12

Pierre Bismuth

“Where is the Money, Lebowski?”

Making Ends Meet

14

Dieter Roelstraete

Notes on Improperties

24

Hadley+Maxwell

Five Acts of Money

32

Carolina Sanín

Zachary Formwalt

42

The End of Coins, the Triumph of Money, and the Disruptive Revolution of Art

44

Donatien Grau

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

50

The End Always Comes Twice

58

Dessislava Dimova

Appendix

71

Biographies

137

Colophon and Acknowledgements

143

Introduction Juan A. Gaitรกn

4

Since the severe funding cuts that will soon hit the Dutch culture sector were announced in 2010, discourse on arts and culture has become almost exclusively centered on the issue of money. Displeasure and outrage have quickly emerged from private into public discussions about the governmental resolution to reduce its spending – a resolution made by resolute bureaucrats whose reasoning they have kept mostly to themselves, in spite of the (suspiciously) spectacular tactics used to publicize their radical decisions.

According to the rumors and the numbers, the cuts will affect institutions across the board. National museums will lose 20% of their operating budgets, presentation houses (of which an as of yet undisclosed six will remain) an equal or higher amount. Music, theatre, and dance are in no better shape. Neither are individual artists, who now face a 50% reduction in available funds. But it also seems that this is not a new problem. Once one has factored in the exceptional growth in and of institutions dedicated to arts and culture, in the Netherlands cultural funding is now 20% of what it was twenty years ago. It being so obvious that an efficient reductions system has long been silently in motion, why the decision to “open,” even to “offer,” this issue up for public debate? (The counter to this question is, of course: What is it that is not being debated publicly when we speak about money for the arts? Surely there are other areas of much more general interest for the public sphere that are being affected by this neo-liberal move away from government subsidy).

Unlike former cuts, which in spite of laying the ground for the current ones were motivated by less dogmatic concerns, the current cuts constitute an inimical demand for cultural institutions to become financially self-sufficient.

In the more immediate future this means that cultural institutions will have to internalize the dominant logic of the economy and find ways to justify their existence in the terms set by this logic (numbers); in a more general sense, however, this may not be an isolated assault, directed exclusively at arts and culture. It is very likely that this neo-liberal economic attitude extends to other, more essential areas of daily life: health, education, housing. Thus we should at least acknowledge the possibility that this assault on culture is part of a much wider project – the systematic dismantling of the welfare state and of all the vestiges of a socialist system, and the re-direction of tax money towards other areas of government. (But which? If one follows the American model, one would have to conclude that the move is towards: banking and military operations, followed by infrastructural subsidies, followed by sporadic and merely palliative subsidies for health, education, housing, though only at the level of investment interests and not at the level 5

Introduction

of individuals; parallel to this is the re-direction of large quantities of money destined to produce long-term revenue such as lines of credit for foreign countries.)

The End of Money is a critical statement within this crisis of public investment, in the arts and elsewhere, but it is not about the financial component of this much more general crisis. In its necessarily narrow focus on art and money, the exhibition aimed at these two problems (money and art) not as mutually sustaining subjects, but as two different functions of abstraction and dematerialization. It is not the relationship between art and money that this exhibition set out to address, but the nostalgia for a tangible world that might be experienced outside the value systems set by economic interests or the preconceptions imposed by excessive representations of the world. Such is the utopian horizon towards which the idea of the end of money is pointing.

The exhibition thus presents one of the issues at hand – money – as categorically different from the other issue at hand – art – treating them as a-parallel problems.

If the function of money today is to insist and to further an abstract ordering of the world suitable to economic interests, then the function of art is exactly the opposite: When one speaks of “the end of art,” one is in fact speaking of the very horizon towards which artistic production in the modern age has been directed. That horizon is perhaps best articulated within Lucy Lippard’s notion of the “dematerialization of art,” or the realization of an avantgardist ethos according to which art is to effect its own end by dissolution – into everyday life, into other forms of production, and so on. Of course, before this happens, everyday life has to adopt the conditions necessary for such dissolution, and one of these conditions, as Dessislava Dimova argues in this book (and presents as a missed historical opportunity), is the emancipation of leisure from the double administration of labor and time. Although this fact is rarely discussed, it is no accident that so many of the products of early-20th century avant-garde art and design were objects of leisure (chess boards, tea pots, tables and chairs, and so on) meant to interpellate the relationship that the industrial revolution established between the human body and labor.

Like that of several other optimists, Lippard’s utopia was underpinned by an enthusiasm for the machine and its promise to emancipate humans from labor – or, if not from labor tout court, then at least from the more laborious aspects of labor. To put it in the terms set by Hannah Arendt: the hope has been to establish a continuity between thought and action that industrial labor precluded. At least in the more sophisticated theories of modern labor and 6

Juan A. Gaitán

alienation, there was never any doubt that individual workers actually had thoughts while engaged in repetitious tasks the more common meaning given to the concept of alienation (alienation from the product of one’s labor) gained the sense of an even more important alienation – of action from thought. The aim was to affect not thought alone, but creativity, which can only take place when there is continuity and a convergence of thought and action.

Such utopias have of course been fraught with aporias and paradoxes. The most important ones take us back to Hegel’s conception of the end of art: As Dieter Roelstraete argues in his essay, for Hegel the end of art is marked by the incorporation of the work of art into history – which means that it is consequently released from the space of transcendental correspondences. In this sense, art and money are subjected to inverse transformations. Money loses the ties to necessity that more immediate forms of exchange still carry and becomes the standard itself; art, on the other hand, loses ground in the space of mimetic representations (and transcendental correspondences) as the material world is systematically incorporated into the determinations of monetary value and economic interests.

Gold is the conductor of both operations, as it is the last link to nature in the development of monetary economies, the principal (though not the most expensive) symbol of symbolic value, and the last (or latest) of the elements to be folded into the world of speculative economics.

At the heart of Donatien Grau’s essay is the provocative claim that the end of coins (and, by extension, of fiat currency) is the triumph of money. This argument focuses on another historical problem that is not so commonly discussed: the coin, as one of the original forms of fiat currency, has never been just the carrier of monetary value, it is also the carrier of symbolic value; a value that is constantly threatening to supersede the denomination of the coin and make its monetary value irrelevant. In this sense, as Grau’s introduction suggests, in the coin one already has the two sides of the Hegelian art historical narrative: the threat that the real places to the symbolic and the threat that the symbolic places to the real.

In these equations of money the individual remains one of the most commonly overseen factors. Using the elements of what, resorting to a Graeco-Latinism, Serge Doubrovsky called autofiction (distinguishable from a fictionalized autobiography, in that the primary purpose of autofiction is not biographical) Carolina Sanín brings the individual face to face with a repertoire of desires that are produced within the logic of money, at least as understood by capitalism. Put otherwise, Sanín’s Five Acts of Money is a story about the ethos of the capitalist logos.

7

Introduction

This book has been conceived as a parallel reflection to the exhibition The End of Money. It includes a number of contributions that extend the exhibition proper beyond its self-contained existence in the gallery space. In this respect, it is also a vehicle through which the exhibition can find different discursive grounds for exploring the theme of the end of money, both as a literary and as an iconographic motif. Beyond the aforementioned essays by Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, and Dieter Roelstraete, as well as the work of fiction by Carolina Sanín, contributions by several of the exhibiting artists – Pierre Bismuth, Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández), Hadley+Maxwell, and Peter Fischli and David Weiss – extend this work of reflection beyond the work that appeared within the show. May there be other relationships to the world.

8

Juan A. Gaitán

9

10

Tonel

11

The Theory of Money Pierre Bismuth

12

Money is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against money is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is money.

Money is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Money is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of money as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

The criticism of money is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which money is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of money disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. 04.02.2011

13

The Theory of Money

“ W h e r e ’s t h e M o n e y, L e b o w s k i ? ” Making Ends Meet Dieter Roelstraete

14

“The goal of management is to make money, not to make steel”– James Roderick, chairman of U.S. Steel, 1979 1 0. Prelude

In April 2008, a chunky special issue of one of the world’s most influential and widely-read art magazines put an image of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull studded with 8601 flawless diamonds, on its cover. Published at the peak of the naughties art market boom – just five months later, on the very same day that Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in history, Hirst would make an estimated 200 million dollars in one day at a Sotheby’s auction – Artforum’s investigation of “art and its markets” made for some 125 pages of actual writing, quite a bit of it very good of course, buried deep beneath 275 pages of gallery (and some museum) advertising.

Some nine months later, in January 2009, another issue of Artforum appeared, this time with an image of a work of art by the much more critically acclaimed (and much more affordable) Jimmie Durham on its cover – a sculpture consisting of a giant boulder squashing a small aircraft. In this issue, art historian Christopher S. Wood remembered British colleague Michael Baxandall, who had died aged 74 in August 2008, in a tribute that opened with the following quote from Baxandall’s most popular book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: “money is very important in the history of art.”2 Indeed, because of the steep drop in advertising revenue following the global financial crisis that was seemingly ushered in by the aforementioned Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, this particular issue of Artforum was about half the size of those published in the previous two years, demonstrating that perhaps never before had money been so important in the history of art – or at least never so ostensibly, palpably important.

1. Allude

The complexity of the processes that have set off the global credit crunch and the subsequent economic downturn effectively continues to cloud our ability to appreciate this as a real crisis (and an especially epochal one at that, as we are continually reminded). Yet, one thing that this particular crisis has in common with most of its more thoroughly studied predecessors (counting from the postwar crisis of all crises, the oil crisis of 1971 – 73) is the deepening sense that we are witnesses to, and participants in, yet another chapter in the ongoing story of the end of money. Indeed, if the current crisis ‘feels’ like a (global) financial one rather than a (global) economic one, it is 15

“Where’s the Money, Lebowski?” Making Ends Meet

1 Quoted in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990, p. 158.

2 It is worth quoting the context in which this fragment appears in greater detail. Baxandall’s primer in the social history of pictorial style begins by stating that “a fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. (…) The relationship of which the painting is the deposit was among other things a commercial relationship, and some of the economic practices of the period are quite concretely embodied in the paintings. Money is very important in the history of art. It acts on painting not only in the matter of a client being willing to spend money on a work, but in the details of how he hands it over. (…) Paintings are among other things fossils of economic life.” In: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 1.

I was reminded of Baxandall’s terse formulation when I last visited the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica in Turin (during an art fair, it may perhaps be useful to admit), the prize possession of which is an Antonello da Messina portrait of an unidentified man from 1476 that adorns every single piece of museum advertising. Controversy over the sitter’s precise identity continues to rage, but one thing is for certain: Turin’s most widely celebrated piece of ‘ancient’ art is a portrait of a banker – a powerful reminder of the extraordinarily long history of art’s relationship to money, a history reaching much further back, clearly, than that of art’s relationship to (to name but one obvious alternative) critique, especially the critique of the commodification of art.

clearly because the one concept, which is hit hardest by it, is that of money as “the crystallized relationship between debtor and creditor” (in Niall Ferguson’s formulation, see note 3), or, more straightforwardly, as “a medium of exchange that can be used to purchase goods and services” – an age-old definition whose contours can hardly be discerned anymore beneath the financial wizardry that has given us such hallucinatory constructs as structured investment vehicles, debt-for-equity or credit-default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and, most plastically, toxic assets. Clearly, the hypertrophy of debt-related jargon in recent years serves to remind us of the central role that debt, as “the condition of owing something to somebody,” plays in the current financial crisis – a crisis spawned by money that essentially isn’t there, but which has been transformed into a commodity nevertheless.

Although most of us have no easy way of knowing what is meant with these various technical terms, it is understandably tempting to interpret the incomprehensibility of contemporary finance – “Planet Finance,” in Niall Ferguson’s semi-partisan terms – as yet another instance of the evaporation of money, its disappearance and descent, rather than its ascent.3

According to most standard historiographies (that is to say, not just Marxist ones), the “descent of money” was decisively inaugurated by the string of events that started with the termination of the Bretton Woods system of monetary management in 1971 – a moment in economic history more commonly referred to as the end of the gold standard – and culminated in the oil crisis of 1973, precipitating stock market crashes, trade deficits, spiking interest rates and unprecedented rates of inflation alike. Interestingly enough, as David Harvey put it: “the breakdown of money as a secure means of representing value” – the gist, in essence, of what has come to be known as the “Nixon shock” – “itself created a crisis of representation in advanced capitalism.” 4 And here again money immediately proved to be very important in the history of art. As an immediate consequence of the dollar’s severance from the notion of real value (however arbitrarily anchored in gold), “money consequently became useless as a means of storing value for any length of time,” so that “alternative means had to be found to store value effectively. And so began the vast inflation in certain kinds of asset prices – collectibles, art objects, antiques, houses, and the like.” 5 To a certain extent, then, it may appear as if the descent of money effectively triggered the ascent of art – if we are content, that is, to perpetuate the confusion of “art and its markets.” But it is precisely this confusion that the most important artistic developments of the late sixties and early seventies (the 16

Dieter Roelstraete

3 Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009. “The Descent of Money” is the title Ferguson has given to the postscript to his “Financial History of the World.” That Ferguson’s is not an economic history of the world is worth emphasizing here, as the distinction between finance and economy is indeed crucial to our current discussion, much like it is crucial to our understanding of the current crisis as one that concerns the reigning system of financial flows rather than trade flows.

4 David Harvey, op. cit., p. 298.

My emphasis in italics.

5 Ibid.

period coinciding with the transformative moment in economic history referred to above) sought to counter, if not undo in its entirety, by way of severing the idea of art from its agreed-upon point of anchorage in material, objectbased form, and surrendering the art object as such.

Indeed, in most standard art histories of the post-war era, the 1971 – 1973 period of monetary crisis stands enshrined as the apogee of the Concept Art revolution – the glory years of what has long been known, in the words of American art critic Lucy Lippard, as the “dematerialization of the art object.” 6 In other words, we are talking of one form of dematerialization shadowing another. Not for the first time in both histories, the end of money appeared to converge with the end of (a certain conception) of art.

2. Interlude

One could of course argue that the concept of the end of art is as old as the concept of art as such, for, philosophically speaking, both concepts belong together as historical artifacts; both the concept of art and the concept of the end of art as we know them are rooted in one and the same philosophical tradition. The very notion of the end (as in the death of the subject, the end of history, the death of art, the end of money, etc.) has accompanied the history of time as such, just like the notion of ‘crisis’ may well be the one constant factor coursing throughout the whole of modern occidental history. Yet, one of the very basic characteristics of our apocalyptically inclined culture is that it imagines itself to experience a qualitatively new kind of crisis all the time, effectively stumbling from one crisis (‘end’) to the next. In the admittedly crude terms of Marxist economic theory, this is probably because modern occidental history is, in essence, a capitalist history: the dawn of the modern era also witnessed the emergence of a capitalist economy, and every subsequent chapter in the history of ‘modernity’ has in large part been written in the shadow of that capitalist economy’s momentous developments. Indeed, as Richard Sennett puts it, “instability since Marx’s day may seem capitalism’s only constant” 7 – the iron law of Nietzschean “creative destruction,” in Joseph Schumpeter’s celebrated formulation.

What were the economic circumstances, one wonders, of the most influential formulation of the end-ofart thesis known to man? Let us reiterate the well-known passage in Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, delivered in Heidelberg in 1816 and further developed in Berlin in 1820 – 1821, in quasi-completeness:

17

“Where’s the Money, Lebowski?” Making Ends Meet

6 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, New York: Praeger, 1973.

7 Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 16. Here again, it is worth remembering how much Marx’s famous image of “all that is solid melting into air,” conjured in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto, retrospectively sounds like a foreshadowing of the “dematerialization of the art object,” from Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris and Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Breath, via Robert Morris’ Steam and Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube, all the way to – the most dramatic and appropriate example of all – Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.

The peculiar mode to which artistic production and works of art belong no longer satisfies our supreme need.

We are above the level at which works of art can be venerated as divine, and actually worshipped; the impression which they make is of a more considerate kind, and the feelings which they stir within us require a higher test and a further confirmation. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art. (…)

Therefore, our present in its universal condition is not favorable to art. As regards the artist himself, it is not merely that the reflection which finds utterance all round him, and the universal habit of having an opinion and passing judgment about art infect him, and mislead him into putting more abstract thought into his works themselves; but also the whole spiritual culture of the age is of such a kind that he himself stands within this reflective world and its condition, and it is impossible for him to abstract from it by will and resolve, or to contrive for himself and bring to pass, by means of peculiar education or removal from the relations of life, a peculiar solitude that would replace all that is lost.

In all these respects art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost for us its genuine truth and life, and rather is transferred into our ideas than asserts its former necessity, or assumes its former place, in reality. (…)

Therefore, the science of art is a much more pressing need in our day than in times in which art, simply as art, was enough to furnish a full satisfaction.8

It is worth rereading this passage and replacing ‘art’ with ‘money’ throughout – the essence, in essence, remains intact: whatever has come to an end (art or money), has been supplanted by reflection upon it; or, alternatively, whatever has come to an end has done so because it was being reflected upon too much, in part by the likes of Hegel himself (when he ventures that “the science of art is a much more pressing need in our day” he of course means his science of art first and foremost). Or, in the words of Hegel’s traveling companion (and, ultimately, rival) Friedrich Schelling, as written down in his equally eschatologicallyminded Philosophy of Art: “When such a fortunate age of pure production has passed, reflection enters, and with it an element of estrangement. What was earlier living spirit is now transmitted theory.” 9 Much like the owl of Minerva, who only flies out after the dark, a true philosophy of art can only come into being once art itself has set in an inexorable decline – and much the same may be true of money, especially in view of the intimacy of art and money’s shared history. It doesn’t quite suffice to call this turn of events merely “ironic” – for irony, after all, is the very essence of the German Romantics’ philosophy of art, if not of the 18

Dieter Roelstraete

8 G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993, p. 12 – 13.

9 F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 10. The “fortunate age of production” referred to in this passage concerns the time of Dürer and Raphael – Cervantes and Caldéron working at the same time as Shakespeare. Hegel’s and Schelling’s time was of course above all an age of criticism and reflection; even its leading literary lights (Goethe, Novalis, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers) were occasionally more respected as critics than as creators of literary fiction in their own right.

philosophical project of German Romanticism (in whose shadow much of our own thinking around and about art and culture continues to flourish). And irony has been perhaps the key factor in the history of art “after the end of art.” 10

3. Quaalude

Oh irony: whether we are living through late capitalism (Mandel), new capitalism (Sennett) or the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello), most well-informed observers seem to agree that, for quite some time now, capitalism has been the only game in town. Insofar as we are still happy to use Marx’s circumscription of the phenomenon, then, this means that the accumulation of capital in private hands continues unabated, and largely unchallenged. It appears nonsensical, therefore, to assert that the age of money (as the most common form of capital) has come to an end.

Pronouncements of “the end of money” seem just as premature and misguided as pronouncements of “the end of art”; after all, never in the history of art has there been so much art, and never in the history of money has money mattered this much. Money is, it may sometimes seem, the only game in town. (Also, returning to our initial observations concerning Hirst, Messina and co.: never in the history of art has money mattered as much, and never in the history of money has art mattered as much.)

How are we to work our way out of this aporetic irony? Perhaps the key critical shift may be located in admitting to the fact that both money and art are indeed no longer ‘here’ (there), but that we’re only pretending they’re still ‘here’ (there). More precisely: some pretend, with varying degrees of malicious intent, that art and money are still there, while others really don’t know they aren’t there anymore. In the field of money, the humble quotidian device that is the credit card occupies a position of symbolic centrality in this regard. It is the channel for the transmission of money that never was ours in the first place (and thus was never really ‘there’ to be spent), but that is believed to have been ours (by each creditor who accepts the card). Credit, after all, is a direct descendant of the Latin verb for believing, credere; credit literally means “he believes.” 11 The credit card, that magical object of so much confidence and good faith, truly is the paradigmatic expression of a culture that has reconciled itself with the complete virtualization of money – that which we earlier on referred to as dematerialization or evaporation. Credit lies one step further still than the gradual disappearance of money into the electronic maelstrom of bits and bytes, zeroes and ones (electronic money may be both invisible and immaterial, but at least it can still be mine).

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“Where’s the Money, Lebowski?” Making Ends Meet

10 One particular quote from Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics will (hopefully) help to illuminate my point: “if Irony is taken as the keynote of the representation, this means that the supremely inartistic is taken as the true principle of the work of art.”

(Op. cit., p. 74.) The basic recipe for Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, in other words – the first in a long line of contenders to claim the crown of the postartistic realm of artistic production.

“After the End of Art” is the title of a collection of essays published by Arthur C. Danto in 1998, fourteen years after he published an essay titled “The End of Art” in a book titled “The Death of Art” – can anyone really feign surprise that anthologies with titles such as “Essays After Danto” have since seen the light of day? Danto has long been known for his ability to date the so-called end of art to a very precise day – that of the opening of Andy Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964.

11 Wading into the troubled water of money’s philosophical relationship to religious belief (or more generally, religion) would surely lead us too far astray, but it is worth considering the basic tenet of the leap of faith that characterizes the religious world-view as such: credo quia absurdum, or “I believe because it is absurd.” The same could certainly be said about both art and money, which are really only worth believing in if we accept the absurdity of the claims on which their respective systems are built.

In the field of art, one could identify a comparable shift to have taken place in the gradual occlusion of the very idea of art by the growing importance of the notion of the art world and the corresponding inflationary growth of art discourse on the one hand, and in the dissolution of art into the broader sphere of culture on the other hand.12 On the one hand, we could say that what is being talked about as art, or referred to as art, is no longer art – we just pretend or believe it is – but rather mere commentary upon art (compare this to Schelling’s lamentation quoted above), much of which also pretends or believes itself to be art, like credit pretending to be money – and there certainly appears to exist a connection here with the hypertrophy of art-about-art, or art-about-the-art-world, in the last two decades in particular (the same time span during which the art market went through a series of exponential growth spurts, in other words), as well as with the sheer excess of discursive attention paid to art in writing and words during that same period (which the current essay knowingly – and gleefully! – participates in, of course, just as it gleefully and guiltily participates in the problematic cult of referentiality, as both its title and profusion of footnotes clearly attest). On the other hand, we could concur with Alain Badiou that “the name ‘culture’ [has come] to obliterate that of ‘art’,” and here too we must refer to a key aspiration of all vanguard art movements of the last century, all the way from Dada to Concept Art’s ten-point-program for the dematerialization of the art object – the dissolution of art into life.13 Now this particular call, like so many erstwhile battle cries of both the political and artistic avantgarde (these things used to be interchangeable once), has of course proven singularly successful in that, historically speaking, art truly has been dissolved into life – without life becoming much more artful or aesthetically pleasing as a consequence, alas. And what is more, it has done so at the exact moment when life itself became increasingly subject to the irrevocable logic of total commodification: if it is now near-impossible to imagine art outside the market, how much more difficult still it has become to imagine life outside the market!

Let us conclude, however, on a note of cautious optimism – for the end of art may not be such a bad thing after all (the art world, which comes after is not the worst world – it may even be the best of all possible worlds right now), and the same may be true of the end of money as we have understood it throughout this speculative exercise. Let us imagine ways of making both ends, that of art and that of money, meet: firstly, if the complex known as the art world, complete with its market and its discourse and its market 20

Dieter Roelstraete

12 It is worth remembering here that the title of the essay in which Danto first articulated his intimations of a true end-of-art scenario was quite simply “The Artworld” (first delivered as a lecture at a symposium titled “The Work of Art” only a couple of months after seeing Warhol’s aforementioned Brillo box exhibition in New York); it starts, by way of quotation, with the following memorable exchange between Hamlet and the Queen of Denmark: “Q: Do you see nothing there?

A: Nothing at all. Yet all that is I see.”

Towards the end, Danto ventures that “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting.” In: The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 61, Issue 19, p. 581.

13 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 12.

It is important to point out that for Badiou, art is one of four fields of human activity (along with science, politics and love) capable of yielding truth. In this sense, the French maîtrepenseur’s contemptuous notion of culture is not terribly different from the Frankfurter Schule’s tried-andtested formula of the culture industry.

According to one slightly more updated variation on this theme, artists, critics and curators alike are today all active in the entertainment industry.

The very notion of industrialization (or, alternately, administration) in these various formulas only adds further weight to the importance of commerce (hence money) in their construction.

for discourse, has come to occupy the place once allotted to art, or succeeded in obscuring it, this must necessarily mean that the art world, as a world, is in fact built upon or around something that is not, or no longer, there – an absence, void, or empty center: the divine hole in the middle of the ontological donut (I am reminded here, inevitably, of Lawrence Weiner’s call to “take the bagel from Hegel”).

And this may well be a good thing, much like the perennially empty chair at the dinner table – one never knows who (or what) may be coming to dinner. And secondly, if money isn’t there (anymore) either, something else or other must be found – a formidable challenge, but also a fantastically stimulating one. Indeed, maybe art can be brought back to help us find this ‘other’ – or become it instead, as in the art I was given to write about in turn.

21

“Where’s the Money, Lebowski?” Making Ends Meet

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Tonel

23

Notes on Improperties Hadley+Maxwell

24

_______6_______ ______5_______ ____4____ _____3______ ___2___ _1_

1. Im-

a) (before adjectives) Not ie. not proper b) (before nouns) Without or lacking ie. without properties

2. Proper

a) (attributive) Genuine, in something’s true form. b) (attributive) Suitable or appropriate. c) (predicative: proper to) belonging or relating to, particular to. d) (archaic) belonging to itself; own ie. “I saw it with my proper eyes.”

3. Improper

Not in accordance with accepted rules or standards (especially morality or honesty); lacking in modesty or decency.

4. Property

a) Possessions, some thing or things belonging to someone. b) An attribute, quality, or characteristic of something.

5. Improperty

6. Improperties

We think of the word improperties like an image, a cubist drawing or collage. Thereby every part of the word can work in a paradoxical balance between holding its own autonomous meaning and reacting to the linguistic influences that surround it; both improper and proper, wherein the meaning of one persists despite of and dependent upon its companion(s).

Improperties take form in the process of collaboration and how it exercises authorship. Thomas Hirschhorn writes on (non-)collaboration: “…Unshared Responsibility means I am completely responsible for the work of my friend, and it means that my friend takes complete responsibility for my 25

Notes on Improperties

work … Unshared Responsibility means to be absolutely committed to the work of the other, to take it for what makes its strength: a sovereign affirmation. To work in Unshared Responsibility means to take the responsibility for something I am not responsible for.”1 This describes how responsibility, and thus propriety, can overlap the same property and yet not interfere with autonomy; how something is absolutely mine (when I say “mine” it is only mine) yet at the same time necessarily belongs to all of you (when you use the word “mine” it is yours).

Words are shared but not divided between us. We feel the same about artworks, the ones we make together and put our names to. Though our image of collaboration differs from Hirschhorn’s – in as much as we still call our work collaborative and for us negotiation is a major part of production – we like his term “Unshared Responsibility” for how it describes authorship, and even the use of language or other tools of presentation. Lisa Robertson also says something precise that describes the unshared site of intelligibility: “If I pretend to see, I enter into visibility.” 2

A signature is the movement of a sign to a signified to a thing, and artworks are therefore signatures of our desire to appear. Boris Groys describes this in a recent article as “self-exposure,” and suggests that the artist is a “professional subject” (as opposed to the “involuntary subject” that describes “everybody else”) who manifests “the inner contradictions of modern subjectivation in a paradigmatic way.” 3 He gets here by identifying subjectivity with visibility, subjectivation with exposure: “Our bodies are submitted to permanent visualization; this is how they become subjects.” 3

A mirror is an example of an improperty, both a site that (lightly) holds an aspectual image, and an object that expresses itself – something that is a property, displays properties, and is also improper in that the images it displays are dependent upon the perceiver’s relationship to the site where the image appears. The mirror is also its image – a signature of my desire to perceive, and thus to appear.

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Hadley+Maxwell

1 Thomas Hirschhorn, as quoted in Bridge online journal (http://www. bridgecollaborationjournal.tumblr. com; last accessed: 11 August 2011), from an interview with Abraham Cruzvillegas in Bomb online magazine (http://www.bombsite.com/issues/ 113/articles/3621; last accessed: 22 June 2011).

2 Lisa Robertson, “Perspectors/ Melancholia,” in Hadley+Maxwell, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2010.

3 Boris Groys, “Artistic Self-Exposure,” Frieze d/e, Issue 1, summer 2011, pp. 79 – 83.

A cursory, but not impulsive, selection of findings (in aphoristic form) gathered from working under the term “improperties:”

1. Im-

– Not, as in “a cut.”

– Not appropriate nor appropriation, yet expropriation (even from itself).

– Not now, but not not now.

– A force that holds you positively to your un-doing, purely transitive: “Like that little drum in your ear / Transfixes you to your fear….” 4 – Life’s dark face, the support of a face, as in the hollowing out that makes a mask or façade what it is.

– Not to be confused with a curse or with oblivion, but more pure than either because it simply separates without judgment.

– An arrow pointing outside of language, exemplarily described by enigmas.

2. Proper

– Everything you have to lose.

– The sphere of the appropriate and the fear of taste.

– Joinery, as in skillful carpentry, or crafty demonstration.

– The beauty of and fascination with geometry.

– The beginnings of what we know at the verge of becoming products.

– The conceit of the concept, but also the very joy of presupposition.

– An over-weaning belief in the transcendence of nouns or thinglyness.

– The oathless dimension of the oath.

– A domestication of accidents, or the formalization of sense and play.

– Secular mysticism.

– “How”-centred art.

– Not to be confused with similarities or utopianisms but far more conservative, like when one sees a clean-cut piece of maple and exclaims “That is wood!” or like the claim that everything is only relative, a matter of framing, etc.

– The nauseating feeling that occurs when an argument’s terms are caught between the universal and the particular.

– In rare cases (that are usually heavily endorsed), knowing the point of perfection.

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Notes on Improperties

4 Siouxie and the Banshees, “Voodoo Dolly,” from Juju, Polydor Records, 1981.

3. Improper

– The thrill of thievery or defacement.

– The confidence of leaving something to itself, or finishing it and departing.

– The erotic charge and repulsion of a stain, but more in the way it lingers in the memory. As in: living with a bad hair-cut; trying to see through another’s eyes; or believing that two heads are better than one.

– The injunction against representation.

– The charm and horror of maligned or faulty images, awkward postures, fallen cakes or heroes, and earnest representations of the political.

– The triumph of parody; the cry of humble misfortunes.

– Nervously: walking into a food-court; sitting on a bus full of familiar strangers; but also, discovering the secret of Karaoke.

– The providence of adjectives.

– The understanding that a simple Yes or No is sufficient in accepting an oath.

– The allure of the accidental.

– The beauty of a scaffold or a court-yard garden that has become a cage.

– The distance between the front and the back of a mask or a stage.

– Not to be confused with dialectical anxieties, it can dispell their binding forces.

– An opening onto the “why” in art, but also the fetish of deconstructionists, as in, when one allows oneself to provisionally answer an ongoing stream of “why?” questions coming from a child.

– An over-productive “suchness” that scatters objects of articulation in space the way archives do, resulting in two extremes: a) to be at home with either a sketch or an overly developed ad-hoc plan or course of action; or b) the dividing up of space when it is obviously too much, or out of an irrepressible “we can’t go on like this anymore.”

– Easing the stakes of an action for better or worse.

– The liberation of what we have learned from what we know.

4. Property

– Evidence of the tendency to articulate things in terms of possession, curiously without recourse to magic or exorcism.

– The Musak of Capitalism, commonly confused with rights, identity, or the process of naming. The becoming brand of the name.

– Hostile to petty notions like time or intuition.

– The coaxing into appearance of thingly opacity.

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– The names that are given to objects, as in, the gestures of giving-over what is available to appear. Many names are inherited.

– a) Something to peculate (or embezzle), from Latin “peculium” or property, as in: with the invention of the train, also the train wreck. See also “peculiar” as in “peculiar to” or “belonging exclusively to”; but also, b) something to steal, as in “The mirror steals the virtue of a pool of water so we can regard ourselves erect.”

– Provides access to feelings of divinity or sovereignty.

– The indistinction between ownership and opinion and their ultimate triumph over reason, due process, or intuition, as in: “The new ID cards include retinal scans and forty-nine items… they won’t stop your identity being stolen, it just means when it is you’re fucked: I’ve left my wallet in the hotel – I’m going to need new eyeballs and a finger transplant.” 5

5. Improperty

– The episteme of examples, or what we can know about things. For instance when we allow light to bounce off, pour through, brush along, but also distort, blind, or dematerialize objects of affection.

– To speak in examples, not to be confused with postmodernity or simply things, but rather allowing one particularity to exert itself on another and vice versa: an uprising or surge of understanding between the two.

– The inheritance of a history, more in the sense of clearing an estate, whereby one learns of many things that are hidden from ordinary view.

– Research method that embraces errantry, accidental findings, and the joy of side-effects.

6. Improperties

– Nothing less than all of the above.

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Notes on Improperties

5 Frankie Boyle, Live at the Apollo, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JroZ4IvMEa4, accessed January 14, 2011).

Sichtbare Welt (1987 – 2000)

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

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Tonel

31

Five Acts of Money Carolina SanĂ­n

32

Interest

She was young and entered law school with no desire to do so. Learning things that were of no interest to her day in, day out – her only interest being to watch the years go by, first one then a second until five had passed – made her feel she was living a life as certain as poverty. Taking time away from the future without embarking on what she wanted to do was like counting the money she lacked to buy the things she would have wanted had she been able to imagine the money needed to want them.

She was good with words and bad with numbers. She had been born in a country and in a home where some professions were regarded as true and others false. Of those that were true, the only one that seemed to contain words and no numbers was law. Among those that were false was literature: not only did it suffer from the inconvenience of promising almost assured poverty, it was also a kind of distortion of another path.

It seemed to her that it seemed to others that law was the true profession of literature, though it is possible that no one thought this, that no one had any thoughts on the matter at all.

The fact is that it never occurred to her to study literature. She did not connect literature with the process of passing from one landscape of her life to the next. Perhaps she had been encouraged to believe that she ought to learn a profession that would allow her to make money, in other words, one that would, one day, allow her to live on her own in a place where she could decide who entered and what they were allowed to bring in with them. Time spent without interest would eventually lead to property. The role of the uninterested guest would turn into the part of the hostess. Empty time would become a home where at last no one would encourage her to believe anything.

In her first semester at university, she was obliged to take a course on Roman law. Twenty years on, she remembers just one scene in which Caius sold a horse to Lucius for a hundred sesterces. Her entire past as a student of law consists of this contract; the portion of the past spent in her first period of university education was limited to this one transaction.

But when she remembered the sesterces for the first time, that afternoon, they were not what she had intended to recall. She had not set out to remember anything. She wanted to ask whether the Earth grew over time, as if it were gestating another body, if the Earth grew as things eroded and the dust settled. If archaeologists dug down and found houses buried under the dust, and these houses were underneath, this meant that people and animals and plants were living higher and higher up, further and further out, that the Earth was getting bigger. She wanted to know who was supposed to know about the endless dust, whether it was archaeologists, geologists, waste specialists, economists, or me. And when she pondered this question, what came to her was not an answer but the memory of her course on Roman law. Marcus was selling Julius a slave for a hundred sesterces. In Rome, in imperial times. In 1990, in a class during which she had probably drifted off, thinking for the first time about the circumference of the Earth.

There was a path that wended its way through the recollection of the hundred sesterces and the question of the fate of the dust that fattened the Earth and was the thinning of things. Marcus and Julius and the horse 33

Five Acts of Money

had, with the earth of their bodies, increased the soil in which olive trees grew. But the sesterces were different. There were old coins in museums, of course. Sesterces were and had been metal. But they were the equivalent of a horse in one example or a slave in another. Their number created the scene in which a certain imaginable Gaius met a certain imaginable Caius in certain circumstances and they both wanted a horse. Or it selected a scene from a forgotten past and put her in mind of it again. The coins raised ghosts, they marked the path back and forth between Marcus and Julius and between Caius and Gaius and, twelve centuries later, they were exchanged for letters of credit and their amount, translated into other currencies, was the equivalent of the length of a traveler’s journey.

Although, of course, money did not live like this but in a manner she would never know.

She transferred to the arts faculty a year after learning the word sesterce and studied literature for four years and then another seven.

Afterwards, she began to teach. One day, when she had lived this life that filled three pages, she saw a puppy being born in her home. The dog’s eyes were closed and it could see nothing. All it did was grow while it slept.

It died before its eyes opened. It died in no time at all, nothing. It was never going to open its eyes. So she began to think about her education again and her lack of interest in so many things while life went by, and about the vague interest she had retained in certain things that were almost worthless (a hundred sesterces) after she had invested so much of nothing in them. She tried thinking about the Earth swelling as time went by, growing like the sleeping puppy and growing with the dead puppy, and about the interest on the hundred sesterces, which she had heard about one day, that had accumulated over twenty years, maybe turning the hundred into a million.

Millionaires

Her first job lecturing in literature was at Purchase College in New York state. She felt slightly embarrassed when mentioning the name of the college to someone unfamiliar with it, afraid that they might think she taught at a school to do with shopping.

In one of her classes, she read Marco Polo’s book with her students.

The Venetian had recounted his travels to Rustichello da Pisa, a fellow prisoner in Genoa. Rustichello transcribed Polo’s account while translating it into a form of French that contained an element of Italian. Polo told of the wonders on the other side of the world, of the part that completed the world and made it a round and desirable number. The book was entitled Description of the World and Book of the Wonders of the World, but it was popularized under the title Il milione, the million. It is said that the title does not stem from the exaggerations, excesses, and wealth of details and descriptions contained in the book but that it is a corruption of the name Aemilione, which Marco’s family took to distinguish themselves from other Venetian Polos.

A possible title for Marco Polo’s travels would thus be The Million

by Marco Polo of the Million Polos, who are not the million Polos about the place but the Million Polos.

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Explaining the title of the book by way of the name of the family seemed irrelevant to her. Marco Polo’s Il milione was Marco Polo’s million: the abundance of the traveler. The million was the imaginable plenteous world and it was, for the reader, money belonging to someone else. The million was an amount that was endlessly counted and which replaced the house, which was one and which was Aemilione, different from il milione.

In another lecture, she spoke of another millionaire, Trimalchio, an immensely rich freedman who appeared in Petronius’ Satyricon hosting a remarkable banquet at which the guests were not allowed to leave by the same door through which they had entered. At the entrance to Trimalchio’s house was a mural that told the owner’s story: while a slave, he had learned to count money and with this skill had set out on the path to abundance and freedom. The unfolding of Trimalchio’s million was another book of the wonders of the world; the banquet itself, a world anxious to complete itself, reality unceasingly transporting to this exhausting feast its produce transformed into dreams from all over the vast lands that the host possessed and had never visited. His guests ate, listened to songs and reprimands, and watched the dancing. They were invited to defecate and to carry on drinking. During the feast, the host made freedmen of slaves, he punished and pardoned, and he turned some things into others.

He counted his possessions as he recounted his story, how in selling himself he had been able to buy himself. He equated tongue with tongue, making puns on the various dishes, and matched verbs with names, identities with duties. “Carver! Carve her!”, he would order his servant, and it so happened that the name of the person in charge of carving the meat in Trimalchio’s house was Carver.

The meal was a spectacle. Everything was edible, but before being consumed, it changed form and name thanks to the workings of money.

Trimalchio had a hen arranged, laying peahen eggs, which the astonished guests realized, when they went to eat them, were made of flour. He had a hare served with wings attached to it. There were fish and fowl made of pork.

Trimalchio was able to make two days out of one. A cockerel somewhere in the neighborhood crowed during the feast, and he had it brought to him and ordered that it be cooked. At last, when the guests and uninvited spongers were exhausted and keen to escape his magnanimity, and just as the reader is wondering how else life might be consumed and money lived, the millionaire staged his own funeral: he had his will read, gave instructions on his funerary monument (which was to portray him giving away money), ordered that mournful music should be played, and lamented his own death, which was not occurring.

Years later, back in Colombia, she continued to talk about money.

She taught a course on the Spanish Golden Age, the age of American gold.

She talked about the million that pulsated in every baroque metaphor, and of how they all stemmed from the great metaphor of gold: the alchemists’ search for gold, which symbolized the soul’s search for perfection so that it might enter the other world, which symbolized the Conquistadors’ voyage to the New World, the world beyond, where they might become other than what they were and thus transcend their own 35

Five Acts of Money

lives, so that they might continue to live on after putting an end to their first life, crowned by the fame of a new name. She spoke of the gold that becomes future and which the natives gave to the Spaniards in exchange for beads with which time could be counted, and for mirrors in which man sees his present.

During another course, she read Santa Evita, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel on the toings and froings of Eva Perón’s corpse. With regard to the famous phrase “I will return and I will be millions” that Evita is said to have uttered, Martínez wondered where she intended to return to and what would she be millions of. The selfsame phrase was attributed to Spartacus and to Tupac Katari, a Bolivian Indian rebel who apparently pronounced it before being murdered by the colonial authorities. She would have to understand money before attempting to grasp that idea of returning as millions, of multiplying in the next life instead of merging and dissolving, before imagining that political fantasy, that alternative to mystical aspiration.

One day she was invited to a literary gathering organized each week by a wealthy woman from Bogotá. She found the address up in the hills overlooking the city and entered an apartment big enough to house a theater. Of the forty or fifty women who had been invited to attend, she was the only one who did not yearn to meet a poet. Pierced and wounded by beauty, these millionairesses longed to know beauty, just as Psyche longed to know Cupid. An old man on a rostrum was reading aloud.

She thought about the aspirations that brought people to the world of plenty. In the past, indianos, the name given to Spaniards who returned home from the Americas having made their fortune, would grow palm trees in their gardens and have pineapples carved in the lintels of the doors to their houses, which they built with the millions they had made selling slaves.

Once rich, the new millionaires set about stealing the beauty that belonged to others. What happened was more complicated than the attempts of new money to become old, or the bourgeoisie’s desire to pass for aristocracy. Beauty, the attainment of metaphors, was the ambition of all money, new and old alike. Every millionaire was an arriviste. The gold he owned inevitably reminded him of that other gold, the gold above and the gold on the other side, the metaphorical gold that the Americas had been.

Betting

Every day, millions of people indulge in the game of imagining what they would do if they were to win the lottery. I suspect that we would all of us like to own a theater, to take our seats and watch the spectacle of others playing their parts on our stage, to describe as a “wonder of the world” all that was presented before us, presence itself.

Tomás bought a lottery ticket with a number I regularly come across. We had fish for supper and went to sleep, forgetting to check the winning numbers. A week later, I remembered. Tomás told me he had remembered to look the day before.

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Carolina Sanín

Dorothy Parker wrote a story called The Standard of Living. In it, two working women, who eat whatever cheap and greasy food New York has to offer, play the game of asking each other what they would do if they were suddenly to come into a million dollars. They are walking along Fifth Avenue, telling each other what they would buy. On one occasion, one of the women says to the other that she would buy a fox fur coat. The other chides her, saying that everyone has a fox fur coat. The first woman changes her mind, without conviction, and says that she would buy a mink coat instead. Her friend tells her, also half-heartedly, that a mink would be much better. But then the first woman changes her mind. The first thing she would buy, she says, is a real pearl necklace. Shortly after this conversation, the two women come to a jeweler’s. They wonder how much the double-string pearl necklace in the window might cost. One guesses a thousand dollars. I cannot remember how much the other one says but I think it was at most three times the amount the first one believed. They dare each other to go in and ask. They enter and, in order to give themselves an air of self-confidence and to make out they have enough money to be interested in what they desire, or instead that they desire it so little that they are in a position to buy it, they put the question in a disdainful manner. The salesman politely informs them that the pearls cost three hundred thousand dollars (they are not just pearls, the necklace has an emerald clasp). They leave and, back out on the street, complain to each other. They are indignant. How could anyone dare to ask that much for that? A few steps further on, one of the two restarts the game. She has modified it and asks her friend what she would do if someone suddenly left her a hundred million dollars.

Tomás and I talked one night about what you should do about something you feel guilty about even though you are not sorry you did it.

I confessed that every ten years I am overcome by a fear that I will go to hell. We were walking along the street where I did what I am sometimes afraid will send me to hell, which is also something I feel guilty about even though I do not regret doing it. It is a long street. Just as we were setting off down it, Tomás told me that in buying the lottery ticket, he was paying in order to imagine what he would do and what he would be able to desire if he won. Thinking about it without a pretext, driven solely by want, did not really stir hope but instead barely offered a subject to ponder over.

In contrast, on reading the prize-winning number on the ticket, he made two days out of one, for a while.

I sometimes think it is true that you always know what time it is without needing to look at a clock or the sun. Guessing the time is one of those things that any healthy person can do. Moreover, when you remember something you did, you can always say what time of day you did it. Perhaps you also always know the price of things without needing to ask.

Now that you have read the paragraph above, which is so out of place, you should take a dollar, a peso, or one of any currency and imagine that that money is mine. You do not need to send it to me or keep it or spend it on something I specify. Spend it on whatever you like or give it to someone else, but when you do, consider that it is my money you are handing over. The relationship thus established between you and me, will 37

Five Acts of Money

it represent the relationship forged and diluted at the moment you read and then stop reading what I have written? Or will it endorse it? And that relationship, is it a transaction or a circulation?

Unlike Tomás, I find it difficult to say what I would do if I suddenly came into a lot of money. Though I can try to desire a swimming pool of my own to swim in. Rather than playing at saying what I would do if I were given a million dollars, I prefer to imagine that everything I do during the day has a price: a hundred dollars for brushing my teeth, fifteen hundred for taking my dog for a walk in the morning, four thousand for taking her out again in the evening, ten thousand dollars for eating an egg at midday, fifty dollars if at that very moment I peak through the blinds and look at what is going on outside, another three hundred if I feel the urge to do so but do not, a thousand dollars for retelling Dorothy Parker’s story, and a hundred thousand if I put more money in my version than in the original.

Accounts

She never expected to become a teacher, which is what she ended up as once the future shrank. Nevertheless, she had invested a lot of afternoons in being a teacher. When she had learned how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, the game of the class list became her favorite. She would sit at the desk in the study at her grandparents’ home, her back to the window, facing towards the door, and she would invent a list of thirty girls’ names, each with its own surname. Alongside each name, she drew eight boxes in which she put the marks (from zero to five, with exact decimals) that each of the girls had got in the exercises assigned during the course of the day. One box was for the grade for a written composition in the Spanish class; one was for an exercise in the music class; another for the math exam. The last box gave the overall mark for each pupil. The game lasted for several hours. It consisted solely of inventing names in alphabetical order and giving them grades. She looked up and positioned her class in the space between the window and the door: a pair of twins, a beautiful blonde girl, another orphan, and herself. She got five in everything bar one subject. The game would end and she would write a letter of congratulations to the mother of her best pupil. The letters described her by emphasizing a different virtue each day. Those letters were worth a million.

She had learned to add and subtract from an arithmetic book that had drawings of gold coins in it. She studied at night before going to sleep, tucked up in a bed that was not hers. Her mother sat beside her, holding the book. The bed was in her grandparents’ house, where she would be living while her parents went through their divorce proceedings. She looked at the coins and said how many there were and how many were left. She read them and said how many pesos they added up to. She fell asleep and dreamed. During the day, she would occasionally see real money if her grandfather gave her twenty pesos to go and buy a comic. Her mother did not allow her to touch money with her bare hands. She had to use sheets of toilet paper to take the bills and coins to avoid catching germs.

Money was dirty like the ground.

There was an unmarried aunt living in her grandparents’ house as well. This aunt used to go to the movies. After the film, the aunt went to a 38

Carolina Sanín

café where they served cappuccino coffee with complimentary chocolate coins. On Fridays, when she had added up the drawn coins, instead of going to sleep and dreaming she would lie awake, waiting for those fake coins. When she was younger, her father had taken her into the vault of the Banco de la República, Colombia’s National Treasury, where he worked.

They descended underground. Someone opened the heaviest door in the world by turning a wheel that looked like that of a ship. The gold ingots that lined the walls represented bills and coins. There, in this vault, was the spirit of all the money people used to buy things; therein was the value of things. Her father safeguarded it. Not long afterwards, her father would be as absent as millions of others, like the lottery prize. But he had taught her that serious yet smiling word, “ingots”. In the future, she would choose to study words rather than numbers as she would feel that, in visiting the gold with her father, she had already seen every number.

The End of Money

My wallet contains a compartment for coins. Amongst those that enter and then leave, there is a Cuban coin given to me by my friend Álvaro, who sells old books. I do not remember exactly when I received this coin. It must have been at least six months ago. I have kept it ever since. It is worth three pesos, an unusual amount to find written on a coin. On one side, it says “Patria o muerte” (Homeland or death) above a portrait of Che Guevara. Perhaps they are not alternatives; perhaps the “o” (or) implies that homeland and death are almost synonymous, almost indistinguishable, like when someone says “red or crimson.”

It does not seem normal for a coin to carry the word three; equally it does not seem appropriate for a coin to bear the word death. This coin is rarely alone in the purse section of my wallet. Every day, when I go to pay for something, I open the purse and remember that in it I have a coin that I cannot use to pay for anything, a gift from another world. And then the coin seems to me to be a word rather than a number. I have to take it out into the light because by touch alone I can easily mistake it for a two-hundred-peso coin. Then I put it back into the purse and this action, repeated so often, is becoming a nuisance. But I have not put the coin elsewhere because I cannot think of anywhere to put it. In my jewelry box?

In my library? Perhaps it will stay in my wallet till I die. I mean to say, until after I die. It will have been the most constant of all my things and the one to have lived in a place with the most inconstant of populations.

A twenty-dollar bill was once taken away from me at a K-Mart store.

When I went to pay with it, I did not know it was counterfeit. As soon as she touched it, the woman at the cash register knew. She called her boss, who folded the bill in half and used a pair of scissors to cut out a triangle along the fold. When he unfolded the bill, the triangle turned into a diamond-shaped hole. The man with the scissors put the bill up to his eye and looked at me through the diamond. I do not know if the real twenty dollars I had exchanged for my time stopped existing for me when someone gave me twenty fake dollars or when someone destroyed them right in front of me.

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Five Acts of Money

I wanted to begin to learn a bit more about money. I thought about getting a credit card or a mortgage and going into debt in order to feel a sense of certainty that I would live a long time, and I did not do it. I sat down to watch a documentary on the latest financial crisis. I paused it time and time again and made the people being interviewed repeat their explanations, which I did not understand. I tried not to fall asleep. Banking jargon, “derivatives”, for instance, crept into my dreams, mutated and became a kind diagnosis that I would dictate to myself from the countryside. As I tossed and turned in my sleep, I thought I had discovered that, in order to think about money as if I had moved on to the next part of my life, I had to replace accounting with trust.

I borrowed a book on securities from a law student who attends the workshop on narrative that I give at the university and who is also my cousin. I read that a check can still be drawn on after the person who wrote it has died. I already knew that you carry on paying after death. As a girl, I was fascinated by checks, which were like bills on which you could write, bills that included questions you had to answer.

I began to write about money on May 22. That first day, I worked for an hour and had a rest, and then I read in a newspaper that, according to the prophecy of a man called Harold Camping, the world should have ended the day before. A lot of money had been paid for this end of the world that never happened. Across the whole of the United States and in other countries, Camping and his followers had had 2,000 billboards put up to tell people that May 21, 2011, was going to be the last day. They had spent the fruit of the days of their lives announcing their death. The press talked of the new poverty of a man who had donated his life savings to the erection of the billboards. A lot of coverage, curiously, was given to those who had spent on the billboards the money they had set aside for their children’s university education. Hope was the end of money.

One last thing: I have often watched on television the first day of the lives of sea turtles. The mothers lay their eggs in the sand and leave.

After a while, the baby turtles break out of their eggs and scramble down the sand towards the sea. Birds are vigilant on this day, the first for the turtles but one like any other to them, and hurl themselves at the newborn creatures. They rain down like arrows and devour the turtles, one after another, hundreds upon hundreds. A few turtles make it to the water and start to swim. But for the other million, their first day is their last. They have a shell, eyes, speed, color and hunger, and all this is merely expenditure for death. The birds eat, the species survives thanks to the few turtles that manage to escape, and I am moved at the sight of this law, as I sit in front of the television, incapable of calculating the value of all this life, a life so brief.

Translated from the Spanish by Sue Brownbridge.

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Carolina Sanín

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Zachary Formwalt

On 1 February 1845, Karl Marx signed a contract with the publisher Carl Leske for his first major work on political economy, a two-volume work entitled Kritik der Politik und NationalĂśkonomie, to be based largely on the manuscripts he had written in Paris in 1844. Signed in Paris, where Marx was living at the time, the contract provided Marx with a 1,500-franc advance on the 3,000-franc fee to be paid in full upon completion of the two volumes. Two years later Leske cancelled the contract with Marx, who never finished the work.

The photograph here shows the verso of Marx’s copy of the contract, which is held in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

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We have a tendency to think that we have left Hegel behind.

But the suggestion of such a shift in recent philosophical and intellectual history still has to contend with the overwhelming impact his thought continues to have. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” 1 or Arthur Danto’s reinterpretation of the “death of art” 2 seemed to indicate that by the 1990s we had reached a point of no return and a momentum in the triumph of Hegelianism in Western philosophy: Continental thought had even gained the United States… After having had such a passion for Hegelian dialectics, we are now keen on forgetting about this, keen on remaining oblivious about Hegel’s influence on the genealogy of our minds. Francis Fukuyama saw in the end of dialectical, hence historical, tensions between liberalism and communism a sign of the end of history, understood as a contradiction in itself. In the same way, Arthur Danto is famed for stating that, in the context of a capitalistic society the work of art, as it was created by Andy Warhol, could not have the same sacredness as before, and therefore did not assume the very nature of what was once art. Both “ends” come from Hegel’s analysis, as developed in his posthumously published Lectures on Aesthetics (1835) and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837).

Raising the issue of “the end of money” provides a perfect occasion to re-think Hegel’s legacy insofar as the expression in itself manifests a Hegelian conception of history, reflecting the idea that history has a beginning and an end. It should be noted as well that this finitude appears to be, not really an ideal, but perhaps more of a possibility.

In other words, the end of money could be purely a utopian projection, but it might also be a very practical reality – one that we experience, even unknowingly, even though it may have changed our world and the perception we have of it.

Indeed, money appears to be more and more immaterial and fictional, less and less actual. Money isn’t money anymore. It isn’t the solid, heavy stuff it once was.

In a way, it has become a concept, the reality of which we believe. But we could choose to stop living in a delusional state. We could refuse to keep using money, referring to it even. A proper response to the current events would be for us to say “we don’t want money anymore. We want something else,” whatever that may be, which raises a totally different question: What could we want instead of money? Trade, Ideals, Freedom, Nothing, Nothingness?

The very idea of the “end of money,” although now not totally unlikely, seems incredibly problematic. It is apparently purely formal, even formalistic, but it relates to the deeper questions of contemporary life. So maybe they should be dealt with seriously. As Plato said in the

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The End of Coins, the Triumph of Money, and the Disruptive Revolution of Art

1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York, 1992.

2 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997.

Theaetetus, soma sema, the “body” (soma) is at the same time a “tomb” and a “sign” (sema). As a concept, the “end of money” obviously enjoys both characteristics of sema.

As a consequence, it would appear relevant to conceive of money in the following terms: on the one hand, as a token of finitude, which is expressed through its semantics; and on the other hand, as a signal, something that would convey a certain meaning and indicate a proper direction. Our take on it should integrate these two aspects, as if we were handling a fiction, with the awareness that it is a fiction, which we nonetheless want to handle. The “end of money” thus appears as a provocative, yet ambiguous concept, that is knowingly conceived as fictional, although it is incredibly helpful in defining what our vision of the world should be, and then, actually is. Such a theme therefore bears in itself some elements of the Platonic muthos, in the sense that Socrates could tell his followers and his opponent Callicles, in the Gorgias: “Do pay attention to a very beautiful tale, that you will perhaps consider to be just a tale, but that I see as a reasonable discourse.” That is what the “end of money” is all about: a “tale” that is at the same time a “reasonable discourse,” depending on who proclaims it, and on whose face it is proclaimed.

In the context of an art center, the “end of money” could easily be taken as a parallel to Hegel’s “death of art,” according to which art lives past the end of its sanctity and its religiousness. Art appears as an essential phenomenon of history, and, as such, it mirrors the mutations of historical processes, entering a post-religious phase, which is fundamentally post-artistic as well. Post-art mirrors post-history.

It would hence be evident that art could not survive an era of trade and non-sacred thinking. In a way, maybe the death of art should be related to the development of money: indeed, currencies have played a key role in “disenchanting the world,” to recall Max Weber’s “die Entzauberung der Welt.” Since it has made the relations and the psychological horizon commercial, money has replaced sanctity – a statement that is, as it seems, a true commonplace of contemporary thinking.

Money, and not coinage, for the gap between those two words is immense. As Walter Benjamin famously pointed out in The Artwork at the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, coins were the first artworks that could be massively and pre-industrially reproduced. Indeed, they were at the very core of a tension between mass-production and rarity; art and money; sacredness and pragmatism. As such, they represent the very proof that a strange alchemy is under way in the interaction between these two entities, some sort of strange magic: if one follows the rules of the market,

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money expresses the value of art. Money defines art. And art is worth money. Such simple statements actually reflect fundamental issues. Should the value of art be necessarily related to physical, material trade tools, such as coins? And what does it actually mean that coins, the instrument of monetary trade, were the very first object to be part of the Duchampian revolution of the conception of the artwork?

It isn’t by chance that Duchamp’s last ready-made was actually a set of coins, first minted in 1964, under the title Drain Stopper, which was changed in 1967 for Marcel Duchamp Art Medal. Indeed, the artist-programmer of the 20th century was deeply aware of the discrepancy between the age of Ancient art, in which coins mattered, and the new age, in which they were turned into useless “medals.”

All this gives us more signs than we would actually need to assert that the birth of money in the form of coins had to do with the sanctity of the artwork. Money, at its very beginning, had a sense of sacredness, as is evidenced by the fact that the Latin word moneta (which means “the warner”) comes from the epiclesis of the goddess Juno. And the place where the mind was located was situated near the temple of that divinity, in Rome. In somewhat parallel fashion, the Greek word nomisma finds its roots in nomos, the “law,” a word which has of course deep religious implications, for instance in Sophocles’ Antigone. Indeed, in this tragedy from the 5th century B.C., Oedipus’ daughter, Antigone, has to choose between the human and the divine law, what she calls “the unwritten laws,” (nomima agrapta in Ancient Greek). As money was sacred, it was also perceived as an art form of some kind; the best example of this being Syracuse in the late 5th century B.C., where engravers such as Eukleidas, Kimon or Evainetos were allowed to sign the coins they designed. It clearly indicated that they were seen as having a potential artistic content.

The decadrachms, most importantly, have been presented as the first medals in history: with a value of ten times the regular drachm, they may have had more than trade value, having also been a gift from the powers that be to certain prominent or outstanding individuals. Numismatics represent the point of connection between art and money. But the increasing importance taken by money has overshadowed the monetary object in itself. When you need more and more money, you can no longer really consider the singular coin as an artwork, and focus on it in the exact same measure as you used to. If the monetary object in itself is not artistic anymore, or at least is no longer considered to be so, it must have an impact on the perception we have of it, and at the same time on the idea we have created for art, and for money.

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The End of Coins, the Triumph of Money, and the Disruptive Revolution of Art

The evolution of money has had an impact on the very survival of artistic procedures, and has been considered as a serious threat to creation and its ontology – or to say it otherwise: its mysticism. Coins originated in art. And for a long time, in particular in the form of medals, they existed in an ongoing dialogue with art. They were material, in the same way as the artwork – be it a sculpture or a painting – was material. For instance, an artist such as Pisanello (c. 1395 – c. 1455) was at the same time a medal engraver and, of course, a painter. But now coins tend to disappear, to become a relic from an object-related past.

And money has become more and more of a new contemporary authority, following an inverse movement to the evolution of coins, that could be summarized in the duality between face value and the pure concept of money, the fiction, the muthos, in which we deeply believe. For a long time, art has dealt with the representation of coins: painters such as Hans Memling, Titian, or Lorenzo Lotto figured coins in their works. The problem now is that artists have to find ways to stage money’s dematerialization, and, maybe, its material end. During the Renaissance, coins were part of the collectible goods that every aristocrat was required to own, in order to show his culture and his position in society. As a consequence, it was normal to picture them in portraits, because they were part of the representation of people as characters. Now, not only numismatic collections are incredibly old-fashioned, but also coins themselves are not very useful anymore. Artists have the duty to find ways to deal with that issue, that coins do not matter anymore – banks, wire transfers are the real thing. Money is something you cannot feel – or, as the Emperor Vespasian once stated: “it doesn’t smell.”

He was not talking about wire transfers, but, two thousand years ago, he could not have found a more proper way to express today’s situation.

Money in itself appears to be a story, a symbol, which you can believe in or not. Of course, we are conditioned to believe in it, and to use it, and to live in a monetarized economy. However, it would be difficult to doubt the fact that, according to an Hegelian perspective, the time of coins and the time of art were simultaneous, and as a consequence, the end of art comes with the end of coins, and, actually, the triumph of money. Indeed, art was material, it was a presence of transcendence. Coins were a material presence as well, and a sign inside of a system of values, with enough balance between materiality and symbolism. Money is no longer material. It goes from one computer to another and, sometimes, but only sometimes, you can use it to buy some element of the ancient system of materiality – such as a gold ingot, if really necessary. But – if there is little debate 48

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over the fact that money is no longer a physical reality – what about art?

Hence, it appears that, if money has “murdered” art, then one should wonder whether the end of money, its finitude, its “death,” to use Hegel’s word, would likely consist of a rebirth of art, a renaissance. The end of money would represent the limit for an age that has relied on it to finance and then annihilate the sacredness of creativity.

It would actually symmetrically reverse the whole process: money slowly circumscribes art, hence diminishes it, and finally destroys it, whereas a rebirth of art would not have this processual dimension. It would be an “event,” in Alain Badiou’s sense of the word, which would create a void, that could, or could not, be filled by art and by what George Steiner once called the “grammars of creation,” according to the idea that all forms of production are part of the same entity, which is art, and that they follow different languages. But how could grammar be shaped again, after such a disruptive revolution? How could art find rules after the materiality in its system of values has been questioned?

That would be the science-fictional problem of art, which could be addressed with the very nature of artistic production: alchemy, and what Kader Attia once called the “artists’s philosopher’s stone.” In such a crisis inside of the system of values, inside of the construction and the definition of art, a lot seems to be possible, and the artworld appears as the “safe haven” of every contemporary practice. And why not? But the end of coins, the end of a materiality inside trade, mimics the end of a need for materiality in art. It expresses the limits of the object – be it a coin or an actual painting. In the end, after this double “disruptive revolution,” the only question that should be raised remains: Is it worth it?

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Lili Reynaud-Dewar

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Lili Reynaud-Dewar

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Lili Reynaud-Dewar

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Tonel

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T h e E n d A l w a y s C o m e s Tw i c e Dessislava Dimova

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There are languages in which money is a word that is always used in the plural: dengi in Russian; pari in Bulgarian; peniaze in Slovak; bani in Romanian. It would thus seem that it was former communist societies that better understood the logic of capitalism. For capitalism’s defining quality is its plurality – the pluralization of money, which (when sufficiently multiplied) itself becomes capital. Drawing on this principle of multiplication, I would like to suggest that, unlike the radical view of “the” end as rupture in the utopia of modernism, the end that one can hope for in contemporary capitalism is not a singular event. Therefore the end of money too has to be treated in the plural (the ends of money). For while the media re-produce an abundance of crises, (aestheticizing these as ends) true ends have become almost impossible to identify. In light of this, I will propose that some ends of money might have already happened, albeit unnoticed – for instance, the end of money as a means for acquiring free time.

After creation comes re-creation1

Free time is always defined by its other – the time of work.

From the perspective of work, free time can be seen both as a means and as an end. As a means, free time is seen exclusively as the time required for the regeneration of the capacity for work; it is the time of leisure. As an end, free time is time freed of necessity and work, and is thus the basic purpose of life. It is in this latter sense that the notion of free time promises something beyond simply leisure, and possibly closer to the notion of freedom.

Thinking work and free time in opposition is not a modern invention. Only the choice of one as the measure of the other has shifted. In Antiquity, for instance, work was perceived as constitutive of the noble vocations of life, such as contemplation and philosophy. Work was defined through free time, as that time which was un-free, enslaved by necessity. This is attested to in both the Latin and the Ancient Greek languages, in which working or doing business literally translates as “not-leisure” – ascholia (work) was, in Greek, the opposite of schole (leisure), just as in Latin negotium (work) was the opposite of otium (leisure). In industrial and post-industrial societies free time is a notion firmly rooted in an ideology of work. Work as an activity measured, valued, and paid for in time, becomes the measure of all activity. Free time is then a kind of surplus, one of the many leftovers of industrial production that needs to be accordingly managed and made profitable.

The question of free time has further philosophical bearings, as it is ultimately a question of what kind of activity constitutes work and what kind of activity (or non-activity) 59

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1 Chapter title in Vladislav Todorv, Red Square, Black Square, Albany: SUNY Press, 1995, p. 97.

constitutes free time.2 Or to formulate it differently: What is the relationship between free time and productivity on the one hand, and free time and leisure on the other?

In his 1920 essay Laziness: The Real Truth of Mankind, Kasimir Malevich reveals the confusion between the two notions of free time – as a means and as an end – and proposes a philosophical account of idleness.3 In line with the ancient Greeks, Malevich sees the truth of life as a state of pure inactivity and contemplation. He suggests that free time is not a surplus derived from labor but the basis of human existence. Every human being naturally strives towards idleness and freedom from the burden of labor.

Labor has been falsely valorized, both in capitalism and in socialism. Such obsession with work and productivity obscures the true virtue of man – and the true meaning of life – which is not simply leisure but laziness.4 The purpose of any work activity is no other than to produce the conditions for time that is free of labor and full of all the enjoyments associated with this freedom. “Money,” Malevich then goes on to say, “is nothing else but a little piece of laziness.” 5 Thus in capitalist society the working class is the mass force producing the conditions for the leisurely life of the few. Labor is paid time, which ensures those who work can buy free time; and in capitalism free time is accumulated like any other surplus. In socialism, by contrast, money should play no role. Both work, and the resulting free time, should be equally distributed among the workers.

Thanks to technology, heavy work can be taken over by machines and free time can become more and more available to the point of completely eliminating the time necessary for labor, at least for humans. Malevich’s surprising antiproductivist concept daringly criticizes socialist society for falling into the trap of endless productivity and forgetting the real purpose of labor – the end of labor itself.6

These ideas testify to Malevich’s own mystical inclinations and should be seen in relation to his theory of non-objectivity, where Man as well as art (as his creative expression) attain a state of divine perfection in pure thought.7 Even activities that are not labor per-se but are rather focused on crafting the perfection of Man – like the sciences and art – ultimately end in a divine state of inactivity and contemplation. Malevich seemed to hesitate on the question of art, as this is activity not born out of necessity, and thus not exactly labor. On the contrary, art is an activity that contributes to the development of mankind, and as such is a stage in the achievement of pure idleness. The general tendency of Malevich’s economy of nature is not entropy or more activity but stillness. Eventually, once perfected, even creative efforts should lead to pure contemplation.8 Thus Malevich takes the communist 60

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2 Throughout the text I have avoided the distinction between “labor” and “work” which would adhere to a separation between the notion of heavy material “labor” and that of creative and immaterial labor implied in the term “work.” Rather both terms are used interchangeably, in the more general sense of a productive and remunerated activity fully inscribed in society.

3 From the French edition, Kazimir Malevich, La Paresse comme vérité effective de l’homme, Paris: Editions Allia, 2007.

4 In the original Russian version, Malevich uses the word “лень” (len), which means laziness and inactivity, not unlike the way they were impersonated in Goncharov’s character Oblomov, in the 1859 novel which took the title character’s name.

5 La Paresse, p. 15.

6 Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930) describes precisely this obsession with work as an end in itself that became characteristic of the early soviet society and later developed into the theatrically performed rituals of labour in late socialism. The workers in the novel dig a pit without knowing for what it serves, but the process, the endless work is what is important.

There is no space for questioning and contemplation, happiness is within work itself.

7 Malevich develops these thoughts in God is not Cast Down (1922).

8 God himself had to work, Malevich proposes, not a heavy physical work, but the creative type of work – simply imagining and pronouncing words, not unlike an artist. Once his work has achieved perfection he could do nothing more but eternally contemplate the wisdom of his accomplishment. La Paresse, p. 29.

utopia to its theological conclusion, where man’s constant striving for a state of full development and freedom culminates in a motionless state of divine perfection, a “white thought.”

The Russian avant-garde had a complicated relationship to the time outside of work. With the possibility of a growing amount of free time that machines were supposed to offer, concerns of how such time could be spent perturbed even the most radical thinkers. The logic of production inevitably invaded free time and turned it into a surplus that had to be carefully folded back into the ideology of production. Melnikov’s famous project for a Laboratory of Sleep (1929), for example, proposed to accommodate workers collectively and to provide them with the best possible conditions for sleep and physical recuperation such as centrally regulated temperature and humidity, calming sounds, slightly rocking beds.9 Another architect’s project – Nikolay Kuzmin’s miners’ commune (1929) – proposed a perfectly calculated timing for every single activity outside of work, from sleeping, eating and washing, to the time that it takes to walk from the dormitory to the bathroom, or the minutes one requires to get dressed.10 In his minutely timed project, a total of four hours was dedicated to recreation. Although he suggested this time be filled with sports or culture, Kuzmin nevertheless left these as the only unspecified time, insisting that: “Here it is life itself that will determine how time is spent…” 11 We can also consider the popular “workers clubs” (in the late 1920s Melnikov famously designed several of them), which were meant to provide the physical and conceptual framework for spending the workers’ free time efficiently for the full development of their personality.

Under capitalism, free time has also been submitted to well-defined – albeit apparently less strict – forms of organization. Here we can take Adorno’s account of the collapsing of free time into its opposite via the limited but perfectly socially-integrated enjoyments proposed by the leisure industry.12 For Adorno, free time in capitalist society is “nothing more but a shadowy continuation of labor,” a notion that goes beyond the sense of such time serving the recuperation of working power.13 Free time collapses into leisure, but this is not the leisure envisaged by the likes of Aristotle or Malevich. Besides its recuperative function, free time under capitalism is defined by a compulsion of society towards productivity, work, and accumulation that makes free time an annex to labor, but also an empty moment that must be filled with appropriate leisure activities. These activities must not be severed from the logic of the economy that engenders free time in the first place. For they are, in fact, the activities where all the money accumulated through 61

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9 S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

10 Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution, New York: Georg Braziller, 1970, pp. 152 – 54 (quoted in Vladislav Todorv, Red Square, Black Square, Albany: SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 97 – 98).

11 Todorv, p. 97.

12 Theodor Adorno, “Free Time,” in T. Adorno, The Culture Industry, London; New York: Routledge, 1991.

13 Adorno, p. 194.

labor is to be spent, folding consumption into the cycle of production. We can shudder with Adorno, who possessed a particular talent for identifying the hopelessness of life, as we recognize the hobbies, tourist packages and sun-tanning rituals, which defined the leisure industry in the late 1960s, persisting to this day. For Adorno, free time – as defined by the leisure industry – becomes the very symbol of unfreedom.

These thoughts are echoed in Clement Greenberg’s essay “The Plight of Culture” (1953), where the critic argues that the logic of industrial (and post-industrial) production dictates the status of leisure on almost every level.

With mass production comes mass entertainment, and everything else follows, en masse. The classes educated for leisure and appreciation of the arts and sciences start to disappear. Even for the privileged, free time begins to be filled with the leisurely pleasures of the lower classes (cinema and popular music) and resembles less and less the truly idle existence that can be devoted to the arts and to philosophy.14 Even the rich have to work today, notes Greenberg, as professional accomplishment has become the most valued quality. This inevitably changes the situation of the arts, which traditionally have been related to the support and the connoisseurship of the leisure classes. Following on these thoughts, a few decades later, Boris Groys suggests that the art world, and artists themselves, have become their own elite, the only “class” able to fully appreciate art as a true form of leisure outside of the mass notions of leisure.15 Yet, turning the producers into their own public, art then performs the ultimate fusion of production and consumption, already present in the structural bind of work and leisure. Greenberg already sensed this shift by hesitantly proposing the possibility of placing art straight in the middle of work.16

White Noise

Technically “white noise” is a saturation of different frequencies in which every sound has acquired the same value and none of the individual elements can be distinguished anymore. But this state of non-differentiation finds a more metaphorical claim in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), where the fear of death organizes daily life as a constant effort to escape or forget the end (which is no longer distinguishable from the phobia against it). Thus white noise becomes a metaphor for a society where the end is always lingering but is never quite allowed to happen.

The immobile state of contemplation (or “white thought”) dreamt by Malevich has morphed today into its opposite – a permanent, self-generating activity that has 62

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14 Clement Greenberg, “L’état de la culture,” in Art et Culture, Paris: Editions Macula, 1988. (I am working with the French translation of “The Plight of Culture.”

15 Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” in e-flux journal #24 (http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/view/226) Returning to the question of money, the concept of artists as constituting their own elite audience does not quite answer the problem of who is actually paying for the avant-garde (Groys distinguishes it from the more spectacular and popular products of contemporary art in general). If connoisseurship and financial support have shifted apart irreparably – one remaining a sort of avant-garde elitism and the other a form of “life-style” (the elitism of the masses) – what (financial) possibilities remain for avant-garde art? I assume Groys implies the need for public and state support, but the problem is worth further examination.

16 Ibid. Groys quotes the English version of “The Plight of Culture”: “The only solution for culture that I conceive of under these conditions is to shift its center of gravity away from leisure and place it squarely in the middle of work.”

transformed both work and its other (free time) into a kind of “white noise.”17

The critics of early industrialization were fighting to transform the production process so as to include the worker in the consumption end of the industrial cycle, thus allowing for more people to consume the ever-expanding production of industrial societies. In The Right To Be Lazy (1883), Paul Lafarge suggests that capitalists should allow workers to access some of the goods they have produced, and even let them take loans so as to be able consume more.18 Today these rights have not only been secured, but there is also an opposite tendency: All consumers, even the most privileged ones, are included in the production process so that everybody participates in the perpetuation of a new kind of consumptive labor, branded as leisurely activity. Today, freedom from work has reached a point of undifferentiation from endless productivity: Creative labor, with its flexible working hours, is exemplified in the “creative industries” of today wherein art is both a model and a part. With this lack of differentiation between worktime and free time, money – which was once exchanged for work time to become the promise of leisure – now seems to bring the possibility of a more complete involvement in the process of producing value. “White noise” becomes the space of a total undifferentiated involvement in this process of production as circulation as consumption.

The Russian avant-garde dreamt of objects that would be, not simple commodities (consumable and disposable), but counter-subjects or comrades whose role would be to accompany the worker in the process of his transformation into a new human. Equally, the artwork had to lose its role as an ornamental, opaque object and become a transparent thing, mimetic of the process of production. As material things were seen to tie the new human down to the world of old values, this new concept of the artwork required a new type of object. Ironically, these dreams have come true today, not only within the reality of art but above all in the allure of commodities that require engagement and participation in an already hyper-productive environment.

This allure is no longer purely aesthetic, as aesthetic enjoyment implies disengagement and disinterest and is more akin to unproductive leisure. Nor is it about provoking and satisfying desire, as enjoyment is now a means – a way of working – rather than an end in itself. In fact the commodity is not about consuming anymore, as consumption itself has become a kind of work. Commodity aesthetics – the pure allure and promise of the commodity beyond its immediate use – has been replaced by an ethics of consumption according to which one does not simply consume things; one participates in global systems 63

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17 Don Delillo, White Noise, London: Picador, 2011.

18 “Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they have built up for you out of their flesh; you want to help business, get your goods into circulation, – here are consumers ready at hand. Give them unlimited credit.” Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ch02.htm.

of economic and ecological distribution. One eats fair-trade chocolate (and in doing so contributes to a more just distribution of wealth), washes and cleans with “bio” detergent and soap (thus helping to offset the impact of living on the environment) and wears lipstick (contributing to cancer research).19

Renzo Martens’ famously controversial film Enjoy Poverty (2009) offers a commentary, albeit an indirect one, on certain historical and geographical aspects of this development from commodity aesthetics to an ethics of consumption. The film shows the artist on a quest to teach locals in Upper Congo to profit from the global demand for images of African poverty by becoming photographers of their own condition, taking this role from the hands of foreign photographers and selling the image of their own suffering to the West. The scandalous and depressing element of Martens’ project is precisely the schema it proposes, which amounts to re-inserting those who were at the margins, living in exclusion (and on the verge of survival) back into the world of capitalist exchange, suggesting that for the locals the possibility of emancipation can only be envisaged within the bounds of capitalism itself. Hence, Martens’ system proposes replacing an ethically unacceptable form of capitalist exploitation with a form of inclusion for the exploited as producers of the new ethical commodities.

But this inclusion is a paradoxical one: The African workers in the film can enter the system of exchange only by remaining poor, by trading not labor but poverty itself.

Certainly the locals do not see themselves as new creative entrepreneurs. Like the early industrial workers in the West, they simply want better wages and better living conditions for their families. In a way Martens seems to suggest that the figure of the worker exploited for his own sweat and blood, a figure that has almost disappeared in the West, is eventually going to evolve in Africa too. Still the transformation the artist tries to impose is hardly his own invention. In Brazil, favela tourism has been for years a similarly controversial example, and has expanded today to other locations. Local children in Delhi can now also earn a living (and ultimately even manage to leave the slums) by serving as tour guides, precisely by selling the sight of their own shantytowns to tourists. That this business is run by local foundations surely contributes to the tourists’ enjoyment – the good feeling that, rather than paying for a service, they are engaging in charity.

If Martens’ film is symptomatic, it is so not only because it refuses the ethical differentiation of good / bad, victim / perpetrator that the viewer expects. Rather, the film operates within the gaps that open between different historical and geographical structures of capitalism. It reveals 64

Dessislava Dimova

19 One of the characters in White Noise, makes the following remark in regards to the fictional supermarket “generic food”, in white, unappealing, no brand package: “This is the new austerity.

Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me.

I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It’s like World War III. Everything is white. They’ll take our bright colours away and use them in the war effort.” In: Don Delillo, White Noise, London: Picador, 2011, p. 22.

not simply the general inequality of the system, but the historical and geographical imbalances within the relation of the production, exchange and consumption. (The impoverished Congolese worker has to “catch-up” to the absolute equivalence of these previously differentiated processes within the capitalist cycle). It also reveals how the changing configuration eventually destabilizes the possibility of art to act as a critical agent, and how critical reflexes need to be re-evaluated with the shift of historical and geographical contexts. Finally, Martens’ experiment proves that, for the moment, the white noise economy remains predominantly, and not surprisingly, well, white.

W h a t ’s a r t g o t t o d o w i t h i t ?

In the white noise produced by the Western system as a form of all encompassing “creative” activity (a type of work that equals its opposite, leisure), it is art that best represents the capitalist ideal of this voluntary and inventive work. In the economy of white noise, art epitomizes a concept of capitalized free time where leisure expands into an artistic and ultimately productive activity.

Already in 1907, Georg Simmel was pointing out that the level of abstraction that money had introduced into society was leading to an unprecedented importance of intellectual work, of ideas and activities not directly engaged in economy.20 And indeed today we cannot see intellectual labor as something separate from the economy.

In all this, we must consider the fact that creativity and access to high culture and advanced thought have also become part of the lives of more and more people today – particularly those who traditionally had no access to intellectual work, either as producers, or as consumers.

In the era of white noise, everybody and everything becomes a producer simply by existing, by virtue of being switched on to the Internet, or to the world in general.

The artwork is probably the best representative of the white noise economy as it generates value not according to the labor time invested in it, or via its exchange, or via the promise of happiness it offers. The artwork generates value simply by being plugged into the system of the art world.

The art world is curiously Janus-faced in that it is both the example and the exception to the world at large.

Paradoxically, only by reflecting the conditions of the white noise economy, can it insist on some separation between the general white noise creativity and what is specifically art. Eventually, by thinking of itself as work, art is capable of opening up a space to reflect upon what free time as a distinctively “free” condition could be.

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20 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London; New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 152.

Art and free time express a form of excess, a surplus. And in capitalism, all surplus must be recycled and rendered profitable. A lot of the efforts to counter the existing equation of art and leisure as activities outside of work have overlooked the reality of the white noise economy. Thus, the effort to position the role of art as something outside of the all-encompassing productive circuit – as a model for true idleness – has largely failed. Few people today probably remember the 6th Caribean Biennial (2000) organized by Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffman, which presented no art but simply provided a vacation for the organizing curators and invited artists, with no obligation towards the public.21 The project echoed older works by Cattelan like How to get a museum-paid vacation (1995) and one imagines that it was intended as a critique of the business of producing art and the spreading of biennial tourism. The major failure of the concept, however, lay in its avoidance of any elaboration on what art as free, non-productive time, could mean. The problem did not lie in the deliberate arrogance of “let’s use all the money poured into the spectacle of art to produce nothing.” The problem was rooted in the fact that the biennial did nothing more than reinforce the empty notion of free time as tourism and far niente; it thus presented art within a space still clearly differentiated between labor and leisure.

There exist more complex attempts to align art, leisure and work, but these have rarely done more than underline the radical separation between the world of work and the world of art. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the worker actually figures in artworks as living and breathing “material.” The fascination with the figure of the worker seems more like nostalgia for a historical situation that obliterates the artist’s contemporary position in the sphere of work. In this respect, Santiago Sierra’s controversial use of foreign workers comes to mind. Besides the moral issues associated with the restaging of the conditions of migrant labor inside the art exhibition, which involve the artist and the public in the act of exploitation, Sierra’s work seems to suggest that the art world, as a site of somewhat perverse, socially-conscious spectacle, is radically separated from the sphere of work.

For Malevich and Adorno art, as intellectual work, ended the distinction between labor and leisure. The white noise economy has certainly taken an ironic revenge on this claim. Today art is more or less fully integrated into the culture industry, as the sheer amounts of visitors, exhibitions, events, and money invested in art attest. Art represents the poster image of the kind of work promoted by the white noise economy that does not separate itself from free time. While, on one level, art as a mass spectacle 66

Dessislava Dimova

21 On the biennial see for instance Jenny Liu, “Trouble in Paradise”, Frieze magazine #51 (http://www.frieze.com/ issue/article/trouble_in_paradise/).

guarantees the relative stability of the art system, on another level, art’s vitality is guaranteed by the masses of people engaged with it in one way or another, representing the shadowy economy and the true working force behind the art world. These are the two essential elements defining the terms of art’s engagement with leisure and work. At the center is the artist, or the artwork – these singular and privileged manifestations of both freedom (Adorno) and idleness (Malevich). Behind them (or rather within them) is hidden the whole system that integrates the unfreedom of both the leisure industry and the underpaid labor that creates the buzzing activity in the world of art.

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Tonel

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Appendix

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Floorplan Witte de With

2nd floor [7]

[6]

[8]

[15]

[12] [0]

[1]

[1]



[2]

[13]





 [1]





[3]

[10]

3rd floor

[11]

[3]

[4]

[3]

[6] [6]

[12]

[17]

 [5]

[16]



[9]

[14]

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The End of Money

The End of Money 2 2 . 5 . – 7 . 8 . 2 011

Group Exhibition

[ 0 ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ]

National Geographic Magazine Zachary Formwalt Christodoulos Panayiotou Tonel Hadley+Maxwell Peter Fischli & David Weiss Vangelis Vlahos Tomás Saraceno Matts Leiderstam Lili Reynaud-Dewar Maha Maamoun Agnieszka Kurant Toril Johannessen Pierre Bismuth Alexander Apóstol Goldin+Senneby Vishal Jugdeo Lawrence Weiner

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Exhibition Floorplan

Exhibition Guide

Introduction

The End of Moneyis a group exhibition about time and value: about time determining value and value determining our relationship to time. As the title suggests, this examination is oriented towards the phenomenon of money, as explored through the idea, or even utopia, of a post-monetary economy.

The title is thus meant to suggest a “horizon” beyond which the present material conditions of existence might be unsettled. What would become of our relationship to things, to the earth, and especially to others? Should money be factored out of reality and, more importantly, out of the collective memory?

[ 0 ]

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In the exhibition the visitor will find two issues of National Geographic Magazine. One is from June, 1974; the other one from June, 2004. That these two issues are exactly thirty years apart could be taken as a gag, for both magazines announce the same grim future: “Oil, the Dwindling Treasure,” (June, 1974) and then, thirty years later, “Think gas is expensive now? Just wait. You’ve heard it before, but this time it’s for real: we’re at the beginning of the end of cheap Oil” (June, 2004). If one wants to know what will happen thirty years from now all one has to do is go back to the 1974 issue, where a chart inserted on top of an aerial view of the Rotterdam port lays it out in oracular fashion. This chart, with its projection that oil will be gone by 2050, can be seen on the walls of Witte de With, and next to it the apocalyptic image of a highway on which cars have The End of Money

come to a standstill (presumably because oil has become unaffordable). Important for this exhibition is the fact that these two magazines construct an eternal return of the same (to use a Nietzschean phrase), and in exact cycles (precisely thirty years, to the day). The fear of eternal recurrence – the gloomy thought that things will have to be endured over and over again – is the emotion that keeps societies focused on ideas of progress and development, the quintessential concepts of modernity. In the discourse of the Enlightenment, these two concepts (progress and development) were humanity’s way out of cyclical time.

But progress and development as conceived today need money and energy, and the end of either of these (of oil or currency) seems, from such a point of view, apocalyptic. Therefore, these two magazines are here as evidence that even capitalism, and a seemingly secular culture, cannot escape theological motifs such as the end of time and eternal recurrence.

Another “end” of money is also on the horizon here: one in which money has been effectively removed from reality. Such a gesture has been proposed many times in modern history, and is often associated with idealized “returns”: such as the return to nature, the return to a barter economy, and so on.

The argument against money is founded on the idea that it is exclusively the vehicle of capitalism, and that as long as money remains the principal form of economic exchange, capitalism will continue to totalize life with its own system of value. The utopian expectation of this logic – the abolition of money – is to release other forms of value and other con-

figurations of the social which are presumably suppressed by the continued existence of money.

a starting point for an historical exploration of how the changes in value of postage stamps at different points in time affected their design, ultimately arriving at two (the Weimar Republic in Germany, and the U.S. just before and during the Great Depression) periods when they were overprinted with symbols and numbers. A second contribution by Formwalt relates to his larger interest in places of capital that capitalism itself has made non-essential. This work is composed of a series of photographs whose common subject is Karl Marx, his famous book Capital and an unpublished manuscript. In one of these pictures one sees a hand holding a loupe to a photograph taken after Henry Fox Talbot’s 1845 calotype of the Royal Exchange, magnifying a statue that occupies the center of the frieze inserted in the tympanum.

As it turns out, this allegorical frieze was meant to be representative of Empire, exemplified by the different “subjects” represented (East Indians, Turks, Arabs, and so on), and brought home by an inscription that reads “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” An image of the same building was used on the cover of a Penguin edition of the second volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, in which this statue and the inscription beneath it have been obscured by the design (whether this is for ideological reasons shall remain as an open question).

A third photograph shows the back of the 1845 contract for the publication of Marx’s Critique of Politics and National Economy, which he put aside for some twenty years when it emerged, transformed into Das Kapital.

We have two speculative positions within the idea of “the end of money.” In one of these – the apocalyptic position – the end of money would bring about the end of progress and throw humanity “back” into a cyclical time. In the other – the utopian position – the abolition of money would allow for new and perhaps better social bonds and other relationships to the world to arise. But there remains a practical side to the problem that this exhibition aims to explore. In an empirical sense, money is the economy made tangible; it is the thing in which the economy is objectively experienced. This factual or factualizing aspect of money is most noticeable in economies that remain in touch with currency: in places where banknotes and coins are the principal mediators of exchange, and in which, as a consequence, currency circulates quite visibly and in large quantities. This is the case for most of the world.

For most of the world money constitutes a real problem, either because it is extremely rare (poverty) or overabundant but devalued (inflation). At the level of everyday life, money remains the form through which the political economy can be felt, and it comes endowed with larger social, political and economic phenomena.

[ 1 ]

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Artists

The informalization of currency under extreme economic conditions is the subject of Zachary Formwalt’s At Face Value. In this video the artist takes his father’s philatelic collection as Exhibition Guide

[ 2 ]

Christodoulos Panayiotou’s 2008 (2008) is a pile of shredded

banknotes that contains all the pounds that the Cypriot Central Bank recollected during its shift to the Euro, marking the country’s (geographically counter-intuitive) entry into the economic policies of the European Union. Clearly this is the most literal representation of an “end of money” that this exhibition contains. Nevertheless, this work belongs to an aspect of Panayiotou’s practice that is concerned with performing an archaeology of modern Cyprus. This work is less about an “end” of the pound, and more about a narrative of transitions (Cyprus’ entrance into the Euro Zone) and replacements (the euro replacing the pound) in which each denomination constitutes a formalization of an entire system of value (the pound is to an Imperial system what the euro is to a neo-liberal economic expansionism). Through this simple (though by no means easy) gesture, Panayiotou hints at another, perhaps utopian geography that has been gradually constructed through the dissemination of the euro. And in yet another sense, devoid of its historical connotations, this work also expresses a metaphysical problem that ties money to the artwork: Turned to shreds, these banknotes are now worthless as currency; yet the value of these shreds of paper is no longer nil because, by the hand of the artist, they have become art.

[ 3 ]

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A more whimsical treatment of the capitalist ethos is found in Earth – Moon – Box (Cosmic Trade) (2011), a large wall drawing by Tonel depicting an interplanetary conveyor belt.

Gigantic boxes coming from the moon drop off the belt onto Planet Earth. Whose “hand” is behind this “project”? What The End of Money

sort of naïve draftsman would envision such an image? At first glance, absurdist scenarios such as this one might seem innocently disconnected from the actual nature of the contemporary economic imagination, its limits and promises.

Coupled with the drawing’s naïve aesthetic, the whimsical ideas that it represents seem in need of a clearer understanding of the technological, political, and financial limits that it so irreverently disregards.

Nevertheless, in a not-sodistant past, between the 17th and 19th centuries, and even into the 20th, similar combinations of individual fancy and economic ingenuity were quite common. Here one might think of the city-machines and cityfactories designed by the earliest rationalists of land economy, the Physiocrats, and of the many subsequent entrepreneurial schemes for the exploitation of natural resources (gold, coal, agriculture) in the expansionist movements of the modern world.

Consequently, Tonel’s Cosmic Trade can be considered as a sketch of the subconscious history of 20th century economic dogma, as developed out of a series of naïvely optimistic schemes that emerged during the multiple movements of colonial expansion – a history that has no interest in limits, and which in this sense is responsible for persuading us that unlimited growth lies within the realm of “natural” probability (that Nature is limitless, even if the earth isn’t).

[ 4 ]

In the installation produced by the duo Hadley+Maxwell a fantastical scaffold runs diagonally across the room, from one wall to another. The design of the scaffold is a reference to the architectural images that

were painted on walls in the villas of Antiquity, and one in particular of a room in the Roman Emperor Nero’s famous Villa Aurea. In these frescoes of Roman Antiquity (which incidentally are assumed to constitute the origin of the grotesque) random collections of objects and fauna were placed within an architectural design that receded into the background, giving the illusion of unlimited depth, so that the viewer (the Emperor, ideally) could feel immersed in imagined realities. Thus, this scaffold seems allegorical of a desire for unlimited expansion associated with Empire. On the scaffold that Hadley+Maxwell have devised rest a series of objects, mostly hand-carved in wood, that the artists have altered, mainly by amputation. To these remaining objects the artists have given the name of “improperties.” These objects now exist in a space of transition between three visible states: the form given to them by the original carvers, the new form produced with the cut, and the state of raw material (mainly wood) revaled by the cut. In this state of transiton, each thing floats in a space of multiple appropriations and claims of property.

[ 5 ]

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In the version presented at Witte de With, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Sichtbare Welt (Visible World) (1987 – 2000) is a three-screen installation, with each screen playing a sequence of still images. Taken by the artists themselves, and produced over a period of several years, this work brings together peopleless views and landscapes from all over the world.

Somewhat post-apocalyptic, the images have a quality that evokes a very specific form of photographic engagement with Exhibition Guide

the visible world: National Geographic Magazine, in particular, comes to mind, with its carefully controlled aesthetic, through which authorship is, as it were, surgically removed – or, if not removed, then replaced, so that National Geographic becomes the ventriloquist of an army of photographers whose role is, in the end, to present the visible world as a field of equalized values. But Sichtbare Welt at once appropriates and works against this homogenizing code. Rather than attempting to ground the images in specific geopolitical realities, as National Geographic does, Fischli and Weiss’ work leaves the image radically uncategorized, suggesting perhaps that the visible world is a world that exists exclusively in the space of representation, without a real counterpart. In this sense, this work functions in opposition to a long history of practices of global scanning through which, to use Heideggerian terms, the world and the earth (die Welt und die Erde) have been brought together in a political field.

[ 6 ]

The work of Vangelis Vlahos engages with the recent history of Greece, endeavoring to decenter official narratives and open up potential new ones.

For The End of Money Vlahos is presenting two parallel works that explore themes relevant to the questions of economic and political expansionism that are central to this exhibition.

Respectively titled Grey Zones (2009) and Aircrafts on Ground (2009 – 2010), both of these works engage with recent history through collections of photographs found in the archives of Greek newspapers.

The two collections of images focus on two archetypically modern forms of mass-move-

ment (sea and air transportation) presenting an intersection between the idea of movement and the role or roles that Greece (with its uneasy place between Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa) has played in a larger political economy. Grey Zones is composed of a series of 75 photographs found in Greek newspaper archives, depicting U.S. and Russian ships sailing the Aegean. The ships represent treaties that the Greek state made, first with U.S. corporations, and later with the Russian Navy. Both were shortlived ventures (oil with the Americans, Navy ship repairs with the Russians) that now exist only as vestiges of the Greek state’s efforts to develop a (modern) economy around the Aegean Sea. Aircrafts on Ground takes its title from a term in aviation maintenance (AOG) which means that there is a technical problem that requires keeping an aircraft from flying. Giving this term a non-technical turn, Vlahos’ work consists of a collection of 57 images of airplanes from all over the world (Middle East, Europe, United States, and all over Africa) that were grounded in Greece for – to put it euphemistically – non-technical reasons: hijackings, threats, and so on.

[ 7 ]

Tomás Saraceno’s work was conceived around his utopian project of developing a cloud city, models of which have been presented on many occasions.

This cloud city would drift around the world, disregarding cultural and geo-political frontiers. The photograph presented here, titled Endless Big (2006), belongs to this project, and introduces a register of pictorialism that this exhibition also explores. This enigmatic picture

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The End of Money

shows a man standing before a horizonless landscape. Clearly drawing its structure from the representation of the “sublime in nature,” the idea of the Sublime is nevertheless filtered through a ubiquitous photographic trope, one that might be called “corporate”: Keeping in mind that this word means “united in one body,” Saraceno’s photograph of a lone looker before a horizonless landscape evokes an image-world of limitless imaginative projection.

Here an analogy is drawn between the expansionist projections of the human mind and those of the economy. The history of representations of the Sublime in Nature is thus the longue durée within which Saraceno’s work functions.

[ 8 ]

Simple, yet stunning, Matts Leiderstam’s Provenance is a two-channel video installation that explores the relationship between art, art dealing, real estate speculation and trade through a series of variations of the 16th century Dutch landscape painter Jan Van Goyen’s views of Dordrecht, as depicted from the South. The two projectors are focused on an oak panel that hangs in the middle of the room. On one side, a series of almost identical paintings slowly cross-fade into each other, giving the illusion of a changing atmosphere, as each painting displays different weather patterns. On the opposite side of the oak panel a projected text scrolls down.

The text has an introduction indicating the range of economic activities that van Goyen pursued – aside from painting, we are told, he was engaged in art dealing, real estate speculation, and the tulip bulb trade; we are also told that some of his drawings bear notes about the prospects for value in-

creases in the region depicted.

This economical but wonderfully evocative introduction is then followed by a catalogue raisonné containing the provenance, or record of ownership, for each painting. The oak panel on which the two videos are focused is, of course, a reference to the panels on which the paintings were executed.

Through this mimetic gesture, Leiderstam inserts a material that seems to have been left out of the painter’s economic imagination, as a sort of “blind spot”: wood, and specifically oak – a material that the painter did not incorporate into his economy in spite of it providing the skeleton for most architecture before the use of iron, not to mention a durable support for oil painting and religious iconography, as well the material of for barrels and furniture. ≥ see transcript on p. 127

[ 9 ]

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Wood is also the main material in Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s Inaccurrencies, a video-installation that involves a collection of objects which the artist acquired (in duplicate) during a trip to Madagascar. At the time of her trip, and still today, Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world.

Its economy is based on a rather insipid tourism – mostly French – around which the paraphernalia that is presented here has been invented and re-invented. Close attention to these objects will reveal the nature of this industry, one largely based on handicrafts that, to the Western eye, are but universal marks of economic poverty and its impact on local cultural identity. These are, in other words, things without a localized social life, which is to say, things that are meant to circulate elsewhere. What they Exhibition Guide

signify and how they circulate elsewhere is most likely unimportant to the local makers, who nevertheless may not have expected the rather bleak turn that they take in Lili ReynaudDewar’s work. The accompanying video shows two young women dressed identically, one younger looking than the other.

The two women exchange gifts, unwrap them, and then proceed to put the entire collection in a suitcase. They then stroll through Paris and walk into a small urban forest where they proceed to burn the contents of the suitcase. One is tempted to see this as a ritual, but all this happens in a rather robotic (or cybernetic) way, without much ceremony. The objects that are burnt, however, are exactly the same as those that rest on the table in the installation, imposing a metaphor of time through which the visitor is at once before and after the event. Such a gesture may be seen to allegorize the circuit that generates the production of curios that are there, waiting for someone to buy them and take them away to another world.

[ 10 ]

Though fantastical in their speculations, the eschatological tropes of science-fiction have come to exercise nearly total control over the imagination of the future. Maha Maamoun’s video 2026 (2010) takes a scene from Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic “photo-novel” La Jetée (1962), and replaces the original narration by a voice reading from an Egyptian science-fiction novel by Mahmoud Uthman, titled The Revolution of 2053.

The character of Marker’s La Jetée lies on a hammoc with his eyes covered by a large white pad with cables attached to the sections that cover the eyes and temples, while a voice reads a passage from Uthman’s

novel in the original Arabic. The passage describes an agonizingly disingenuous scene of the future wherein the Pyramids, presented in a landscape of splendorous glory, become the set for a highly choreographed banquet in the year 2026.

Rather than delivering the reader into a plausible future, the novel lands in a series of clichés profoundly rooted in a contemporary ideology that is consumed by its investment in the here and now. ≥ see transcript on p. 129

[ 11 ]

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The critique of the contemporary utopian principle finds its desolate underpinnings in Agnieszka Kurant’s Future Anterior (2007).

Kurant’s work is composed of a stack of The New York Times with several pages framed and hanging on the wall. The entire run of newspaper pages has been printed with thermochromatic ink so that as the room temperature rises the printed words become increasingly faint, and as it drops they become more and more visible.

This oscillation between visibility and invisibility is contingent on climatic conditions, which are purportedly extraneous to the content of the news.

Nevertheless, this newspaper of the future functions as a “standard” against which the steady progression of the world towards catastrophe will soon be measured. However bleak and barren, the future that is conjured in Kurant’s newspaper is, unlike Uthman’s novel, quite believable. It is significant too that the future is only a few years away, and that we get closer to it by the day, noticing that adjustments we make in the present, they may be large and dramatic, make absolutely no impact on the image that this newspaper gives us of a day in September 2020.

The End of Money

[ 12 ]

The work of Toril Johannessen is concerned with de-centering scientific knowledge by forcing exchanges between disparate elements and concepts on a scientific plane. The graphs that Johannessen has contributed to this exhibition appear both simple and logical: Revolutions in Time, for example, promises an historical subject, but its history, which is both social and political, is here subjected to a rudimentary mathematical reduction. A note at the top of the chart explains that “Time” means Time magazine, and that the dates correspond to the first and latest issues of this magazine. The chart thus illustrates something that is only tangentially related to the actual revolutions that have taken place in the last 92 years: We are looking at a chart that shows how many times the word “revolution” appears in print, in this specific magazine, year by year. The other graphs function in the same way.

Alongside these graphs is a Dutch train-station clock that the artist has re-programmed so that its pace is contingent on the volume of activity registered by the biggest servers powering the internet. As the volume of users rises the clock begins to move faster, and as the volume decreases the clock also slows down. Rather than representing time, with this clock time becomes contingent on the collective efforts of a community unaware of itself.

[ 13 ]

With its ominous title, Pierre Bismuth’s Technological Development is for the Time Being Mankind’s Only Future announces a familiar image in the contemporary prophecies about the future as a field of technological totalitarianism.

Yet, this idea of the future is moderated with a temporal

motif – “for the time being” – implying that the current lack of ideas might soon give way to more utopian designations of the future. The installation is focused on a home-made teleprompter on which the artist’s text “Technology and Production” unfolds. The same text runs through two screens that hang behind the blue-screen. The text has the language of a manifesto, but it doesn’t seem to give its subject the lashings that this genre would have normally applied. In the logic of a modernist manifesto, the axiomatic sentences about labour and technology that appear in Bismuth’s text should deflect towards accusatory negations of the structure of contemporary life. But here they are instead interspersed with somewhat fatalistic (or, in the language of pragmatic conservatism, “realistic”) statements, of which the last sentence is emblematic: “Technological development is, for the time being, mankind’s only future.” ≥ see transcript on p.

130

[ 14 ]

Alexander Apóstol’s short video opens with a daytime view of the Avenida Libertador in Caracas, Venezuela. Once a monument to urban planning, this avenue is now divided between two neighborhoods with seemingly unbridgeable ideological discrepancies. In order to affirm their respective ideologies, each neighborhood has decorated the wall of this avenue with their own version of Venezuelan art history: on the West side the murals represent the landscape tradition of the beginning of the 20th century (Manuel Cabré, Armando Reverón, and so on) and on the East are representations of the much more recent constructivist tradition

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Exhibition Guide

(Alejandro Otero, Jesús Soto, etc.). Once Apóstol’s video shifts to nighttime, one finds that the avenue becomes populated by transsexuals who have named themselves after these artists and, at times, use the concepts associated with their work (colofonía, for instance) as euphemisms for sexual positions and acts. In sections of the avenue, night-life becomes the site of a double dramatization of the historical narrative of art: once ideologically, by the neighborhoods whose opinion is publicized in the murals they have made; a second time by the transexuals, for whom the murals offer a range of possibilities for developing characters and personae through which they individualize their profession. Modern art and its supporting narratives exist uneasily in the context of the Avenida Libertador, where a recalcitrant history of modernism subsists as a phantasm that can only be brought to life in the sexual practices of a marginal class.

[ 15 ]

Through their collaborative framework Goldin+Senneby (Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby) have been exploring the geographies that are produced through capital and finance, presenting these explorations as theatrical and performative problems. For this exhibition Goldin+Senneby have produced The Discreet Charm (2011), a work that takes the form of a “pitch” for a theater play about self-interested financial practices within contemporary banking. In theater, a scale-model of the stage (model box) used to display the choreography of each scene, typically facilitates the communication between actors and members of the production team, or between the theater company and poten-

tial producers and financiers – in every practical sense, the model box is a didactic device.

And, if there is something to be said about didacticism in contemporary economic life, it is that it is mainly – if not only – used in order to steer the public towards self-detrimental financial practices and investment, and seldom in order to explain how best to use their economic resources. The Discreet Charm includes such a scale-model of Witte de With, with all the elements that were present in the exhibition space during the performance enacted on the opening night. ≥ see transcript p. 131

[ 16 ]

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An often-overlooked argument made by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal A Thousand Plateaus (1980) draws a parallel between Capitalism and Western racism: both, they claimed, operate not by exclusion, but by propagating waves of sameness, until everything in range has been either incorporated or wiped out. (One can easily say the same for contemporary democracy). Imbued with an analogous critical attitude, Vishal Judgdeo’s Stage Design for Disassociation (2011) explores the ways in which the values of economic exchange invade all forms of social exchange. The installation includes two videos and a series of objects. The videos show two female actors reading lines from a script for what appears to be a talk show.

The lines they deliver are, as Jugdeo states, “riddled with clichés about emotional healing from a distinctly popular and Western-capitalist perspective, addressing ideas about loss, self-discovery, and the quest for happiness.” This videoinstallation is punctuated by an array of objects that have The End of Money

been arranged throughout the space, from which the voices of the actors sometimes emerge suggesting a consciousness that moves between subjects and objects and that, in doing so, seems to bring them closer to each other while remaining alien to both.

[ 17 ]

To those familiar with English idioms, Lawrence Weiner’s A CHIP TAKEN OFF OF AN OLD BLOCK introduces a variation on the English expression “a chip off the old block,” which generally implies the inheritance of character (father to son, for instance). But in adding the verbal form “taken off,” Weiner has here evoked a sense of purpose that the original idiom lacks. Thus, rather than being “fated” by inherited character traits, the invisible agent of this statement may be seen to actively sculpt “an old block.”

This is, to be sure, a syntactical problem that ties language to what linguists refer to as its “natural” form (spoken languages, in opposition to “formal” or “constructed” ones). In this sentence, as in all of Weiner’s work, concrete language must contend with the active part that it plays in the construction of the social, which is to say, as the element that constitutes the human subject as a “political animal.” There are several ways in which the sentence A CHIP TAKEN OFF OF AN OLD BLOCK can be read in relation to The End of Money, but such interpretations are perhaps less significant here than the way this sentence interpellates the exhibition with questions of the social, and of the generative role that language plays within it, forcing us to re-focus the discussion, from money to society.

Works in the exhibition

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[ 0 ]

National Geographic Magazine Left: June 1974; right: June 2004

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Works in the exhibition

In Place of Capital (production stills) 2009; 2 colour photographs; 36 × 54 cm and 56 × 34 cm; courtesy of the artist [ 1 ]

Zachary Formwalt

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At Face Value, 2008; single-channel HD-video with sound, 22:30 min.; courtesy of the artist [ 1 ]

Zachary Formwalt

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Following page

2008, 2008; shredded money; 600 (diameter) × 240 cm (height); courtesy of the artist & Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul [ 2 ]

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Works in the exhibition

Christodoulos Panayiotou

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From the series Blurred, 2008 – 2009; several digital prints (inkjet) on paper; edition 10 / AP5; 21.6 × 27.9 cm each; courtesy of the artist [ 3 ]

Tonel

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Baltic Dry Index, 2009; watercolour on paper; 56 × 77 cm; courtesy of the artist [ 3 ]

Tonel

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Following page from left to right

Earth – Moon – Box (Cosmic Trade), 2011; installation, wall drawing; courtesy of the artist [ 3 ]

Tonel

Grey Zones, 2009; 75 framed photographs found in Greek newspaper archives; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist & The Breeder, Athens [ 6 ]

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Vangelis Vlahos

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Name

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Grey Zones (detail)

Grey Zones, 2009; 75 framed photographs found in Greek newspaper archives; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist & The Breeder, Athens

[ 6 ]

Vangelis Vlahos

Vangelis Vlahos

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Previous page

There is plenty of hope, but not for us, 2011; mixed-media installation with altered antiques, wood, plants, paint; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artists [ 4 ]

Hadley+Maxwell

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Sichtbare Welt, 1987 – 2000; 3-channel video; courtesy of the artists & Eva Presenhuber, Zurich [ 5 ]

Peter Fischli & David Weiss

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Previous page from left to right

Provenance, 2007 – 2011; digital double projection on oak panel; panel 70 × 98 cm; courtesy of the artist & Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam [ 8 ]

Matts Leiderstam

Endless Big, 2006; c-print mounted on aluminium behind 8 mm plexi, framed in white wooden frame; 180 × 120 cm; courtesy of the artist & Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen [ 7 ]

Tomás Saraceno

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Inaccurencies, 2011; video installation; courtesy of the artist [ 9 ]

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

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2026, 2010; DVD for video projection, 9 min.; courtesy of the artist [ 10 ]

Maha Maamoun

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Following page

Future Anterior, 2007; 8 framed pages, stack of 290 newspaper, thermochromic ink silkscreen on paper; 57 × 37.5 cm each; courtesy of the artist & Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo [ 11 ]

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Works in the exhibition

Agnieszka Kurant

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Name

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Titel

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Following page from left to right

Mean Time, 2011; clock; 65 × 53 × 65 cm; courtesy of the artist & Lautom Contemporary, Oslo

Words and Years (Revolutions in Time, Conventions in Time), 2011; 6 inkjet prints on paper; 74 × 54 cm each; courtesy of the artist & Lautom Contemporary, Oslo

[ 12 ]

Toril Johannessen

Toril Johannessen

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Opposite page

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Technological Development is for the Time Being Mankind’s Only Future, 2011; real time closed-circuit television installation; teleprompter, camera, computer, DVD players, MX50 panasonic videomixer, blue screen, LCD screens; courtesy of the artist & Jan Mot, Brussels [ 13 ]

Pierre Bismuth

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Opposite page

Technological Development is for the Time Being Mankind’s Only Future (reverse view of installation) Pierre Bismuth

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Stage Design for Disassociation, 2011; mixed-media installation with HDvideo on monitor and 4-channel soundtrack; 13 min.; Cynthia Bond, Patricia Scanlon (Performers); courtesy of the artist & Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles [ 16 ]

Vishal Jugdeo

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background: Aircrafts on Ground, 2009 – 2010; 57 photographs under glass, wooden shelf; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist & The Breeder, Athens [ 6 ]

Opposite page top: The Discreet Charm, 2011; Goldin+Senneby with Pamela Carter (Playwright), Ismail Ertürk (Senior Lecturer in Banking), Anna Heymowska (Set Designer), Hamadi Khemiri (Actor); courtesy of the artists

Vangelis Vlahos

foreground: The Discreet Charm (model) [ 15 ]

Goldin+Senneby

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bottom: The Discreet Charm (detail of model) [ 15 ]

Goldin+Senneby

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Previous page

A chip taken off of an old block, 2006; black cohesive foil; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist & Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf / Berlin [ 17 ]

Lawrence Weiner

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Av. Libertador, 2006; video DVD, 4:30 min.; courtesy of the artist & Distrito 4, Madrid [ 14 ]

Alexander Apóstol

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Tr a n s c r i p t s f r o m t h e e x h i b i t i o n

Provenance Matts Leiderstam

The painting Vy från Dordrecht, 1655 (1653?), oil on panel, 66.8 × 98.2 cm, is owned by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

Between 1641 and 1655, the artist Jan van Goyen returned regularly to the same subject: Dordrecht, regarded as the oldest and most venerable city in the Dutch Republic. Most of the paintings depict the city from the south – a coastline in the distance, dominated by the Grote Kerk, some windmills, and a large number of boats on the River Meuse. The horizon is set low, and the sky overwhelms the landscape. Only one of van Goyen’s drawings from that perspective has survived to our day. It can be found in a sketchbook from around 1648, belonging to Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden. Throughout his life, van Goyen engaged in a number of business activities. This included auctioneering, art dealing, as well as speculation in land and tulip bulbs.

In some of his drawings, one can find notes about the potential for property value increases in the depicted region.

Jan van Goyen painted the views of Utrecht and Leiden eight times each, the Hague nine times, Arnhem eighteen times, Rhenen twenty-seven times, and Dordrecht thirty times, of which twentytwo depict the city from the south. Nijmegen he painted no fewer than thirty-one times. Some of these paintings are on canvas, but most are on oak panels, divided into three parts. The colour is applied on a white ground with thin brushwork – darker parts with a lightly flowing semi-transparent colour, and lighter parts with a thicker, opaque colour. The pale under-painting shines through in the water and the sky. Hans-Ulrich Beck has recorded all the artist’s paintings in his book Jan van Goyen, 1596 – 1656: 2, Katalog der Gemälde. The picture at the Nationalmuseum is “Beck no. 317”, and its first well-known owner was King Adolf Fredrik. In 1771, Gustaf III bought the painting from his father’s estate. After the King’s death in 1792, the painting went to the Swedish government, and with the founding of the museum’s that same year, it became part of the collection.

Beck no. 295a, Mouth of the Meuse (Dordrecht) / Masukako (Dorudorehito), 1644, oil on panel, 127

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48.5 × 76 cm, hangs at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the painting was part of Paul Grand’s collection in Lyon. On November 21, 1974, Galerie Nathan in Zurich purchased the painting at auction in Paris, and in 1978 the painting was sold to the museum in Japan.

Beck no. 296, View of Dordrecht and the Grote Kerk from across the Maas, 1644, oil on panel, 64.8 × 97.2 cm, hangs at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England. The painting was very likely purchased by Henry Blundell, who lived in the same city, or by his son Charles Robert Blundell, at some point between 1803 and 1837, and incorporated into the family’s art collection at Ince Blundell Hall. The picture was inherited from the Blundell family by Lieutenant Colonel Humphrey Weld’s family. The painting was stolen on December 29 1990 from Lulworth Manor in Dorset, but was returned several years later by the Sussex police. “H.M. Government” recovered the picture in “lieu of inheritance tax” from Colonel Sir Joseph James Weld’s estate and it was granted to the museum in the year 2000.

Beck no. 296a, View of Dordrecht from the Dordtse Kil, 1644, oil on panel, 65 × 96 cm, hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The art dealer Eugene Glaenzer, with business activities in both New York and Paris, sold the painting in 1906 to Baron Vladimir de Gunzburg from Paris. His son, Serge de Gunzburg, in Geneva inherited the painting and sold it via Galerie Heim in Paris to the museum in Washington in February 1978.

Beck no. 298, Gezicht op Dordrecht/Vue de Dordrecht, 1644 / 1653, oil on canvas, 97 × 148 cm, is at Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels. The painting is signed with monogram and date, 1653, on the small ferry on the left side. A signature and a different date, 1644, can be found on the small ferry on the right. Finally, there is a fake signature and date on the lower left side: “A. Cuyp fecit 1655”. The first known owner was Comte de Robiano from Brussels. His heirs sold it to the art dealer and collector M. John Wilson from Paris, who sold the painting at auction in Paris on March 14, 1881, where the Brussels museum bought the painting.

Beck no. 299, Blick über die Merwede auf Dordrecht, 1644, oil on canvas, 104 × 134 cm, hangs in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches

Museum. An exhibition catalogue from 1878 reveals that the first known owner of the picture was G. Rohan in Paris. On May 29, 1890, the painting was sold at auction. One “Marquis de X du Château C” in Paris sold the painting again at auction on March 31, 1914. In 1920, the painting could be found at the art dealership Trotti & Cie in Paris, who then sold it in 1923 to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

after the war, the Dutch state took charge of the painting. The Goudstikker family’s claim of what remained of their collection began in 1946 when Goudstikker’s widow returned to Holland for the first time from her present residency in New York, US. The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage / Instituut Collectie Nederland, Rijswijk / Amsterdam placed the picture with the Dordrecht Museum in 1948 as a loan.

Beck no. 305, La Meuse à Dordrecht avec la Grote Kerk; vue prise au sud-ouest, 1647, oil on panel, 74 × 108 cm, hangs at the Louvre in Paris. It was given to the royal collection (“l’ancienne collection”) at an unknown date, and in 1830 was registered under the title Marine. However, on the frame there is a different title: Vue de Dordrecht.

In January of 1998, with the “Black Book” as the primary evidence, Marei von Saher, from Connecticut, USA, widow of the Goudstikkers’ son Edo, reopened the case with the help of her Dutch counsel Prof. H. M. N. Scholis and R. O. N. van Holthes. On February 6, 2006, a final decision was taken in von Saher’s favor by the State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science who followed a recommendation from the Dutch Restitutions Committee.

Beck no. 310, View of Dordrecht, 1649, oil on panel, 68.5 × 99.5 cm, hangs at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, USA. The picture’s journey can be traced from the art collector Charles Butler in London to Galerie Charles Sedelmeyer in Paris, which, according to a catalogue, owned it in 1894.

In October that same year, M. Knoedler & Co, New York had purchased the painting and then sold it in 1897 to J. Eastman Chase, collector and art dealer from Boston. David P. Kimball, also from Boston, bought the painting and sold it to the art dealer Robert Vose, also a resident of the city. Arthur J. Secur, a businessman from Toledo in Ohio, then bought the painting in 1924 and donated it to the museum in 1933.

Beck no. 312, Gezicht op de Oude Maas te Dordrecht, 1651, oil on panel, 66.7 × 97 cm, is hanging at the Dordrecht Museum. The painting was sold at Christie’s in London as lot 70 for £ 2.730 on July 18, 1930 by the A. J., the Earl of Balfour, Whittingham, Haddingtonshire, England.

The buyer was art dealer and collector Jacques Goudstikker from Amsterdam. Goudstikker, of Jewish descent, died in an accident on May 16, 1940 while aboard the ship SS Bodegraven during his escape from the Nazi invasion, and the painting was thus left behind. With him was an inventory notebook (known as the “Black Book”) recording the pictures left in his gallery. In July of 1940, Hermann Göring and his banker and art dealer Alois Miedl took possession of the painting through a forced sale from Goudstikker’s mother, along with the rest of the collection (estimated at 1,400 art works) for a trifling sum.

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In the spring of 2007 the painting was returned to Goudstikker’s heiress, along with two hundred and one other art works that had been placed in Dutch art museums. The family decided to sell eighty-three of them at auction via Christie’s in New York on April 19, 2007, in London on July 5, 2007, and in Amsterdam on November 14, 2007.

The sales totaled $ 9.924.800, £ 3.120.400 and € 1.196650 respectively. Gezicht op de Oude Maas te Dordrecht, however, was not put up for sale.

The picture was shown together with thirtyseven other pieces at an exhibition, Reclaimed – Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker, under its English title View of the Oude Maas near Dordrecht at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, USA, May 10 – September 7, 2008. During the run of the exhibition, the Dordrecht Museum negotiated with Goudstikker’s heiress and made a deal to purchase the picture on September 9, 2008 for € 3.500.000. The painting received a new frame in September 2009 and a reprint of the museum’s postcard of the picture was ordered in 2010 from Art Unlimited, Amsterdam with the information: “Riviergezicht op Dordrecht, 1651, paneel, 67,2 × 98,1 cm.”

Beck no. 315, Elveparti ved Dordrecht, oil on panel, 47.5 × 75.5 cm, is at the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo.

The canvas was sold at auction in Vienna on June 5, 1871 under the title Ansicht von Delft as part of the estate of the artist Erasmus von Engert. A “Dr. Meyer” bought the painting and in 1901 introduced it in a catalogue as part of S. B. Goldschmidt’s collection in Frankfurt am Main.

On March 11, 1907, the canvas was auctioned in

Vienna and the collector J. Böhler from Munich became the new owner. Christian Langaard from Oslo bought the painting in 1909 for his collection and, according to his will, it was then donated to the museum after his death in 1923.

ve been wiped out of existence. The only building visible on the horizon is the big Egyptian Museum.

Statues. Pharaonic chariots. And various antiquities in glass vitrines. Indirectly lit and dotting the space in a wonderful way.

Gezicht op de Merwede voor Dordrecht, oil on panel, 55.5 × 72 cm, hangs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The painting was sold at auction in Amsterdam by Johan van der Marck from Leiden on August 25, 1773 to J. J. De Bruyn, from Amsterdam, who in turn sold it to A. Van der Werff van Zuidland from Dordrecht on September 12, 1778. He auctioned it on July 31, 1811 but then decided to buy the work back. A. Lacoste from Dordrecht sold it at auction once again on July 10, 1832 to J. Rombouts, of Dordrecht, who then bequeathed it to L. Dupper Wz, also a resident of Dordrecht. In 1870, the Rijksmuseum acquired the painting as an authentic Jan van Goyen. However, in his book Künstler um Jan van Goyen, 1990, Hans-Ulrich Beck describes the painting (previously Beck no. 316) as falsely attributed to van Goyen. The picture was actually painted in 1660 by Jeronymus van Diest (II) (1631 – 1673). Furthermore, Beck shows that the Queen of the Netherlands, a private collector in Lausanne, and Szépmûvészeti Múzeum in Budapest also possess views of Dordrecht painted by the same artist’s hand, each of which had previously been attributed to van Goyen.

I see a number of huge glass spheres around the Dome Restaurant. Some of them are restaurants and nightclubs, and some are conference and celebration halls. I also see hanging glass bridges connecting the spheres at certain floors. Great precision in every architectural detail. Transparent surfaces. Fine metallic lines. Endless expanses of green as far as the eyes can see.

≥ [ 8 ]

2026 Maha Maamoun

An enchanting night, the sky is clear, stars are shining, and the moon is full. It’s so big that it looks like it will touch the ground by the pyramids’ plateau and the Sphinx. The whole place is lit by indirect lighting. The foot of the middle pyramid is intricately designed, the floor is marble and has wonderful luminous inscriptions that look like they were lit from below. Everything is clean and glittering. And there is no trace of the dust of the pyramids’ plateau.

From another angle, I see the Sun Boat shinning inside a glass structure, like it’s floating… All around the Pyramids, there is nothing but green expanses, immaculately designed.

I don’t see any buildings around the place. There is no trace of any informal settlements. Like they’ 129

Transcripts from the exhibition

Up close I can see tables with food, placed in orderly geometrical arrangements. The tables are meticulously decorated, with fabulous statues carved from ice, melting very slowly. There are all kinds of food. I’ll try to get closer… I can’t recognize a lot of the food, but there is clearly a lot of seafood. Caviar… sushi… huge lobsters….

Everyone is wearing extremely strange yet elegant clothes. Most of them don’t look Egyptian.

Their features are Eastern but they’re not Arab.

Some look European and some Asian. Everyone is eating extremely slowly. Like they’re in a slowmotion film.

I can’t see any waiters. Next to each table there is a hologram. When someone passes their hand over it, different kinds of food and drink appear from an opening in the middle of the table.

There’s something strange in the background.

Something’s not right. The background of the Pyramids looks natural, but the background of the opposite side of the Pyramids does not look natural. There’s a strange line in the ground… A wall. A thin wall surrounds the whole area. Its not a normal wall. It’s a gigantic screen. Screening a virtual image of the extension of the pyramids’ plateau onto the horizon, and hiding the view of the crumbling old city behind it.

There’s a surveillance tower every 10 meters in the wall. Next to every tower there’s a room. And there are people monitoring the place through screens and other devices.

Something is happening… There are signals from the towers and something moving in the distance.

A car. A car is coming from a distance. Armored and with dark opaque windows. Raising a lot of dust around it. The car slows down. I see a lot of

children running after the car and surrounding it.

The children are almost naked. Wearing rags.

Shaved heads and big deep eyes. Skin on bone.

Like skeletons.

form of work. We are experiencing what is no doubt the most evolved phase of democracy in that no class, or social group, is exempted from this task.

They try to hold onto the car and to enter it by any means. They are screaming hysterically and banging the car. The car is moving steadily. Nothing affects it. As if it were moving in another time. The car moves towards a room next to a surveillance tower. The children scream louder and louder. They stop all of a sudden and look towards the tower. As if they’ve heard a signal.

It would be a mistake to think that the unemployed do not work. All men work if they have the means to contribute to the flow of production.

Something opens in the wall and bags are thrown out, about 20 meters away from the wall. The bags open when they hit the ground. The children leave the car and run to the bags. Grabbing.

Hitting. Snatching. A terrible fight over food. At the same time, the car starts moving slowly into the room and the door closes behind it. A finely dressed man and woman step out of the car.

The wall facing them is glass, opening onto the pyramids’ plateau. As for the other 3 walls, they are like the other wall, screening images of fabulous natural landscapes.

The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (excerpt) by Mahmoud Uthman ≥ [ 10 ]

Te c h n o l o g y a n d P r o d u c t i o n Pierre Bismuth

Today, human activity seems to consist essentially of working to build and maintain the economy: work on the one hand and the acquisition of products (goods and services) on the other.

Work and acquiring products are in fact one and the same thing that is basically contributing to the flow of production. The term “consumption” is no longer appropriate for this system because the acquisition phase is now an integral part of work. In this sense, free time is also an integral part of work.

We are no longer slaves of any other individual, as the existence of all men, without distinction, is driven by one and the same thing: production and the flow of production.

Contributing to the flow of production should be considered as the most advanced contemporary 130

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Unemployment benefits are the state’s indirect contribution to the flow of the economy. It helps the young to join the flow of production and the most disadvantaged not to leave it. Recipients of these benefits have a debt to society in that everyone should be capable of working autonomously to sustain the flow of production.

The economy is based on production, and this is driven by technological progress.

Technology does not free man from labour. It augments the field of labour for each individual and makes us increasingly autonomous with regard to others.

Autonomy created by technology is considered freedom.

Technological research is a speculative system whose motivation is the very possibility of technological progress. Technological innovations are developed well before their application is conceived. It is only once technological innovations are operational that applications are sought.

Technology is not there to solve problems but to create potential for exploitation and capitalisation.

Technology has become in the end the model for life as we impose to our own existence the imperative of constant improvement and development inherent in technological production.

Technological development is for the time being mankind’s only future.

14.12.2009 ≥ [ 13 ]

The Discreet Charm of Meta-Finance Goldin+Senneby

The curator introduces the piece … ‘Welcome to the Witte de With … the show … this is The Discreet Charm of Meta-Finance by Goldin and Senneby.’ He sits. He has made no mention of Ismail.

We watch the projection of the box of the gallery space … just chairs set for the lecture.

Ismail who has been sitting in the front row, stands and takes his place to the side of the projected image.

Hello / Hi … thank you Juan …

And yes, welcome to the ‘The Discreet Charm of Meta-Finance’ … which is actually the title of my lecture … an idea I approached Simon and Jakob … or Goldin and Senneby … an idea I approached them with some weeks ago … a proposal to talk about finance within the context of their art work.

I first encountered the artists last year as they were starting out on their own investigation into the nature of financial speculation as a kind of theatre … a theatre which creates its own realities and actors and stories … so they say.

Their project is called ‘The Nordenskiöld Model’ I believe.

This is their model of the gallery, of course. It is not in my control.

A model of the ‘real’ Ismail is placed in the model box.

And here I am … Ismail Ertürk. … I’m honoured and maybe a little surprised to be talking to you, here at this gallery as part of this show. It’s not my usual … habitat you could say. I’m a Lecturer in Banking at the Manchester Business School in the UK … you think that’s quite boring perhaps … but I like art … I think art has things to say about economics … it’s always been interested in economics … take the French poet Mallarmé for example … do you know Stephane Mallarmé? In his poème critique ‘or’ … that’s the title ‘or’ … it means ‘gold’ … in French. In this poem he makes a comparison between real gold, which is currency and, in his eyes, worthless, and this idea of a ‘poet’s gold’ … which he thinks has real value of course.

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Perhaps I can quote a little for you if I can remember it … yes …

Qu’une Banque s’abatte, du vague, du médiocre, du gris’ … oh …

The stage managers begin to set up the theatre scene from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Ismail pauses to watch for a few moments and then carries on.

The title of my talk comes from Bunuel’s film ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ … you’ve probably spotted this already. In the film, a group of sophisticated, attractive, powerful people keep trying to eat dinner together but are interrupted again and again … they have their cake but they never get to eat it in peace.

I like to think of bankers as charming … they have manners, influence, education, they build iconic buildings, they collect art, build temples of culture and knowledge. They see and represent themselves as civilised people … but they also brought the world economy to collapse.

It’s almost half a decade since the subprime crisis erupted. Right now, in the EU, economies like those of Greece, Portugal and Ireland are in serious trouble. But the paradox is that the bankers who caused the crisis in the first place are getting huge bonuses and it’s something that people have difficulty in understanding.

Back in Bunuel’s film, the main characters arrive to dine at a house only to find that everything … the decorations, the food are stage props. A curtain rises and they find themselves seated at a table on a theatre stage, they don’t know their lines … the audience begins to boo … they try to carry on … it’s a very famous scene, which I particularly like …

A model of Stephen Hester has appeared in the scene. The stage managers begin to dismantle the film scene.

But this is Stephen Hester … the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland … not a character from Bunuel’s film. In 2010, he received a 7.7 million pound bonus. This is at a time when the UK government was making the biggest public spending cuts in its history and customers of the bank were complaining about not getting loans … this bank, by the way, is now 80 per cent owned by the UK government.

When he was asked to justify his high bonus Hester said “It’s out of my control, it’s the board, shareholders and remuneration committee who decide.”

So … he can’t justify his bonus by pointing out that the economy is doing well because of his bank’s performance or by the bank helping its customers. The bonus is justified by making reference to other financial activities, actors and institutions … it is self-referential.

So this is the realm of self-referential finance.

Or what I call meta-finance. Financial institutions cannot justify their existence by how they contribute to the real economy … the one you and I live in day to day … but by making references to some other processes that are purely within the financial world.

3 years ago the CEO of Lehman Brothers was questioned about the 200 million dollars worth of bonuses he received between 2000 and 2008.

He said, “We had a compensation committee that spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that the interests of the executives and the employees were aligned with shareholders.”

You’ll know Lehman Brothers … 619 billion dollars, the largest bankruptcy in the U.S. Actually the bank had a very interesting con-temporary art collection … the aim of the acquisition policy was to both improve the working environment of the bankers and also to support artists at early stages of their careers …I think the art critic Sarah Thornton called the collection ‘visionary’ … with artists like Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari … and interestingly, Baldessari caused con-sternation in 1970 by claiming that it wasn’t Andy Warhol who was the most influential person in art but Luis Bunuel … he had already recognised that film …

Diagram 2 has appeared in the camera lens obscuring the model box behind it.

But I’m here to talk about finance … this is a diagram developed by the Bank of England.

It describes the kind of economics where the financial economy, the business of banking … here … exists to support the real economy … here … which is … corporations borrowing from banks and subprime mortgages … low income people borrowing from banks to own their houses.

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But there’s this huge complexity … or should we call it ‘sophistication’ … here … as those loans are converted into collateralised debt obligations and securitised, and tranched and traded between financial institutions … rating agencies, hedgefunds, pension funds are all involved transacting between themselves.

Now I realise I’ve started to use specialised terminology, some of which you may not have heard before … or you’ve heard but don’t know what it means.

Securitisation’ for example … this is the process of banks selling their loans on to other financial institutions …

During this next section, the diagram is removed and a film scene of the group walking down the road is set up.

So the bank who buys the securitised loan knows the bank it buys the loan from but doesn’t know the borrower. Then the loan’s sold on again, so now no one knows who originated the loan. So the real economy disappears through securitisation …

But I’m ambivalent about explaining these terms.

There is mystery … mystification here … finance is a mystified world … and there’s a danger I make it seem reasonable, rational, scientific.

Simon and Jakob explained this idea of the model box presentation to me. It happens in theatre … or when theatre is being made … a designer or director … I’m not sure … uses the model box to sell the concept of the show to the producers … or to demonstrate the design of the show to the actors before it’s made for real. Or this is what Simon and Jakob told me that Pamela Carter … this is the name of the playwright they work with … they told me this is what she told them … how theatre is made.

But it’s not something I know much about. I don’t really go to the theatre … I much prefer film as I said … avant-garde film in particular …

Diagram 3 has appeared obscuring the scene in the model box.

Now this diagram was prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2009, it took them about 2 or 3 years to do this. And it describes what they call ‘shadow banking’. And ‘shadow

banking’ is the summary term explaining all types of various financial transactions between rating agencies, special purpose vehicles, hedgefunds, private equity and so on.

So this picture of the recent financial economy is very interesting because there’s no reference to the real economy at all.

Now if you felt confident working your way round this model you might say there is a reference to the real economy here somewhere… you might identify a box containing ‘reference assets’ because these are supposed to be loans made to households and to corporations. But really, they are not actual loans themselves but derivatives of securitised loans … they’re contracts based on non-existent loans.

So this is the ultimate picture of meta-finance where banks don’t even need to make a loan to create financial assets which other financial institutions invest in. They just need to make reference to a future loan that has not been made yet.

Diagram 3 is removed to reveal the model of Bunuel’s priest.

I particularly like this character of the priest. I think meta-finance also has its priests … whose job it is to teach and sanctify. In one scene in the film, the priest … in fact, he’s bishop ‘Monsignor Dufour’ … he’s played by the actor Julien Bertheau … anyway, he asks a peasant woman why she doesn’t believe in god but he doesn’t listen to her answer … oh …

Diagram 3 has reappeared.

But back to finance … now this model had big support from the likes of Robert Merton …

Merton is an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for developing an option pricing model … an algorithm, which revolutionised finance … specifically derivatives trading. In 2002 he said his option pricing model was developed entirely within the academic research community and was the result of the science of finance. He really believed that finance was science.

So this is economics and finance aspiring to be like physics or chemistry so this is what we call physics envy. Merton isn’t the only academic to think that financial innovations have come about through science.

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Transcripts from the exhibition

Diagram 3 has been removed and the scene of the animals invading the music room in Exterminating Angel is set up.

In 2007, Andrew Low, another academic, thought basing economics and finance on physics isn’t appropriate so instead he proposed using biology, and he’s developing behavioural finance as an alternative.

So what we get, as banking runs into problems, as meta-finance runs into problems, is it looking for a new way of understanding or justifying itself. But it does so by replacing physics envy with biology envy.

An article in the financial times in 2009 said academics were ransacking a range of other disciplines in the quest for a better understanding and that search has ranged from evolutionary biology to behavioural psychology to thermo dynamics and chaos theory.

Now we know that some economists like John Maynard Keynes call the urge or the instinct to make money an ‘animal instinct’. And so I’m not so sure how much of a role science has to play in explaining this kind of behaviour.

So really what I think we have here is a world of meta-finance. And just like the characters in another film of Bunuel’s ‘The Exterminating Angel’ … bankers like those characters are entrapped in a room, which they cannot leave, and they have no connection with the outside reality.

Here sheep and a bear find their way into the room with them.

The wall goes down in front of the Exterminating Angel scene. Ismail is removed.

So it looks like this is where I make my exit. I’ll leave you here with the entrapment. Please enjoy your art.

Thank you and goodbye.

Credit: Pamela Carter (Playwright) & Ismail Ertürk (Senior Lecturer in Banking, University of Manchester ≥ [ 15 ]

Statement on the work

Grey Zones Vangelis Vlahos

The project consists of two sets of photographs found in Greek newspaper archives that have reference to two cases of Greek initiatives of the utilization of the Aegean Sea in the 1970s.

The first set of images involves the “Wodeco” ship, an American drill-ship that was used for the exploitation of Greece’s oil fields in the Aegean Sea in the mid 1970s. The second set involves the “Koyda,” a soviet auxiliary vessel that inaugurated the bilateral agreement between Greece and the Soviet Union in late 1970s in order for the Soviet vessels to use the Greek shipyards in Syros Island for repairs.

In the Aegean, the term “Grey Zones” has a political impact mostly related to local issues that deal with the delimitation of Greece’s and Turkey’s zones of influence. The concept was first introduced by the Turkish authorities after the Imia / Kardak crisis in early 1996, in order to describe the areas of undetermined sovereignty, specifically regarding several islets in the Eastern Aegean. Several of the issues involve the delimitation of both countries’ air-space and national waters. These issues owe their controversy to the geographical peculiarity of the Aegean Sea and its territories. The decades since the 1970s have seen a series of political and military tensions between Greece and Turkey over the Aegean, with most important incidents namely the “Hora” crisis1 of 1976, the “Sismik I” crisis2 of 1987 and the Imia / Kardak crisis3 of 1996.

About Wodeco: In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, Greece, like many other countries at the time, embarked on a systematic effort to discover and exploit its local energy resources. In the mid 1970s the “Wodeco” drill-ship of the U.S. oil company Oceanic made its first successful offshore oil strike in the Prinos location a few miles southeast of Thassos at the Northern part of Aegean Sea. In the early 1980s local oil production had managed to cover almost 13 percent of the country’s petroleum needs. By the late of 1980s production started to drop without being able to explore for new deposits. Today it seems to be a problematic utility with no prospect for the future.

About Koyda: In September 1979 Moscow signs an agreement with Greece for repairs of Soviet 134

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merchant and naval auxiliary vessels at the Greek-owned Neorion Shipyards on the Aegean island of Syros. “Koyda” was the first Soviet ship that arrived for repairs in the shipyards. In the late 1960s and 1970s the Soviet naval forces had greatly expanded its presence in the Mediterranean. For the Soviets, the need for a naval presence in the area was an issue of military as well as political importance. Taking also into account the Soviet Union’s lack of bases in the broader region, the agreement of Neorion was considered important for establishing its political influence. The issue provoked the reaction of the United States, NATO and Turkey arguing that this agreement disrupts the military balance in the area. In the following decades Neorion shipyards faced many challenges that almost led it into going out of business, but managed to survive, diversifying into new fields like the construction of luxury mega-yachts.

“Grey Zones,” 2009 (75 photographs) ≥ [ 6 ] 1 In July 1976 the Turkish research vessel Hora entered the Aegean beyond the Turkish territorial waters. Andreas Papandreou, the leader of the opposition Socialist party at the time, called to sink the vessel (“sink the Hora”). The vessel “Hora” was later renamed Sismik I. 2 In late March 1987, when a Greek-based international consortium, announced that it would start searching oil in international waters east of Thasos Island, Turkey sent the survey ship Sismik I into the Aegean, flanked by warships. The Greek Prime Minister of the time, Andreas Papandreou gave the orders to sink the ship, if found within Greek waters. This incident nearly started a war between Greece and Turkey.

3 Imia in Greek, or Kardak in Turkish is a set of two small uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea, situated between the Greek island chain of the Dodecanese and the southwestern mainland coast of Turkey. Imia / Kardak was the object of a military crisis and subsequent dispute over sovereignty between Greece and Turkey in 1996.

Aircrafts on Ground Vangelis Vlahos

“Aircraft on Ground” (AOG) is a term in aviation maintenance indicating that a problem is serious enough to prevent an aircraft from flying. In contrast to the usual image of planes flying, the project involves a collection of photographs and magazine clips depicting civil aviation aircrafts on ground. All the images included involve aircrafts from the Middle East, Greece, United States and Africa, related mainly to an incident (such as accidents, terrorist attacks, hijackings, official visits, bad weather conditions, etc.) that either took place in Greece or which involved Greece in some way. The images cover almost three decades (1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s) and are presented on a shelf in chronological order, albeit without any reference or information about their original context. No dramatic images are included. The images were found in different Greek newspaper archives.

The project, consisting exclusively of images depicting grounded planes, indirectly links a variety of different political and social incidents from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, a politically and socially loaded transitional period in Greece.

The project takes the form of a chain of images that in some way have Greece as their backdrop, connected to each other by the descriptive reference of an aircraft on ground.

Through a series of different incidents related to civil aircrafts on the ground, the AOG project attempts to produce an abstract narrative of a socially and politically transitional period in Greece, presenting an allegorical and abstract overview of this transitional time (covering the last four years of the Greek dictatorship (19671974), the period after its fall in 1974 and the socialist governments in Greece of the 1980s and 1990s). What would the outcome be if I tried to find images of aircrafts on ground from different historical periods? What would be the differences between the reasons preventing an aircraft from flying in the 1970s, in the 1990s and today? Are there analogies between these differences and the changes in Greek politics of the same period that the images of the airplanes cover?

“Aircrafts on Ground,” 2009 – 2010 (57 images) ≥ [ 6 ]

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Statement on the work

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Biographies

Authors

Dessislava Dimova is a writer and curator based in Brussels. She is currently completing her PhD at the Institute for Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. In 2010 she curated Thank You for Your Understanding – 2. International Antakya Biennial in Turkey. Recent projects include Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, Material Culture: Things in our Hands, (Christine König Gallery, Vienna, 2011) and The Bulgarian Pavilion Project (www.bulgarianpavilion.org, 2011).

Founding member of Art Affairs and Documents Foundation, Sofia and founding editor of blistermagazine.com.

Her first novel “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was published in Bulgarian in 2009 (Razvitie, Sofia).

Juan A. Gaitán has been a curator at Witte de With since 2009. He was trained as an art historian and aesthetic theorist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has curated several exhibitions internationally, the most recent being Models for Taking Part (Vancouver and Toronto) and The End of Money at Witte de With. His most recent essays have been published in Afterall, The Exhibitionist, and the series Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating in Mousse magazine.

Donatien Grau graduated in the Classics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, in Paris, where he now teaches. He serves as a member of the board of the French philosophical review ‘La Règle du Jeu’ and the pilori al. publication “Commentaire”. As a contributing editor of Flash Art International, he has co-authored a book on curating with Elie During, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Donatien Grau is also a trained specialist of Roman coins, on which he has written extensively in France, Austria, Switzerland and the United States.

Dieter Roelstraete was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and works as a curator at the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA. His curatorial projects there include Emotion Pictures; Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver; The Order of Things; Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner: A Syntax of Dependency:, and the collaborative projects Academy: Learning from Art,

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The Projection Project and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. In 2005 he cocurated Honoré d’O: “The Quest” in the Belgian pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale; he has also curated solo exhibitions of Roy Arden (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007), Steven Shearer (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2007), Zin Taylor (Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, 2011), as well as small-scale group shows in galleries and institutions in Belgium and Germany. He is an editor of Afterall as well as a contributing editor to A Prior Magazine, a co-founder of FR David and a tutor at both De Appel in Amsterdam and Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Roelstraete has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals; his latest book, Richard Long: A Line Made By Walking, was published by Afterall Books / The MIT Press. He lives in Berlin.

Carolina Sanín has published the novel Todo en otra parte (Seix-Barral, 2005), the biographical essay Alfonso X (Panamericana, 2009), the children’s book Dalia (Norma, 2010) and the short story collection Ponqué y otros cuentos (Norma, 2010). Sanín holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de los Andes and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Literature from Yale University. Currently a professor of Spanish literature and creative writing at the Universidad de los Andes, she also taught at Purchase College-SUNY and lived for 7 years in Barcelona, where she worked as a translator. She writes a column for the Sunday edition of El Espectador, one of Colombia’s leading newspapers, and another one for the literay magazine Arcadia. Her articles and short fiction have been published in magazines and anthologies in Colombia and abroad.

Artists Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1969). Lives and works between Madrid, Spain and Caracas, Venezuela. He has had solo exhibitions in, among others, MUSAC, León; Galeria Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; and Arratia+Beer Gallery, Berlin (all 2010); Solo Projects in ARCO 08, Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid (2008); DRCLAS, Harvard University, Cambridge (2007); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition Center LACE, Los Angeles; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami; and Palau de La Virreina, Barcelona (all 2006); and Sala Mendoza, Caracas

(2004). Recent group exhibitions include Photographic Typologies, Tate Modern, London (2010 – 11); Modelos para Armar, MUSAC, León (2010); Der Brief aus Jamaika, Oi Futuro, Río de Janeiro (2010); Painting in the Glass House: Artist revisit modern architecture, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Islands+Guettos, NGBK. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin; and Building Pictures, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (all 2008); Lo(s) Cinetico(s), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia MNCARS, Madrid; andHabitat/ Variations, BAC Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (both 2007). Apóstol has also participated in the Venice Biennale (2011), San Juan Triennial (2010), Prague Biennale (2005 and 2003), Istanbul Bienali (2003) and Bienal de São Paulo (2002).

Pierre Bismuth (Paris, France, 1963).

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Recent solo exhibitions include Le versant de l’analyse, Jan Mot, Brussels; Le psy, l’artiste et le cuisinier, Nuit Blanche, Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, Paris; Pierre Bismuth, Fremantle Arts Center, Fremantle; and La galerie est heureuse de vous inviter à la nouvelle exposition de Pierre Bismuth, Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris (all 2010); Objects That Should Have Changed Your Life, Base Progetti per l’Arte, Florence; Following the Right Hand of…, Team Gallery, New York (both 2009); The All Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version), British Film Institute, London; Ruled by Extravagant Expectations, Galerie Christine König, Wien (both 2008); One Size Fits All, Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2007); and Coming Soon, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica (2006). Recent group exhibitions include 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Bild für Bild, Film und zeitgenössische Kunst, Museum Ostwall im Dortmunder U, Dortmund; The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York; Une forme pour toute action, Le Printemps de Septembre, Musée les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Yesterday Will Be Better, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau;Chef d’oeuvre, Centre Pompidou, Metz; Seconde Main, ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Exhibition, exhibition / Mostra, mostra, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Repetition Island, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (all 2010). In 2005, Bismuth won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay along with Michel Gondry

and Charlie Kaufman for the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Fischli & Weiss (Zürich, Switzerland, since 1979). Peter Fischli & David Weiss (Zürich, Switzerland, 1952 & 1946). Live and work in Zürich, Switzerland.

Selected solo exhibitions include Peter Fischli David Weiss, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Goetz Collection, Munich (both 2010); Peter Fischli / David Weiss. Are Animals People?, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Palacio de Cristal, Madrid; Objects on Pedestals, Sprüth Magers, London; and Parts of a Film with a Rat and a Bear, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi at Teatro Arsenale, Milan (all 2009). Selected group exhibitions include Radical Conceptual, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Analysis of Flight Data: Art of the 1980s: A Düsseldorf Perspective, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (all 2010);Waiting for Video: Works from the 1960s to Today, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2009). Fischli studied at the Academia di Belle Arti in Urbino (1975 – 1976) and at the Academia di Belle Arti in Bologna (1976 – 1977).

Weiss studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich (1963 – 1964) and at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel (1964 – 1965). In 2010, Fischli & Weiss won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize.

Zachary Formwalt (Albany, Georgia, USA, 1979). Lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Recent solo exhibitions include Zachary Formwalt, ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano (2011); Future Park – Reproduction Direct from Nature, Casco, Utrecht (2010); and Zachary Formwalt – The form of practical memory, Kunsthalle Basel (2009). Formwalt also had solo projects at the Elder Gallery, Lincoln (2006); and the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2005).

Recent group exhibitions include Large Abstractions, The Suburban, Oak Park Illinois (2011); “To the Arts, Citizens!”, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto; Monumentalism, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Neither From, Nor Towards…, Art Pavilion Zagreb, Zagreb; Bucharest

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Biennale 4, Bucharest Biennale for Contemporary Art; Zachary Formwalt, Rumiko Hagiwara, Ola Vasiljeva, BillyTown, The Hague (all 2010).

Formwalt also participated in group exhibitions at the Bank Gallery, Durban (2008) and Gahlberg Gallery, Glen Ellyn (2004). Formwalt received his MFA from the North-western University in Chicago (2003) and attended the Critical Studies programme at the Malmö Art Academy (2005). In 2008 – 2009 he was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam.

Goldin + Senneby (since 2004). Live and work in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions include The Nordenskiöld Model: Act 1, Konsthall C, Stockholm; The Decapitation of Money, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (both 2010); Headless. From the Public Record, Index, Stockholm (2009); and Goldin+Senneby: Headless, The Power Plant, Toronto (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Abstract Possible, Museo Tamayo, Mexcio (2011); The Moderna Exhibition, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Hydrarchy, Gasworks, London; Uneven geographies, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; and The Headless Conference, New Museum, New York (all 2010); The Malady of Writing, MACBA, Barcelona; The Man behind the Curtain, Mission 17, San Francisco (both 2009); TINA, The Drawing Room, London; and Reality Effects, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (both 2008). They have been invited for several artist residencies, including one at the Kadist Foundation in Paris (2010) and at the 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008).

Hadley + Maxwell (Canada, since 1997).

Live and work in Berlin, Germany.

Recent solo exhibitions includeThe Idiots, Every Letter in the Alphabet, Vancouver; Improperties, SMART Projects Space, Amsterdam; and When That Was This, YYZ, Toronto (all 2010); The Lemonade is Weak Like Your Soul/ Die Limonade ist matt wie deine Seele, Kunstverein Göttingen (2009);1+1-1, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto (2008). Recent group exhibitions include It’s the End of the World (as We Know It), La Kunsthalle Mulhouse; Manifestation Internationale d’art Québec: Catastrophe!, Québec City; and Kurt, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (all 2010); The Malady of Writing, MACBA, Barcelona; There is No Audience, Montehermoso Cultural Centre, VitoriaGasteiz; and Suddenly: Where We Live Now, Pamona College Museum of Art,

Los Angeles (all 2009); Good Gangsters in Town, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; and Into the Music, Kunstraum München, München (both 2008). Hadley+Maxwell studied at the European Graduate School in Switzerland (2004) and were recently artist-in-residence at YYZ in Toronto (2010) and at the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede in Germany (2009).

Toril Johannessen (Harstad, Norway, 1978). Lives and works in Bergen, Norway. Selected solo exhibitions include Transcendental Physics, Bergen Kunsthall NO.5, Bergen (2010); The Generic Stone (w/Sidsel Meineche), Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen; Variable Stars & In Search of Iceland Spar, Oslo Fine Art Society, Oslo (both 2009); and Self Made, Kunstrom, Bergen (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Space. About a dream, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2011); Smooth Structures, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; BGO1, Bergen Art Museum, Bergen; Chris Cornish, Kristin Nordhøy and Toril Johannessen, Lautom Contemporary, Oslo; The Line, CSA Space, Vancouver, (all 2010); Session 6 – Lecture, AmNudenDa, London; From Now On – New Nordic Photography, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (both 2009); and Magiske Systemer, Tromsø Fine Art Society, Tromsø (both 2008). Johannessen received her MFA in 2008 from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, and in 2011 she was a student at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles. In 2010, Johannessen was an artist-in-residence at AIR Bergen-Berlin in Berlin and at The Western Front in Vancouver.

Vishal Jugdeo (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 1979). Lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Selected solo exhibitions include Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles (2010); Surplus Room, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2008); and Video About Sculpture, Western Front, Vancouver (2005). Recent group exhibitions include Elastic Frames, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2011); the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Quadruple-Consciousness, Vox Populi, Philadelphia (both 2010). Jugdeo completed a BFA at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, an MFA at University of California in Los Angeles, and attended the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine (2003 – 2007).

He is currently a visiting professor at California State University in Long Beach, where he is teaching a video and intermedia course.

Agnieszka Kurant (Łód z´ , Poland, 1978).

Lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She represented Poland at the Polish Pavilion at Venice Biennale of Architecture 2010 (with Aleksandra Wasilkowska).

Her works have been shown in art institutions including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mamco, Geneva; Tate Modern, London; Yvon Lambert Gallery and Creative Time, New York; and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Kurant has participated in Performa Biennial, New York (2009), Athens Biennale (2009), Bucharest Biennale (2008) and Moscow Biennale (2007). She was commissioned to do Frieze Projects at Frieze Art Fair, London (2008). She was an artist-in-residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2004; ISCP, New York in 2005; Konstfak, Stockholm in 2007 and at the Paul Klee Center in Bern in 2009. She was shortlisted for the Henkel Art Award (MUMOK, Vienna) in 2009. Kurant’s monograph Unknown Unknown was published by Sternberg Press in 2008.

Maha Maamoun. Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. Selected exhibitions and biennials include Mapping Subjectivity: Experimental Cinema in The Arab World, MoMA, New York; Live Cinema, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Ground Floor America, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Homeworks 5, Beirut (all 2010); Past of the Coming Days, 9th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2009); PhotoCairo 4, Contemporary Image Collective – CiC, Cairo (2008); Global Cities, Tate Modern, London (2007); C on Cities, 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Venice; Snap Judgments, International Center of Photography – ICP, New York (both 2006); and DAK’ART 6, Dakar (2004). She was co-curator ofPhotoCairo3, an International Visual Arts festival in Cairo (2005), and assistant curator for Meeting Points 5, an International Multidisciplinary Contemporary Arts Festival (2007).

Maamoun is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), a space for contemporary arts and culture in Cairo.

Matts Leiderstam (Gothenburg, Sweden, 1956). Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Leiderstam has had solo exhibitions at Turku Art Museum, Turku; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Malmö Art Museum; and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (all 2010); Salon Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam (both 2008); AndréhnSchiptjenko, Stockholm; Verkligheten, Umeå; and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (all 2007). Selected group exhibitions include Louvre in Heino – Photography from the Collection of Reyn van der Lugt, Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle; Modernautställningen 2010, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Canon and Attitude, x_hibit – exhibition rooms of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; 14 Vilnius Painting Triennial: False Recognition, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (all 2010); Konsthall SE, Konsthall C, Hökarängen; The Mountain Show, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam; Seen, Unseen, Scene, Centré d’Art Passerelle, Brest; and Romantikens kraft på spaning efter romantiken, Malmö Art Museum, Malmö (all 2009). Leiderstam holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Malmö Art Academy. He was an artist-inresidence at the International Residence at Couvents des Recollets in Paris (2006), at Cove Park in Scotland (2005) and at IASPIS’s Studio in Stockholm (2004 – 2005).

Christodoulos Panayiotou (Limassol, Cyprus, 1978). Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Solo exhibitions include Christodoulos Panayiotou, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Christodoulos Panayiotou, Norrlands Operan – Vita Kuben (both 2011); Christodoulos Panayiotou, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich; Christodoulos Panayiotou, Cubitt, London (both 2010); The End, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Never Land, Rodeo, Istanbul (both 2009); and Act I: The Departure, 1m3, Lausanne (2008).

Recent group exhibitions include I Know Something About Love, Parasol Unit (2011); Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Live Cinema / In the round, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia;Let’s Dance, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine; Trust, Seoul Media Biennale, Seoul; Home Works 5, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; The Living Currency, 6th Berlin Biennale – Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1), Berlin; and Catastrophe, The Quebec City Biennial, Quebec City (all 2010); Insiders, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux; Generosity is the New Political, Wysing Art Center, Wysing; Lyst, Lundme Overgarden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen;The Columns Held Us Up, Artist Space, New York; and Convention, MoCA Miami all 2009). Recently, he was an artist-in-residence at CAPACETE in Rio de Janeiro (2011), IASPIS Studio in Stockholm (2009) and at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2008). In 2011,

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Biographies

he received the ‘Future of Europe Prize’ from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig and in 2005 he won the 4th DESTE Prize from the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Athens.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar (La Rochelle, France, 1975). Lives and works in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Interpretation, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Antiteater, FRAC Champagne Ardennes, Reims (both 2010); Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of the European ShorthandTypists, Mary Mary, Glasgow; Black Mariah, Centre d’art Parc Saint-Leger, Pouges les Eaux (all 2009); IAO Explorations in French psychedelia 1968, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux; LOVE = U.F.O, Lili ReynaudDewar, FRAC, Bordeaux; and The Race, Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea di Siracusa, Montevergini, Sicily (all 2008).

Recent group exhibitions include Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall / The Royal Dramatic Theater, Stockholm (2010); Elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Je n’ étais pas qu’ une simple chimère, SBC gallery, Montréal; Kehrhaus-Abschied von Stabilen Wänden, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Revolver, Coco Kunstverein, Vienna (all 2009); 5th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2008); and Freak Show, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon (2007).

Reynaud-Dewar studied Ballet at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers de La Rochelle and Public Law at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, where she received her masters in 1997. She then received a Masters degree in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2003.

Tomás Saraceno (Tucumán, Argentina, 1973). Lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Saraceno has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and K21, Düsseldorf (both 2011). Recent solo exhibitions include Tomás Saraceno: 14 billions, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Cloud Cities Connectome, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (both 2010); Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than air, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Biosphere, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (both 2009 – 2010); On Clouds (Air-portcity), Towada Art Center, Towada (permanent exhibition); and Cloudy Dunes, Fondazione Garrone, Genova (both 2008). Saraceno has also participated in the Perth International Arts Festival; and The Devine Comedy, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA (both 2011). Recent group exhibitions include Between here and there:

Modern and Contemporary Art in the Permanent Collection, Miami Art Museum (2010); Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969 – 2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London (2009 – 2010); Wanås 2009: Footprints, Wanås Foundation, Knislinge; Fari Mondi//Making Worlds, 53d Biennale de Venezia (all 2009); and Psycho Buildings: Architecture by Artists, the Hayward Gallery, London (2008). In 2009, he won the Calder Prize from the Calder Foundation.

Tonel (Havana, Cuba, 1958). Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Solo exhibitions includeNothing to Learn, Galeria Habana, Havana (2011); Some Information is Now Available, Teck Gallery, Vancouver; Tonel, Miart 08, Milan International Art Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art, Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Milan (both 2008); A Music of The Body, Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Roveretto (2006); Tonel, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco (2002); Some of the Houses, Several Documents, the Rocket, Detour 888, San Francisco; andTonel: Lessons of Solitude, Art in General, New York (both 2001). Selected group exhibitions include Disturbing Narratives: Cuevas, Toledo, and Tonel, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; The Billboard Project (Seeing Peace), San Francisco International Arts Festival, San Francisco (both 2008); Face to face. The Daros Collections, Zürich; Cuba Avant Garde: Arte Contemporáneo cubano de la Colección Farber, Museo Harn, Gainesville and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; and Killing Time, Exit Art, New York (all 2007). Tonel graduated in Art History from The University of Havana, Cuba in 1982. He was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship for painting and installation art in 1995 and won the Cuban Artists Fund Award of the Cuban Artists Fund in New York in 2003.

Vangelis Vlahos (Athens, Greece, 1971).

Lives and works in Athens. Selected solo exhibitions include Between Facts and Politics, Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan;What history do they represent? (together with Zbynek Baladran), Blow de la Barra gallery, London (both 2008); Direct Architecture, The Borgovico 33, Como; «1992», The Breeder gallery, Athens (both 2007); and at Display Galerie, Prague; and (together with Hito Steyerl) at Els Hanappe Underground gallery, Athens (both 2004). Selected group shows include “To the Arts, Citizens!”, Serralves

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Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; Tanzimat, Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (both 2010); 11th Istanbul Bienali; After Architecture, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona (2009); ISLANDS+GHETTOS, NGBK & Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin; and Monument to transformation, City Gallery Prague, Prague (all 2009); Selective Knowledge, ITYS, Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, Athens (2008); “A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own”, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2007); 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006); Behind Closed Doors, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts (2005); Manifesta 5, San Sebastian (2004), and the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004).

Lawrence Weiner (Bronx, New York, USA, 1942). Lives and works in New York, USA and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Recent solo exhibitions include Lawrence Weiner: Dicht Bij, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Lawrence Weiner: Dicht Bij, BAK, Utrecht; Lawrence Weiner: As far as the eye can see, K21 Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus, Düsseldorf; Lawrence Weiner, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin (all 2008); Lawrence Weiner 1960 – 2007: As Far As The Eye Can See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Drift (film project with John Baldessari and Juliao Sarmento), Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2004); and Bent and broken shafts of light, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2001).

Recent group exhibitions includeWall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Text / Messages: Books by Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The End, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (all 2009); Order. Desire.

Light: An exhibition of Contemporary Drawings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Todas as Histórias, Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto (both 2008). Weiner received several awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Painting / Conceptual Art (1999), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and the Arthur Kopcke Prize of the Arthur Kopcke Memorial Fund (1991).

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Witte de With Staff Director Nicolaus Schafhausen Deputy Director Paul van Gennip Business Coordinator Belinda Hak Curators Juan A. Gaitán, Zoë Gray

Colophon and Acknowledgements This publication accompanies the exhibition The End of Money (22 May – 7 August 2011), curated by Juan A. Gaitán, assisted by Amira Gad, at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

Editor Juan A. Gaitán Additional editing Amira Gad, Monika Szewczyk

Junior Curator Anne-Claire Schmitz Assistant Curator Amira Gad Education project curator Renée Freriks, Karin Schipper

Contributors Pierre Bismuth, Dessislava Dimova, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Donatien Grau, Hadley+Maxwell, Dieter Roelstraete, Carolina Sanín, Tonel Translator Sue Brownbridge

Publications Monika Szewczyk PR & Communication Jessie Hocks Office Angélique Barendregt, Gerda Brust Reception Hedwig Homoet, Emmelie Mijs, Erwin Nederhoff, Erik Visser Technicians Gé Beckman, Line Kramer Installation Team Ties ten Bosch, Carlo van Driel, Chris van Mulligen, Hans Tutert, Ruben van der Velde Intern Mariska Oosterloo

Production Amira Gad, Juan A. Gaitán Proofreading Monika Szewczyk Graphic Design Kristin Metho Images Bob Goedewaagen Publisher Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, The Netherlands ISBN 978-90-73362-98-7 All rights reserved.

Curatorial assistants for Melanchotopia Fabian Schöneich, Sam Sterckx

© the artists, authors and Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2011.

Supported by

Business Advisor Chris de Jong Board of Directors Joost Schrijnen (chairman), Stef Fleischeuer (treasurer), Bart de Baere, Jack Bakker, Claire Beke, Nicoline van Harskamp, Karel Schampers, Yao-Hua Tan

Witte de With is supported by the city of Rotterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Culture.

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Colophon and Acknowledgements

Thank you to all the artists: Alexander Apóstol; Pierre Bismuth; Peter Fischli & David Weiss; Zachary Formwalt; Goldin+Senneby; Hadley+Maxwell; Toril Johannessen; Vishal Jugdeo; Agnieszka Kurant; Matts Leiderstam; Maha Maamoun; Christodoulos Panayiotou; Lili Reynaud-Dewar; Tomás Saraceno; Tonel; Vangelis Vlahos; and Lawrence Weiner. And to their galleries: Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; The Breeder, Athens; Distrito 4, Madrid; Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; Jan Mot, Brussels; Konrad Fisher Galerie, Düsseldorf / Berlin; Lautom Contemporary, Oslo; Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul; Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles; and Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam. For Goldin+Senneby’s The Discreet Charm, thank you to: Pamela Carter (Playwright), Ismail Ertürk (Senior Lecturer in Banking), Anna Heymowska (Set Designer); and Hamadi Khemiri (Actor). And thank you to the lender Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Thank you to our generous funders: Office for Contemporary Art Norway; Cypriot Ministry of Education & Culture; Pro Helvetia: Swiss Arts Council; The Canada Council for the Arts; and the Fonds BKVB. For the graphic design, thanks to Kristin Metho. For their contributions to the book, thanks to: Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, Dieter Roelstraete, and Carolina Sanín.

For her translation of Carolina Sanín’s text, thanks to Sue Brownbridge.

For his photographs, thanks to Bob Goedewaagen. A very special thank you to Amira Gad, Fabian Schöneich, and to all the Witte de With staff, interns and the installation team.

Contributions

Appendix

Mark to Market Value, Inc. (1st of 9 text works spread through this publication)

Exhibition Floorplan Exhibition Guide

Tonel

Works in the exhibition

The Theory of Money Pierre Bismuth

“Where is the Money, Lebowski?”

Making Ends Meet Dieter Roelstraete

Transcripts from the exhibition Provenance Matts Leiderstam

2026 Notes on Improperties

Maha Maamoun

Hadley+Maxwell

Production and Technology Pierre Bismuth

Sichtbare Welt (1987 – 2000) Peter Fischli & David Weiss

The Discreet Charm of Meta-Finance Goldin+Senneby

Five Acts of Money Carolina Sanín

Statement on the work Grey Zones

Zachary Formwalt

Vangelis Vlahos

The End of Coins, the Triumph of Money, and the Disruptive Revolution of Art

Aircrafts on Ground Vangelis Vlahos

Donatien Grau

Lili Reynaud-Dewar The End Always Comes Twice Dessislava Dimova

Edited by Juan A. Gaitán