Printed Project 12: Circulation - Curator/Editor Katya Sander

Printed Project Issue 11 Circulation Curator / Editor Katya Sander



Contents



Printed Project ISSUE 12



Circulation Curator / Editor Katya Sander



Katya Sander Ashley Hunt Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich Michael Stevenson Jason Simon & John Strauss Simon Sheikh



Introduction Any Machine Runs in Part on Confidence... Money The Search for the Fountain of Prosperity Two Essays on Banks The Representation of Banking /Banking on Representation: Reflections on John Strauss’ ‘Transparency’ and its Reframing In place of movement Is it Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies What goes around comes around Stations and trajectories in systems of circulation Blind Spots: Connecting Nodal Points … the need to be free … (a road movie on freedom) aus der Serie: Assets 1-n Salomania Passing the Rainbow Circulating Artworks



5 7 11 19 27 47



Zachary Formwalt Brian Holmes Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén Alex Villar Elin Wikström Katja Eydel Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz Sandra Schäfer Neil Cummings



50 54 61 70 77 83 89 97 103



Contributors



109



Circulation

Katya Sander



5



In the light of the recent crash in the global financial system, this issue of Printed Project is framed by the notion of ‘circulation’ – but not only in the sense of the circulation of goods, bodies, knowledge, ideas, images and money, ie the movement of certain forms; but also and maybe more so, the idea of circulation as form in itself. A central figure in the western idea of modernity is the notion of movement – questions of transportation, flow, directions, velocity, and circulation. And from modernist urban planning and its visual analysis of spaces, functions and ways of optimising the movements between them, we are familiar with particular kinds of iconic diagrams, charts, blueprints and maps which have come to both represent and embody modernist ideals. Similarly, critics have pointed out that the visual language of the market – charts, graphs and statistics – rather than merely depicting or describing; constitute it. They generate certain readings, interpretations and reactions, which in turn can be seen mapped in these images themselves. But unlike the graphic abstractions of modernist urban planning which are essentially related to actual physical spaces, real objects and bodies, the graphics we look at when we want to understand the market are abstractions to a different degree. They refer less to real objects, bodies, ideas and spaces, but rather to the circulation of these factors – supposedly depicting ‘movements’ in the market and their consequences for investments, speculations, risks, and possible accumulation of value. By understanding the notion of ‘circulation’ as central to the idea of the market, I am taking the cue from a number of contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, who have sought to understand and describe the market as (one amongst several forms – for example also public sphere, nation state etc) a form of circulation central to the western imaginary of modernity. Along with the market, the notions of the public sphere and the idea of the nation state are also understood as seminal forms of circulation for western modernity, and the ways in which it is understood and imagined. Considering the notions of the market, the public sphere and the nation in the light of circulation, forces us to arrive at a new understanding of circulation itself. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, two anthropologists dealing especially with global financial systems, suggest: “It is no longer viable to think of circulation simply as movement (…) from one place to another.” 1 Instead, Lee and LiPuma, call circulation a “cultural process (…) with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and their interpretive communities built around them.”



PRINTED PROJECT 11: Katya Sander



A machine operates in part on confidence Money

Ashley Hunt Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



6



Interpretive communities are the social groups and practices that set the codes, customs, contracts –and thereby also institutions and boundaries – for understanding and using certain forms of circulation. They are groups implementing and performing the practices of recognition, interpretation and use that are necessary for the different forms of circulation to exist. As such, forms of circulation can be understood as self-referential or performative. The acts of buying and selling can be understood as performative practices, that constitute the idea of the market – parallel to the way in which, for example, reading and public discussion are constitutive to the ideas of a public sphere. As such, performativity is central to any system of circulation and exchange, in that “performatives go beyond reference and description (…), and seem to create the very speech act they refer to.”2 It allows for “language to objectify it’s own praxis”, just like forms of circulation give shape and meaning to the forms they circulate; producing a framework for visibility, interpretation and evaluation of the objects, texts or ideas they not only transport, but also make recognizable as such. “Although a culture of circulation can be identified by the objects circulating through it, it is not reducible to them. More is at stake, or, in circulation”. 3 I am interested in how we can describe, make visible and discuss this more – these different forms and ways of circulation – and not only that which is circulating in them. What are the conditions imposed on different forms in order for them to travel and circulate across social space? To try to look at circulation itself – not just the objects it moves – implies that rather than attempt to condense meaning from forms in flow, but to try to follow these forms in all their transformations, mutations and transfigurations. In other words, trying to grasp their journey, observing the ways different forms in circulation behave or change as they move, and / or discussing the conditions and behaviours of the interpretive communities. The artists, thinkers and researchers I have invited for this issue of Printed Project have been asked to contribute with notes, images, collages, stories or anecdotes or other kinds of material they felt could reflect upon these various questions of circulation. As such, this issue of Printed Project is imagined as a kind of sourcebook or collage of material of very different formats and characters.



One machine coordinates itself around a core group of managers, who draw upon the tools and talents of others, arranging them so as to enrich themselves.



PRINTED PROJECT 11: Katya Sander



1 Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the globalization of Risk, Duke University Press, 2004. 2 Ibid. 3 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elisabeth A. Povinelli: Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition. Public Culture 15(3): 385-397. Duke University Press, 2003.



A monument to this can be found on the side of the Wells Fargo Bank Building on Victory Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, in North Hollywood, California. The bank paints itself into two images at once — that of the sky that surrounds it, and that of the Western expansion of the United States, wherein banking is positioned as a natural part of a landscape of rugged individualism as an institution placed upon an Earth of unclaimed resources that governs god’s creations with god’s approval.



around whom everyone else is a foil, everything else is a resource or an obstacle the action and purposes of the story revolve around him, indeed are part of him



authority customs hierarchy law

a fantasy for the character and the reader alike, acting as the center of the world



in d iv id ual s et ag ain s t t h e com m u n i t y



he roi c i ze d



1) Any machine runs in part on

a life in which all things are to exist for his purposes, or are otherwise just in the way, to be pushed aside or eliminated.



heroic lover adventurer



col l ec t ive



entrepreneur



partitioning the space of the haves from the have-nots



community becomes impediment to power

vio

len



val or i ze d



value reduced to the intersection between the desire of a buyer and seller



protagonist

vir t ue heroic genius heroic leader

the one for whom the intricate mysteries and puzzles of the story are his to solve

f l aw



owners



citizens in d iv id ual wealth



ce



does what we’re told it does, and

s t at u s



that one can indeed operate it. This is all the more true with abstract machines, which are inoperable, broken or a hoax. So one such machine exists and is

credit risk asset-liability ratio



rulers



workers



p

b e li e f



ro duc t i o



n

o le vi



economy

b el i e f



heroic leaders



n c t i o iolen v



consumers



ce



hero

the one who drives the changes in time, space and relationship that constitute a story, or history



the state



nce



p r o du



the actor who cannot succeed by the rules will either act outside the rules or will act to change them



suspension of disbelief crisis in virtue crisis in narrative power agreement

use



symbols



ex

ch



monetization

sign of value becomes aligned with some quantity of real things, energies, time or services something worth nothing can become valuable something of value can become worthless



value

crisis in value

use



currency



crash



bubbles market correction crisis in belief systemic risk opportunity insurrection power grab stimulus (de)regulation asset-liability mismatch



hidden hand of the market actions

collective agreement to values



rendered some in equivelence with others



images the system is me natualization

force



spatial adaptation



temporal adaptation



behavioral manipulations



force



making something abstract appear real, given, unquestionable creating the cultural appearance and belief of a given system as a natural, just, unchangeable reality



backed by force



placed behind whatever system of value the state chooses to legitimate



behavior



hegemony



others’ creation



others’ genius

economies of scale



ot h ers’ rights



p beli ef



ro d u c t i o



o t hers’ power



fossil fuels industrialized production



n

others’ resrouces



organized around the most monopolizable resources and production modes



the system that the state chooses will be that which its ruling class values most



the



s t a te b a ck s th e s et t in



go



f va



l ues



t ion ucef i



investment intensive resources cross border business



owner as creator



the engine of histor y

credit speculation



l



value origin circulation valorization of capital valorization of capital-ism valorization of individuals self-made man



system



my t h s



language



d is avowi n g i t s violence



diminution of producers



heroic individual creati o n p ro g re s s devaluing p hys i c a l l a b o r divine providence pri v i le gi ng o f ma na ge me nt



self engrandizement

architect of the system captain of industry



ideology

i t p l a ce s i t s de s i g n e r s at t h e ce nt er of i t s m o ral t a x b re a k s



value

erasure of links between the system and its erasure of links between the economy and the political system that supports it



meritocrat entrepreneur

erasure of links between individuals and social networks



possibilities freedom



the subjec t of histor y



c re di t wo r t hy value measured acco rding to one’s utilit y to the system t ak in g o ut m o re t h an o n e p ut s in



a ncialization



c l aim in g c red it fo r all things good and jus t



corporations o t h er s an d es t ab l is h in g t h at as n o r m a l

here, one form of collective is honored, that which is modeled on the ethos of the enterprising individual, basing the values, rights and rules that govern it on those extended to individual people



privacy rights



a legal identity protected against liable



to the extent that a collective is business that serves the state’s organization, control and the enrichment of its ruling class — it is to that same extent recognized and protected by the state, or notaa to the extent that it is connected to state governance or the interests of those who of state law and regulation



protection against liability



ideology



belief



vi



ol



e



words



n



ce



power



crisis



thoughts



law

fear collective agreement to believe in the state



w it h i ts in s t itu



consumers



government regulation



io



n belief pr o



division of rulers and ruled



du



discourse and explanation

selection



enforcement



credit worthiness

and here we see characters summoning representations,



ct

medium of exchange



education



well-oiled, the desired results may be achieved, but there will be a reckoning if the hoax is



violence



stimulus



ange



economy

indoctrination dissemination



making t hings



risk management



discovered, as the value of what people thought they’d produced will be shown to be nothing at all.



asset that management have been

produced by many into the personal property of one



debt management



privatization



individuals taught to identify with the system



transferring things from common ownership to private ownership



2) Value and values depend upon continued, living circulation: through both an agreement

burying liabilities



repeated between parties as to what a given value is equal to, and through a performance —



tax shelters

transferring things from the domain of the public into the domain of the family



speculating enterprising competetive entrepreneurial



creative accounting



tio



n



n sa



d



in



u



c en



e



the system will be taught



fr o n t comp fo r a n ie s h id in g deb t



wherein the publicly agreed-to

s

t h e o r a te corp



value is enacted, performed, making it real. This is true for commodity value as it is for a social value.



as just as natural as democratic



behind this teaching will be violence

state violence police

the demands and desires of markets and business appear naturally developing



corporate violence pinkertons mercenaries security guards



encode all things within the regime of the sellable, the politics,

a body of people



p ro du



be



lie



strike breakers military

disappearing those who contradict the system



t ifo



c



n



pro



be d



themselves become sellable — segmented into products, something with a price.



policing those who co unter the system



p rop r i e t a r y k n owl e dg e



like a family unit — another model of private sphere — a collective sets its own values and creates its own governance structure



privileg ing those who p e r fo r m t h e s ys te m



state bureaucrac y



4) These patterns of circulation extend themselves into the cultural life of individuals and commodities, where its rules, demands, ethics, rhythms and spacings come to order our own patterns.



state secrets



co r p o rate s e c re t s



the system va lues itself



state investment



s u b s i di z at i on c re di t - rat i n g of p u b l i c e nt i t i e s



c i v i l i a n u s e co nve r s i on research and development s t ate s e c u r i t y p r i vat i z at i on co nt ra c t i n g infrastruc ture investment



customers c i t i zen s b e co m e com n on - c re di t wo r t hy c i t i ze n s b e co m e zen co optation of grassroots marketplaces c r i m i n a l i z at i on of i n for m a l e con om i e s



cartel



n



social regulation



resource investment



corporation



cooperative collective



a company



gang partnership



Money

Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



11



Money issues a command. It goes “More!” for money counts. And since we count not 0,1,0,1, but , 1,2,3,4, the demand for evermore is already marked in the nature of counting. Money is a number with an owner. And it is in fact the money owner at whom the command for “more!” is first addressed. But no need to be concerned, for this command affects everybody else as well – subject to different rights and liberties. Money emerges from debt, though not every credit is immediately money. Through the process of a bank loaning money – without really possessing it – to someone, new money will have been generated. Banks ‘create’ money by attributing the borrower with a monetary figure. By ‘granting’ them a credit, as they say. Because they trust in the borrower repaying more? Yes. Because they want them to repay the money? No; incurring more debts is positively encouraged. Initially money is nothing but a set of numbers in a table. The central bank creates money by furnishing another bank’s ledger with a tally. From here a bucket chain, from debts to debts and credit to credit, leads all the way down to the consumer. Thirty years ago, making the consumer the last one in the chain, ‘the debtor of last resort’, would have been, frankly, impossible. Until then, the investor had still occupied this place. By creating money, debts occur which equal new credit. Income is acquired by spending it; and growth by taking out a new loan. It is irreversible and self-perpetuating. More debt = more money = more turnover = more profit. The result is an economy that only continues to grow if credits further increase. Has there ever existed a money without the demand for “More!”? Aristotle was the first to present a distinction between two types of money, with regard to the economy of Athens – the first state with a stamped national coinage as we would understand it today. Aristotle distinguished between two forms of economic activity: economy and chrematistics. Economy – in its literal reference to the single household (oikos – house) or, put differently, as business administration, supplies households and the broader community with goods needed insofar as the simple production and distribution of commodities is concerned. Chrematistics – “there is, however, yet another form of trade which is, apparently, bearing no limit to wealth and profit – rightly regarded as the art of money-making.”1 It was precisely the illimitability of the ‘more’ of money-making / chrematistics which frightened Aristotle.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it. Adam Smith



13



12



“Money is what money does.”2 To pay, to account, to store. No matter as which store of value and in which medium it circulates, money always fulfils the same functions. It is, in fact, nothing else but these functions, with speed and volume being the only changing features or variables. Still, these quantitative differences do effect whole new systems of circulation. 3 In the light of our present object of analysis, it becomes apparent that less than dealing with any genuinely new functions of money, the crucial thing is the very stretching of those same functions evoked by the newly created financial instruments. “Thus, to be said in passing, the saving of time, which the information and communication technology, the activity of stock quotation and the movements of chrematistic speculation assure for the market, is by no means a secondary or contingent asset; one could say rather that this is the unfolding of the very essence of money as time (money is time), as acceleration of social time, as quantification and economy of time.”4 Most of the so-called financial innovations go along as money changes from one medium to another. They are not random contingencies but emerge together with new technologies. In the past, fragments of data were transferred bit by bit from bank to bank, stock-exchange to stock-exchange. But today we are dealing with a large network structure gazing back at us from the screens – an entity consisting in a social network of simultaneously acting players. Since it is really the involved market participants who generate new social structures stretching across time zones and monetary flows, the digitally powered circulation is by no means independent from their decisions and activities.5 What the screens reveal to us is a world afloat a stringent flow in which money and prices reflect a future of bundled expectations. Is the digitalisation of money the critical break? The 19th century, too, had its new media. Telegraphy did not transfer information any slower than today’s Internet. But what does make a difference is the sheer amount of data and its predictability. And the latter constitutes that which the expanding derivatives market6 most significantly depends on. What kind of changes regarding the functions of money do the digital possibilities trigger regarding the functions of money and participants? We have to scrutinise coinage, paper money and digital data to apprehend the implementations of their monetary function; and, instead of examining how they have been put into practice, ask more abstractly, what would be possible in theory? This leads us to the conception of three different types of money. We can distinguish between three areas in which money fulfils quite different tasks: the first being the mediation of finances; the second an allegedly free consumerism; and the third one of poverty, distress and the restraints of bare life. Nominally it is one and the same money that circulates in each of these three domains. But in reality we are facing considerable differences regarding both the way in which money circulates as a number, and in terms of its relationship to its owner.



Cash still signifies the amount of coinage or paper money an owner has to hand. What is important here is the maintenance of anonymity: 7 the materiality of coins and paper assures anonymity because there is no authority noting the owner's name. Consumer’s funds on the other hand, having become almost entirely digital information, usually rely on bank accounts, and the banks must know the names of the owners. In this way, the State too indirectly gains access to their monetary flows. The immaterial numeric value must know its owner for without his identity it would not be money. The same, though with an essential difference, can be said for funds of high finance or financial capital. While the consumer is subordinate to the State, these funds elude public control. This happens, for example, when trans-national companies shift sums of money beyond national borders and keep them in offshore accounts to conceal the owners' identities from the regulators of their home countries. 8 On a supranational level, these institutions thus serve to re-establish the anonymity of money and its owners. Perhaps we should now assume a fourth type of money – the money of the shadow banking system. Also digital, it exists only in the form of credit derivatives where banks assess the propinquity of their financial assets to money in levels. On level 1, proper prices still exist; on level 2, they are merely derived, and on level 3, not even the price of the underlying asset is known anymore. Credit Default Swaps (CDS) serve as one example: originally developed to insure credits, they have become increasingly popular and circulate as a substitute for bonds in a continuously inflated market. Banks trade these papers – contracts referring to a third party’s debt – ‘over the counter’, that is, behind closed doors amongst themselves. If money is a numeric value with an owner, these papers are money only in their underlying assumption that someone might own some money at some point in the future. Can we still refer to money, which has been generated in such a bubble as simple digital financial capital? Perhaps we should instead call it secondary or derivative money. 9 Hence we are dealing with a three or fourfold division of the monetary circuits – each part characterised by different constellations of power, control, quantity and circulation, and their dividing lines differing considerably from those of federal borders or of the first, second and third worlds. Quite to the contrary: the divisions can even intersect within one single individual. Any money-saving consumer submits a part of his money to the financial sphere. An investor also has to yield his assets partly to the consumer. But those who are bound to the sphere of bare cash face much greater difficulties in leaving their financial straits in order to consume more than what is necessary, let alone to put aside any savings from their already scarce allowance.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



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14



Assessed in relation to the quantity regarding both the individuals as well as the global turnover, these differences become strikingly evident. The proportion between hourly wage and equal labour time diverges from domain to domain by a factor between one hundred and one thousand. In opposition to the manager of a hedge fund who can earn a whole million in a single day, those in the grip of poverty often have nothing more than one single dollar to cover their daily expenses. Money changes, and with it, too, does the role of capital.10 Since it apparently remains the most precise definition, we will continue to speak of ‘capitalism’ with respect to our system. Capital still rules in terms of being the money that goes to work. What is the function of this kind of money? Capital does not save nor assess anything. It is money that goes to work by buying workers, production goods, resources, and pooling them into that construction kit called the factory in order to produce the stuff that sells. If the operation is a success, profit will follow. Hence the factory operates as an organisational frame of the command “More!” . Are banks factories? There are offices, screens and people who develop products – even if they only consist of consultation and speculation. Seen as an investment the situation seems clear: you invest money, hire someone and finally you account a profit. Subsequently, a bank should also be regarded as a normal enterprise, a factory. Yet, in their concern for other factories, a bank rather constitutes a meta-factory. However, this factory investment model had already been abandoned by the 1990s, when the business model for banking switched from productive investment to consumer credit and securitisation. With the factory investment model thus in decline the question to ask is: is this still capitalism or have we boarded onto something else? Even if floating money ends up with the banks, it does not constitute an investment in the financial sector. Banks will hand it on. Positively put, credit signifies trust. First, financial credit depends on the faith in the borrower to pay interest on their credit: the debtor can make themselves happy by fulfilling a wish, by starting a project. Hence others will be pleased too, namely through earnings, enabling those people, yet again, to pay their own credit in order to justify the confidence that has been shown in them, and to increase their creditworthiness. Money demands “More!” and singles out the competitively most suitable methods of multiplication. In this sense, ought we not regard money as a subject? No, rather as an agent for it does not reflect anything. Those in charge of constructing the different forms of organisation are our leading subjects. In capitalism, it is specifically the entrepreneurs who are most directly subjected to money in the literal sense of the word. This is what makes them capitalism’s main subjects. It is the providers of capital who execute money's command for “More!” There are two types of people who we perceive as its governors: those who own it and those who administer it. Those, that is, who must give the command and those entrusted with its enforcement. This is not the whole truth though, since in reality the command is always already inherent in money itself. The providers of capital are left therefore only with the option of disobeying the command “More!” by not surrendering their liquidity. At this point, squandering it all unscrupulously would indeed be a clever decision. Administrators act as specialists in enforcing the command:11 “We who serve the rich,” is how a banker once put it. More than a simple adherence to the command for “More!” their work is, in , practice, centred upon launching investments. Somebody – a person – is needed to make those decisions and here we encounter the moment when money, this automatic subject, merges with whoever is its subject. A subject, that is to say, in the ancient, pre-Kantian sense. “And indeed from that moment Saccard ceased to be his own master. He belonged to the millions which he was making.” 12 Put differently, money is regarded as an apparatus of power – perhaps even the supreme power. By expressing itself concurrently as freedom and constraint, money is the most generic apparatus that envelops us, in every instance and in all our deeds. Liberation for some, limitation for others. 13



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



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Is money reflexive? No, but those who play with it are. And if money is a function, what we are dealing with is a reflexive over-coding of this function. We assume that money places a structure into the world, emitting the simple command for “More!” By counting everything, moreover, money forces all other things of this world into its one-dimensional scheme. The command “More!” emphasises a certain kind of future, namely a certain concept of time that differs considerably from previous models. The present does not inherently also manifest a future. In fact, only the present exists. But because economic action is determined by our expectations, money compels us to be obsessed with the future, all of the time. Perhaps it is a matter of religion: since capitalism does not originate from China but from Europe, and Christianity has always been extremely future-oriented. Whilst Confucianism demands an all-permeating stability apt to support the Meritocracy, the Christian, in contrast, is indebted from the beginning. Salvation may well lie in the hope of entering the Kingdom of Heaven. But hope is the future and so too is redemption. The oldest counting system is the calendar. Administering time, it grants the construction of a future. With the schedule – a linear way of counting – meeting the cycle of seasons, we encounter a clash between difference and repetition, future and multiplication in place of eternal identity. At stake here is a circular versus a linear concept of time: the clock-face versus the digital display. We encounter this same difference again in the opposition of secular and cyclical developments. While the former runs straight forward, the latter oscillates around an equilibrium. The problem today is that many values, albeit usually regarded as cyclical, have actually run straightforwardly for quite a time: witness, for instance, the sheer amount of credits drawn in relation to economic production. Here are the two resulting possibilities: Either – whatever looks linear at the end of the day will turn out to be in fact cyclical. The last time this happened, it led to a massive pauperisation and consequently a world war. Or – the linearity can be kept up. In this case money would have changed its face fundamentally, to maintain the linear development of the credit system money would have to be loaned to people who can never refund it. Mortgages for low-income earners, as practised



in the US, would have to become the rule. Hence money would be akin to air, something simply ‘there’, existing for free. No longer necessarily associated with categories like work and salary it would have to be distributed according to whatever random criteria: as long as our credit-history is in order we get advance payments – and that is not only for the next car or the next house, but indeed for our entire life. How do things transmute into quantifiable goods? Transmute, that is, into goods payable with money? Initially there is nothing. You partition that nothing. Then you count its parts. Let’s take a plot of land. Until the economy of property takes it over, the plot is extra-economical – common land. Already in its ancient Egyptian inception, geometry had been the tax collectors’ auxiliary science. 14 As long as real estate property exists there needs to be a method of determining its borders. In order for a territory to become conquered by money the ground has to be made into property first, and a regulating authority has to then erect an economy on top of it. Moreover, by turning the formerly public, non-economised activity of land surveying into a service fit for business, various chargeable regulations have now been introduced, adding their twist to this practice. No king would ever have to wait days on end in front of the palace whose masters summon him only to then fail to admit him entrance. Privatisation, after all, equals profitability. So you design the regulating authority itself as commercially efficient, achieving bureaucratic regulation through tax increase: house, development scheme, tax liabilities extended over carports, conservatories, green houses etc. These kinds of extensions procure tax revenues high enough to continue to ensure sufficient and lucrative paperwork for the “publicly appointed land surveyor” 15 . Since the system would collapse with too many areas of unproductive regulations, the key question in this process is whether the acquisition costs of infrastructures produce a benefit or only accumulate expenses. That is, whether in this process something is created with which others can work productively. Let’s take climate change as another example of the same business. Obviously the real issue here is not the prevention of CO2, for we can be certain that even the last drop of oil will be found, extracted and burnt. Emission rights serve the generation and cultivation of a new economic field, which will in the end perform two tasks16: on the one hand installing a monetary flow where formerly none existed, and on the other hand making permanent the dominance of the developed over the underdeveloped countries. Though why exactly the environment? It may be that people’s levels of motivation played a role here. Being a topic of public attention, the question of the climate lent itself to selection. In a similar way that voting for a candidate is dependent upon the likelihood of his success.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



The Search for the Fountain of Prosperity

Michael Stevenson



18



19



Currently, due to the fabrication of an artificial scarcity – tightened regulation – more and more aspects of life are increasingly becoming objects of commercial assessment, be it geriatric care or climate change. Of the different methods some emerge collaterally from others. So when traditional family structures crumple for the sake of more efficient labour, the remaining domestic tasks can then be auctioned off to the marketplace. These circumstances make evident also that the family can only posit a promising life model for the financially better off. For the less wealthy, it signifies not only dis-profit and a consequent deprivation of freedom, but also, moreover, the absurdities of forced public administration with regard to their children. Through its withdrawal, the money sphere liberates part of our economised and short-running time. Sacking the cleaner, we mop up ourselves.

Translated by Sophie Springer.



The theme of the quest is ancient. In many versions, it is the search for a precious object with magical properties: the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Elixir of Life. The precious object in most of the stories either remains elusive or is a disappointment when found … Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of World War II, we economists began our own audacious quest: to discover the means by which poor countries in the tropics could become rich like the rich countries in Europe and North America. Observing the sufferings of the poor and the comforts of the rich motivated us on our quest. If our ambitious quest were successful, it would be one of humankind’s great intellectual triumphs. Like the ancient questors, we economists have tried to find the precious object, the key that would enable the poor tropics to become rich. We thought we had found the elixir many different times. The precious objects we offered ranged from foreign aid to investment in machines, from fostering education to controlling population growth, from giving loans conditional on reforms to giving debt relief conditional on reforms. None has delivered as promised. William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press Cambridge, 2001) This is the story of a search for a quest − not the quest itself, but the search for what purports to be the only tangible object of the quest, the ‘fountain of prosperity’. The story is as much mystery and fantasy as it is economics or history, or even sculpture for that matter. Like the quest itself, the search is steeped in superstition and magic. Forecasting economic growth is, after all, a form of divination or scientific fortune-telling and, like all predictions, remains permeable to the irrational. While the quest involves looking into the future, my search involves divining the past. Over a number of years, in diverse locations, I pieced together the following story. Some years ago, while I was researching the automobile industry in New Zealand, I heard rumours of the existence of a physical model of the country’s national economy. Intrigued, though unsure at first exactly what I was searching for, I found the Phillips Machine hidden in plain view at the Institute for Economic Research in Wellington. The machine stood there, on display yet still somehow undiscovered, concealed by its own obscure history and, perhaps, by its improbable form. I found myself standing before a large, upright Plexiglas and metal device, built partly into the ceiling. Almost biological in appearance, like some kind of cyborg vascular system rather than an instrument of use to economic science, it was crammed awkwardly into the tiny foyer beside the communal drinking fountain. This juxtaposition began to seem more than accidental when it was explained to me that the Phillips Machine itself runs on water. More precisely, it is a hydromechanical analogue for total national income − a hydraulic computer. I learned that the economist Alban W. (‘Bill’) Phillips had built the machine in 1949



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Ralph & Stephan Heidenreich



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



1 Aristotle: Politics 1257a. 2 Hicks: The Two Triads, Lecture I, 1, in: Monetary Theory. 3 Sassen: Territory, Authority, Rights, pp.249. 4 Derrida: Über das “Preislose”, pp.18 5 See Knorr-Cretina: How are global markets global? 6 Derivatives – Options, Certificates, Futures, Swaps – are drawn from shares, currencies, credits and resources as underlying assets. They allow for betting on profit and loss of underlying assets. In 1973 Black / Scholes were the first to present a formula to calculate the pricing of options. 7 See the ancient term ousia aphanes – invisible substance – referring to money as “property which can be assigned without witnesses” Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (1993), pg. 32 , 8 See Altvater/Mahnkopf: Globalisierung der Unsicherheit (2002), pp. 223 9 Basically, this type of money includes all those assets which Warren Buffet called “financial weapons of mass destruction” in the Berkshire Hathaway Report of 2002. 10 See Marx/Engels, The Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. IV, pp. 123 11 See Peyrelevade, Capitalisme Total, (2005), pg. 30 12 Zola, Money, pg. 214 13 See Agamben, Che cos’e un dispositivo? (2006), pg. 21; here Agamben discusses the inner relationship between the terms ‘dispositio’ and ‘economy’, whilst overlooking the difference between ‘disposition’ and ‘apparatus’. 14 See Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, (1983), pg. 90 15 Land surveying act of the German federal state of Baden Wurttemberg, §10 16 Altvater calls this ‘Inwertsetzung’, see ibid Das Ende des Kapitalismus, pg. 51 and with respect to the climage, see ibid, pg. 54



while a student at the London School of Economics, apparently to fathom the complexities of Keynesian economics. Confused by the various macroeconomic theories, Phillips fell back on his skills in both engineering and dairy farming and set to work in his landlord’s garage. Using mostly war-surplus materials, including parts salvaged from a Lancaster bomber, he began to experiment with a system that represented capital reserves as tanks of water and monetary flows as that same water circulating around interconnected plastic tubes. What is most striking about the machine is that it gives ‘the national economy’ − that invisible yet omnipresent being − a physical body. The hitherto unseeable multitude of social processes and restless circulatory activity that we call the economy and recognise only via its abstractions can, with this model, be viewed in its entirety, in the round. With its various tanks accumulating water/money via emissions from the central circulatory flow, a number of economic variables can be determined; thus the machine presents an illustrative simulation of economic processes. The machine is apparently quite accurate in its calculations, but beyond these economic capabilities it is also an undeniable sculptural presence. Economics is full of fluid metaphors, and Phillips’ insistence on a cascading flow of water brought to life something beyond the functional. Quite inadvertently, Phillips created a fountain from whence, it can be said, a plentiful flow of magical, biological, and alchemical allegories spring forth. These allusions are not entirely unfamiliar, reminding us of metaphors employed by Karl Marx when describing the processes of the economy: “crystals forming out of liquids, liquids passing back to crystals, metamorphoses, social metabolism, the dramatic encounter of life and death.” I was told that Phillips had also attempted to use electronic technology to realise his macroeconomics model, but it seems he was dissatisfied with the results. Apparently, this was not due to a lack of processing power but to a concern with the way the results could be displayed. At the time, the industry standard was to input information using punched paper tape, with numerical results tabulated off-line. This method was not only visually uninspiring, but it also failed to show the computations in progress. Phillips constructed his machine with the classroom in mind, and it seems he chose the hydromechanical solution because he felt it was more likely to capture the imagination of his students. In doing so, he brought about a strange convergence, fusing the objectives of the economist with those of the sculptor. He liked to dye the circulating water blood red, purely for dramatic effect, unleashing the full sculptural possibilities that lay dormant in the machine. This act of economic transubstantiation was not new: Thomas Hobbes had compared monetary circulation with that of blood 300 years earlier in his most influential book, Leviathan. Now the Phillips Machine called forth not only the power of the living but also that of the dead.1 The Phillips Machine was first presented at a seminar held by a Professor Robbins at the London School of Economics in 1949, where it stunned both students and faculty. Some had simply shown up to scoff, but interest spread rapidly in the academic world. Phillips soon put the prototype into limited production, and in total perhaps fifteen machines were built. Most Phillips Machines were destined for academic institutions in England. Scholarship on the subject has concerned itself primarily with these applications, but in the March 1952 issue of Fortune magazine I found indications that the machines also had a life in America. At the London School of Economics archives, which are the only real repository of information pertaining to the Phillips Machine, I began a more intensive search. I discovered that Abba P. Lerner, the economist credited with popularising Keynes’ ideas in America, had become an enthusiast for the machine after seeing it in London in 1950 and had secured the rights to sell

20 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



the device in the United States. Lerner, always the populist, applied good old American business know-how to his new enterprise and christened the machine the ‘Moniac’, a corruption of ‘money’ and ‘mania’, and also perhaps a reference to a well-known early computer called the ‘Eniac’. The name change was bemoaned by Lerner’s colleagues, who thought it a devaluation of Phillips’s work. A letter I later read at the archives of the University of California, Berkeley indicates that at one time Lerner proposed calling the machine the ‘nymph’ (or ‘NIMF’, for National Income Monetary Flow), thinking perhaps that the frolicking, semi-naked maidens of the fountain would bring him buyers. He acknowledged, however, that this new name would probably have engendered further bad jokes, in this case about nymphomaniacs. After spending several days at the Berkeley archives, I became aware of Lerner’s fondness for this kind of salesmanship. The name change was not the only modification that was made to the Phillips Machine when it entered the United States. Structural differences in the U.S. economy meant that further engineering work had to be carried out before it was fit for U.S. consumption. The American Moniacs were calibrated in dollars, and additional development work was done by the research division of General Motors in Detroit. It was there, in Motor City, that a so-called accelerator was developed. A brake, apparently, was not thought necessary. Although the machines rapidly fell out of use in Great Britain (by the late 1950s they had been all but banished to the basements of their respective institutions), Lerner peddled his machine way beyond its obsolescence date. Seeing in it, perhaps opportunistically, a way to spread his own message, he brought this cumbersome machine along with him wherever his itinerant



21 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



A Moniac at the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research, Wellington, New Zealand.



22



23



academic career led. ( There is an account of Lerner with a leaky machine at an American Economic Association meeting in a New York hotel lobby in the 1970s.) He passed up no chance to publicise himself, or the machine. In correspondence with Life magazine, he urged the editor to include a piece on the machine and followed that with, of all things, material on his recent wire sculptures. (It is interesting to note that at this time, economics still existed in a sphere that included the arts − indeed, even wire sculpture). Of all the accounts and letters I uncovered at Berkeley, however, one detail was enticing beyond anything else: a passing reference to the fact that, sometime in the early 1950s, a machine had been ordered by, and dispatched to, the Central Bank of Guatemala. The search therefore brought me to Guatemala City. On busy 7a Avenida, downtown in Zona 1, I came upon the Central Bank, situated in a complex beside the other fabled institutions of the modern nation-state. It was an extremely optimistic building − mid-century Latin modernist − and, like the other structures, it was concealed behind a deep, carved concrete façade replete with Mayan flourishes. A series of fountains were arranged to welcome the visitor, but it had been some time since the water had actually flowed in them. I had to take care, as I attempted to cross the dry plaza, not to walk into the empty, tile-lined pools that ringed the complex. It seemed that, metaphorically at least, the bank had lost its power over the forces of circulation. As I passed the grand façade, rusted steel reinforcing rods could be seen through the concrete rendering. Inside, I was met by an elderly, bespectacled gentleman named Elvidio Aldana. He was the longest-serving employee of the bank and was known to all in the building simply as Elvis. It was not just his name that distinguished Elvis from the buttoned-down bankers; he wore a large tweed cap and his shoes shone with an unusual radiance. He would have been more at home in a Latin jazz club than at the Central Bank, and he had the tempo to match. He seemed very excitable and immediately launched into conversation. One of the first things he said to me was ‘Phillips was brilliant!’ Elvis signed me in at the front desk and escorted me around the building. We paused in front of a red-lit glass case containing a rather badly stuffed bird with peculiar tail feathers. The bird was a quetzal, the country’s national symbol, which shares its name with the official unit of Guatemalan currency. Given that the Central Bank issues quetzals, and the bird has, over the years, been brought to near extinction, the symbolism was hard to miss. Next I was escorted to the office of our host, Lic. Sergio Armando Hernández Rodas, on whose various desks was arranged a curious collection of model sports cars − Lamborghinis, Ferraris − none of which were to be seen on the streets outside.



Elvis, who is the bank’s chief librarian, an economist, and − some say − a historian, handed me a document. It seemed that rather than show me the archival material pertaining to the Moniac; he had instead prepared his own three-page account of its history at the bank. Not reading Spanish, I could only pick out obvious words from the text and wonder what Elvis had uncovered. Everyone who had read the Spanish agreed that it was not only accurate but also brilliantly observed. I noted that there was no bibliography and that nothing was footnoted. Our host took it upon himself to read it aloud for me in translation, and it was at this point that I realised the original sources would probably remain elusive. The account itself was written from so deeply within its subject that, even with my knowledge of the machine, it sounded like science fiction. There was a fourth man in the room, who sat quietly; he spoke only Spanish. This was Señor Alberto Muñoz. After a chance meeting in the streets of Guatemala City, Elvis had invited this former bank employee to meet us. It seemed that most of the new information about the Moniac had been passed on in the street. On a number of occasions, Elvis turned to me, his index finger directed toward his large bifocals, and exclaimed, “This man saw it … with his eye!” Later, in the library, I mentioned to Elvis that in my birth country, New Zealand, the national symbol is also a bird − the kiwi. The colloquial name for the New Zealand currency also comes from the country’s national symbol − the ‘kiwi dollar’, or even simply the ‘kiwi’. Upon hearing this, Elvis took me to his chaotic desk at the back of the room and opened a drawer that appeared to contain freshly printed banknotes. The notes were in bundles, each with a paper band around it, as if straight from the mint. It was unclear if this was actual legal tender; since the bundle he removed was made up of one-quetzal notes and I had seen only one-quetzal coins since I had arrived. Nonetheless, he sat down at his desk, signed the notes as if he were the president of the bank, and formally presented one to me. It was clear that a Moniac had been sent to the Central Bank, though the details about its time in Guatemala remained shrouded in mystery and its actual function at the bank may never adequately be understood. Also, it seems that it arrived damaged, and it is unclear exactly how or indeed if it was repaired. I later discovered that Lerner had visited to instruct the bank in its use, the knowledge of which seemed to have vanished soon after he left town. At the Library of Congress, turning the pages of one of Lerner’s sweat-ridden pocket diaries, I finally came upon the relevant entry. It simply stated: “Arrived Guatemala, set-up Moniac.” The date was March 23, 1953.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



Reverse of the one-quetzal bill showing the Central Bank of Guatemala.



I had an appointment with Lic. Eduardo Antonio Velásquez Carrera, dean of the Economic Sciences Faculty. He brought me into his Spartan conference room, where a large desk stood beneath a frieze of framed black-and-white photographs of men in academic dress − this was the history of the deanship of the school. We sat down, and I showed him pictures of the Moniac. He was completely unfamiliar with the machine, though he had no trouble in describing to me the exact functions it could facilitate. From my cursory view of the building, and indeed the university as a whole, I guessed that the campus dated to the 1960s. Assuming that the school had relocated here a good ten years after the Moniac had been donated, it seemed unlikely that the Guatemalan machine was still in existence. It certainly was not here at the school, although the dean would not let that hope die. His secretary brought in large bound records dating from 1954 and 1955, and the dean scrutinised the handwritten inventory, but nothing of interest was found. He then began making telephone calls, and eventually an elderly gentleman appeared. We were introduced, and he sat down to read Elvis’s account. Later, I was informed that he too had seen the machine at the Central Bank. No further information was divulged. Señor Velásquez Carrera had initially brought me into the conference room to introduce me to Dr Manuel Noriega Morales, a former dean of the school, by way of the framed portraits hung high on the walls. The dean pointed to the picture of Morales stationed in the middle of the frieze; the dates under his picture read ‘1948–1952’. The dean was convinced that Dr Morales had, along with President Guzmán, been responsible for bringing the Moniac into the country. If this was the case, the machine had certainly been in contact with extraordinary personalities. The title ‘Dr’ was important; Morales was the first Guatemalan to receive a PhD. He was also the only Central American present at the United Nations’ Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, where the US dollar’s supremacy in the international monetary system was institutionalised − against the advice of John Maynard Keynes, the British advisor. But more importantly, Dr Morales was the founding president of the Central Bank, a role he maintained into the 1950s. When I asked why he was so sure Dr Morales was involved in the Moniac’s history, the dean simply said that it was very much Morales’ kind of machine. Again I was reminded of the mythology of the times and how neatly the Moniac story fitted this unfulfilled desire for economic autonomy. History in Guatemala, it seemed, was not a topic open to debate, and many aspects remain off-limits to this day. Unknowingly, I had introduced a new personality into these events − in the form of the Moniac − which had yielded at least some new grounds for discussion. Perhaps this is why so much of what I heard in the city circulated only in the form of allegory. The real history, however, was not allegorical; it was brutal. Researching the history of the school on my return to San Francisco, I discovered another aspect of the story. The school had for many years taught a brand of economics with a distinctly leftist bent; it was described by some as Marxist. During the worst years of the civil war, in the 1980s, the military government added the dean of the school to a long list of assassinations. A faculty member attending his funeral was gunned down on his way home, and a third member of staff was also killed. All this took place in the period of about a month. The portraits above the table where I sat and talked with Señor Velásquez Carrera were hung with a regularity that revealed nothing of these events. As with a number of other subjects, these stories remain unutterable in Guatemala.



24 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



25 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



Beyond the hearsay and theatre of my visit to the bank, the symbolism of the Moniac animated each and every conversation I had there. It had arrived at the bank at a crucial time, right at the climax of a period known as the Ten Years of Spring. This time of liberal reform was dramatically curtailed by a CIA-led coup in 1954, which in turn ushered in a forty-odd-year period of largely uninterrupted military rule and then civil war. The coup was − unofficially at least − launched in response to the land-reform program enacted by the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán after it gained power in the 1950 election. The program returned land to the indigenous population by shifting ownership from the large landholders − the upper classes and foreign corporations. The foreign interest that stood to lose the most in these reforms was the Bostonbased consortium United Fruit Company, the largest banana producers in the world. The Moniac entered service at the Central Bank in 1953, just as the land-reform process began, and became an accidental witness to the tumultuous events of the next fifteen months. In desperate times such as these, there is no reliable counsel; no one knows what is being plotted, what pressures are being applied, or who will turn where. In such times, confidence can spring from the most unlikely places, and perhaps this is a clue in understanding the Moniac’s true function at the Central Bank. It is often the case with complex machines that we attribute mysterious powers to them, powers they simply cannot possess. It may turn out to be that the Moniac − whose economic capacities were impaired − functioned more as a talismanic advisor on the economy and perhaps even the state. With the enforced regime change in 1954, the machine − and everything it stood for − was cast out. From Elvis, I learnt that the machine had been given to the University of San Carlos, and so I resumed my search. The cab driver finally located building S8, the Economic Sciences Faculty, on the university’s sprawling, run-down campus in Zona 12. It is the only public university in Guatemala, and though it is publicly funded, it maintains a certain autonomy from the government by invoking its founding decree − the pursuit of pure academic thought. Like the Central Bank, such independence has not always found favour with the government of the day, and the long-term result seems to be that the funding tap has been turned off, or at least reduced to a trickle. I walked over dry, bare terrain to approach the school, while in the distance I could see that the weather was changing.



Two Essays on Banks

John Strauss, Jason Simon & Simon Sheikh



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My return from the university was a disorganized affair. No taxi driver would pick me up in Zona 12 that late in the afternoon, and so eventually I was driven by the secretary in the dean’s own vehicle. The threatening rain had now arrived and was turning the dry, dusty ground to mud. With the car doors locked, I passed through the squalid, desperately poor neighbourhoods of Zona 8. We drove in tandem with a decrepit diesel loco as it attempted to haul three wagons of scrap metal down a ramshackle railway line. I had wondered for some time about this railroad system, which in the 1950s was still the only transport link from the Atlantic. If the Moniac had been sent from London by sea, it eventually would have been hauled along these wet tracks. They were at the time part of a system entirely owned by the United Fruit Company. From the ripening bananas on their vast plantations in the Motagua Valley to fruit stands across America, United Fruit had developed what you could call a vertically integrated business system that guaranteed them money from every transaction. By the 1950s, their operations in Guatemala included electricity generation, mail delivery, a telephone network, and, of course, the railroad system. In short, it was difficult to do business in Guatemala without involving ‘The Company’, which became known as El Pulpo (The Octopus). While the Moniac bore the hopes of economic independence, the hypothetical path it took to arrive at its destination suggests just what it was up against. If it came to Guatemala by sea, it would have been paid cargo on the United Fruit shipping line, the Great White Fleet. It would then have been off-loaded at their facility at Puerto Barrios, the only port on the Atlantic, where it would have incurred further fees. It would then have been hauled − for a price − along the United Fruit railroad network to Guatemala City. Haemorrhaging from these costs, the ‘fountain of prosperity’ would have arrived at the Central Bank damaged (also perhaps courtesy of United Fruit), drained of funds, and already in debt. Ultimately, perhaps, the Moniac functioned neither as a Keynesian economic calculator nor as a tropical talisman for safe passage through the mysteries of global finance. Rather, it might be seen as a symbolic victim of the accelerated obsolescence of Keynesian thought in an international financial system dominated by the United States − a system committed to the relegation of all competing ideologies, with military force to back it up. It is this reality that led to the disappearance of the Guatemalan Moniac − and so also to its contemporary recreation as the symbol of an alternative to the very real political, economic and social miscalculations that defined Guatemala and other countries that strayed from the path. The Moniac, in this incarnation, stands not for the quest for a fountain of prosperity, but for the abandonment of that quest. The search for the Moniac turns out to be the key not to understanding the economic vision of a lost revolution, but to understanding the ways in which that vision was liquidated.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Jason Simon & John Strauss



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Michael Stevenson



1 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (Routledge, New York, 1997), p. 138



This article can be read in full at www.printedproject.ie



The Representation of Banking /Banking on Representation: Reflections on John Strauss’ ‘Transparency’ and its Reframing

Simon Sheikh



47



A crucial question for critical artists, and for cultural critique, has long been whether capital itself can be visualized? Not just in what manner it should be visualized, that is, a matter of representation, but whether its very workings can be imaged, whether something as elusive as the circulation of capital, goods and labour, can be contained in an image? Often this demand can never be met, and the answer is that it is unanswerable – Sergei Eisenstein, for instance, famously never did film his adaptation of Marx’s Capital… Obviously the effects of capital cannot only be measured, but also visualized, be it at the wealth or poverty end of the pole, or even in-between, but what about its functions, its world production, indeed its image production. In other words, how can you picture something that is itself a producer of images and imaginings? A picture of a camera does not really tell us anything about how a camera works, let alone what images it can produce, just as a picture of a machine does not tell us much about products or labour conditions. However, one can examine the image production of capital, which has long provided a rich furrow for cultural critique in both theory and practice, from ideology critique to institutional critique, and beyond. Indeed, whole cultures and publics, or, if you will, counter-cultures and counter-publics, have sprung up and thrived around this very brief. Among such projects we find certain cultural magazines, precisely producing their publics through circulation. In a magazine, a text is never alone but always within a context, and in a dialogue that is both internal and external to its publication. A magazine thus circulates discourse, but in a reflexive manner, since its publication date is a punctuation of time, while its seriality assures continuation. Although short-lived, the NYC journal Wedge, published in the early 1980s, was exemplary of this notion of reflexive circulation of discourse, but also of a magazine culture that was interdisciplinary in its scope and political in its critique. It may have stemmed from the art world, but was not limited to it or defined by it. It was not dealing with art criticism, but with what can be termed the art of critique. Today one might characterise its methodology as cultural studies (before that became a slur word of art history), but if so, it is of a different kind to the consumer studies-inspired sociological version, or, the aesthetification of so-called outside and low cultural forms in the establishment of a postmodern sublime that seems to have become the dominant strands now that cultural studies itself has become a discipline rather than an inter-disciplinary or even anti-disciplinary mode of inquiry. Instead, Wedge called itself ‘an aesthetic inquiry’ at its inception in 1982, and dealt with such issues as ‘the imperialism of representation – the representation of imperialism’, which was the theme(s) of Wedge 7/8, the double issue in which John Strauss’ article on bank architecture appeared. Strauss’s piece, tracing the change in bank architecture from the grandiose imperial style, through modernist transparency to its almost disappearance, sees this design as ideological, as representational. In short, banks represent. In this way Strauss, as an artist-writer, uses art criticism (or architectural criticism, if you must), as an aesthetic inquiry into the politics of representation. It is an artistic critique that uses aesthetics on the offense rather than as



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Simon Sheikh



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entrenchment into discipline, as an analysis of other forms of representation than art, but as equally expressive of discourse. It is an art criticism that does not have art as its object, but representation, in this case the aesthetics of banking, and how the façade represents the value inside. And whereas banks in the 19th and early 20th century tried to lure customers in through solidity and monumentality, literally securing the deposits, modern, international banking requires transparency: functionalist architecture with glass façades and atriums masquerading as public spaces. Modern bank architecture, then, attempts to represent efficiency, access-ability and inter-activity – well, trans-activity, really. However, with computing, transactions are virtual and thus virtually impossible, thus necessitating another form of representation, answered partly by the falseness of postmodern architecture, with no correspondence between façade and interior, what Strauss outright calls ‘cynicism’, and partly by the disappearance of the bank as a physical site altogether, replaced by ATMs that, conversely, are omnipresent, literally located on every street corner and in all supermarkets. “Money must never rest” as Strauss writes, “for circulating money is what ‘makes’ money”1 , . Indeed, the second half of Strauss’ text goes beyond representation in any tangible sense, focusing on the invisibility of the circulation of capital, as well as the instability of money and credit in the so-called ‘debt crisis’ of the 1980s. The text shifts from discussing ideology in representation to political economy during the much-fabled Reaganomics, and its severance of the credit system from the system of production, turning the credit market into a speculative industry, which is, of course, at the root of our current debt crisis, or as it is named now, credit crunch. This is not to say that Strauss’ essay is prophetic, but rather that it is instructive in how it allows cultural critique to engage with economics and neo-liberal ideology, that the editors of Wedge found it appropriate for an art magazine to discuss the economy and criticise the IMF, as well as US interventionism in general (that is thoroughly documented within the pages of issue 7/8), something that we sorely need in our actuality. Thus, Jason Simon’s rewriting of Strauss’ piece is inserted in the pages of Printed Project, in the form of a photo essay visualizing the apparently seamless transfer of bank spaces turned into other commercial spaces – shops accessible with credit cards, indeed often offering credit plans – as well as Strauss’ article in facsimile (as an artistic ready- made). New questions can then be formed: what happens to representation and politics now that the credit system itself has been discredited? And how can this be traced in representations today: what does the transformation of old stolid bank offices into boutiques, as Simon’s series of photographs testifies, tell us about the surge to transform economies of production into zones of consumption in the former West? And what does it tell us about the failure of this project, this failure within capital?



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Simon Sheikh



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Simon Sheikh



At the time of the publication of Strauss’s text, criticising, in effect, Reaganomics and neoliberalism, Reagan’s close ideological ally, Margaret Thatcher (in)famously said that “there is no alternative” to her way of governing, to neo-liberalism and to capital, which has sadly proved prophetic in terms of our political imaginaries. Today, it seems, there is no answer to the credit crisis, no alternative political project making itself visible, and, if you will, credible. The crisis is generally seen as having to do merely with banks, and as integral to the capitalistic world system from which obviously it sprang. So, perhaps the real failure, the real crime, does not lie with the banks, that, after all, only did what banks always do (trying to maximize profit), but with the lack of visibility for alternative visions and for the critique, political and artistic, that is there, but has been effectively depresented in the remnants of the public sphere and nominal political democracy.



1 John Strauss, Transparency: The Highest Stage of Bank Architecture, Wedge 7/8, winter/spring 1985, pp. 110-17.



In place of movement

Zachary Formwalt



January 15, 2009 Visited a used bookshop today, which had a book of early photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot. There was one that had been taken in the spring of 1845 that I found particularly striking. It was a perfect example of the failure of early photographs to stop and capture movement due to the long exposure times required: photography before the snapshot. The picture was of the Royal Exchange in London. Other than a few semi-transparent traces of horse-drawn carriages and what might have been a man sitting down for a moment in front of the equestrian sculpture towering over him, the streets and forecourt of the Exchange appear empty, leaving the sculptures on the building and in front of it as the sole representation of human life. And this life was one that had been frozen, arrested, for someone’s idea of eternity. All of this in front of a building constructed to provide shelter for the orchestration of commodity movements throughout the world: the Royal Exchange.

51 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Zachary Formwalt



March 12, 2009 I took this photograph today. I had wanted to get as close to Talbot’s exposure time and point of view as reasonably possible from street level in midday. I ended up with a time significantly shorter than his and this is clearly visible in the degree of movement captured on the film exposed to this scene today in comparison to that in Talbot’s near-empty image. But then again, other things have also changed. Some new buildings are clearly visible and there is a new monument behind the statue of the Duke of Wellington on a horse. While preparing to make this photograph, I discovered that Talbot’s had been taken only months after the Royal Exchange had been built. The previous Royal Exchange had burned down in 1838, the year before Talbot and his French contemporary, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, made their first photographs public. This sequence of events made the current Royal Exchange, the one standing before me, the first Royal Exchange ever to be photographed in London. In 1845, such a photograph was unable to capture those people and things moving past the very building that appears so solidly in that picture of Talbot’s. Although these people and things would look very different today, I thought it would be nice to repeat their escape from photographic depiction.



April 2, 2009 While reading The Guardian today, I came across a photograph of the Royal Exchange taken from a similar viewpoint to mine and Talbot’s. However, this was clearly a snapshot, taken in that fraction of a second that arrests all movement in the image, clearly reproducing all those bodies in movement at a particular instant. But this arresting of movement was, it turned out, reinforced and extended in time − for nearly eight hours − by a massive police force, which was not apparent in the photograph but was described in the text accompanying it:“Protestors are hemmed in outside the Bank of England and Royal Exchange. The police used the technique known as kettling to contain the protestors.” Kettling is a tactic used by the police to contain a group of protestors, an estimated 4,000 in this case, for a period of time in a particular location. This prevents the protest from breaking up into smaller groups that then require a greater number of police to effectively control, while at the same time preventing the protest from moving through the city and disrupting traffic. It is an arrest of movement in one place to allow movement to occur elsewhere. But this was not all. As the police began to let people escape from this place where they had been confined, they were required to identify themselves and be photographed individually. Here again, it was only by exchanging one arrest for another, that movement took place. And this arrest, this photograph taken by the police of the individual attached to their name and address, holds the promise for yet another arrest in the future. Today this economy of movement appeared in photographs as a mass protest in front of a building erected 165 years ago to shelter the exchange of commodities and their circulation throughout the world.



Is it Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

Brian Holmes



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Imagine the night sky as an overarching dome filled with thousands of shimmering points of light. Like celestial messengers they gleam and glitter as they drift across the face of the heavens. Each of these bright stars represents the stock of a publicly traded corporation. The intensity of their luminous presence varies in real time according to the frequency of trading. If one star co-varies with others – that is, if an identifiable pattern emerges between the rates at which certain stocks are bought and sold – then the flickering points of light draw slowly together, forming unstable constellations. The illuminated dome is an artwork by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, entitled Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. It refers both to the contemporary financial economy and to ancient astrological techniques for the calculation of human destinies. The work was conceived during the 1990s tech-stock boom and was originally intended for installation at a barrestaurant in the City of London. After the crash the piece was installed twice, first at Tate Britain in 2001 where a Reuters financial news feed provided real-time data on some ten thousand stocks, then again in 2004 at the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center where it was directly connected to the data streams of the local bourse. At first glance it might resemble dozens of other stock-market visualisations, remarkable mainly for its arresting astrological metaphor. In the Copenhagen version a computer workstation allowed the visitor to identify the stocks, to see their current prices and intuit some aspects of their shifting connections. But there is a further element to this piece, which transforms it into an existential allegory of contemporary social relations. To develop Black Shoals, the artists brainstormed with a group of nine artificial intelligence researchers. They worked extensively with one of them, the A-life specialist Cefn Hoile, to develop computer algorithms for the generation of ‘creatures’ that would feed off the nutrient energies released by the shimmering stars. On the basis of these genetic codes, populations of creatures are born, grow, reproduce and die, developing unique survival strategies that cannot be predicted in advance but only observed in the course of the installation. Like traders, they form vast alliances or operate warily on their own, display tremendous mobility or remain fixed in one position, focus solely on particular stocks or cast their nets across the entire virtual universe. And like traders, they are affected both by the fluctuations of the market in general and by the strategies of their rivals. A photo documenting the work shows a dense cluster of tiny A-life agents. The caption reads: “These creatures would breed voraciously when they found food, causing huge swarms which would spread across the dome eating everything in their path and eventually dying out when nothing was left to eat.” 1 If this allegory of the trader's condition can be termed ‘existential’, it is not because the creatures are alive in any natural sense, but instead because their artificial world, like the one in which we all live today, is decisively shaped by the complex flow of data streams whose relations continually border on chaos. As seen in the series of currency crises that surged across the global periphery in 1997-98 at the moment when the Black Shoals was conceived, or more



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Brian Holmes



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Brian Holmes



recently again in 2007-08, nothing has more powerful effects at the ground level of existence than the shifting map of the financial stars above. The artists put it like this: “Because the stock market has the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena (feedback loops etc), it can be studied in the same way as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a 'natural' expression of some fundamental forces. One of the lessons we learned in our long journey to understand something about the operations of big finance is that the market is only a natural expression of the particular artificial world model that it embodies – in the same way that the artificial life creatures in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium are natural expressions of the computer program that they exist in.” Black Shoals is a great and enduring artwork because it asks two fundamental questions. First, what is the ‘artificial world model’ that contemporary civilization has come to embody, under the decisive influence of speculative finance? And second, will the ‘creatures’ of this particular world – not only the traders themselves, but all the cultures of global circulation that have sprung into existence over the last thirty years – now have to dramatically change survival strategies, or perhaps even die out and disappear in the wake of the current crisis? Mirror Maze Writing in 1986, Susan Strange described the extreme volatility of the financial world as “casino capitalism.” Bankers and investors were becoming fabulously rich, but risk and instability had begun to dominate everyday experience: “The great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter we are all involuntarily engaged in the day's play.”2 The continual rolling of the dice disrupted the entire international trading system. America retained the key place it had gained after WWII, but its hegemony was now founded on the management of chaos.



The root cause was the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods fixed exchange-rate scheme in 197173. The new regime of floating rates required the hedging of international transactions by purchases of several foreign currencies to offset the risk of devaluations. The appearance in 1973 of the first networked currency trading system, called the Reuters Monitor, marks the departure point for a still-expanding range of specialised financial information networks.3 What became crucial was the relation of the speculating individual to the flickering patterns of opportunity on the screen. As Urs Bruegger and Karin Knorr Cetina explain in an article on The Global Lifeform of Financial Markets: “The screen is not simply a 'medium' for the transmission of messages and information. It is a building site on which a whole economic and epistemological world is erected. The world-character of this site also comes about through the performative possibilities of the dealing systems implemented on the screen.” 4 1973 also saw the publication of the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, which Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway have placed at the center of their allegorical world model. Fischer Black and Myron Scholes opened the Pandora's Box of contemporary finance. What they sought was the possibility to eliminate the risk of trading by the use of a financial derivative called an option. This is a contract granting the right, but not the obligation, to sell an underlying commodity or stock for a fixed price at a future date: in short, a guarantee that it can be sold for at least its initial value. The problem was determining just how much that guarantee should cost. Black and Scholes assembled a fictional portfolio of stocks and options and used a technique of ‘dynamic hedging’ to continually buy and sell shares of the stocks, balancing their fluctuations against each other in order to maintain the value of the corresponding options. They represented this process in a mathematical formula which identifies the price of an option with the cost of dynamically hedging it until its expiration date. If the average volatility of the stock can be established on the basis of its past performance – using a form of statistical analysis borrowed from the physics of Brownian motion – that average curve can then be used to calculate the price of the option.



Black-Scholes opened the way for the supernova of over-the-counter derivatives that has continued expanding up to the present, reaching a potential or ‘notional’ value of $683.7 trillion in mid-2008.5 To attain this impossible sum – roughly ten times global GDP – the initial options-pricing formula had to be rewritten for an enormous variety of contracts, whose potential profits could be calculated instantaneously in the trading pits by means of networked computer devices. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee explain: “The model was extended to encompass increasingly abstract forms of risk that went beyond simple commodities options pricing into the much more sophisticated world of complex financial derivatives.... In ensuing years, mathematical statistics would work not so much in concert but rather alongside those who fabricated and marketed derivative products. Computer pricing programs and the in-house technicians who designed them would functionally and socially mediate their relationship. Eventually traders could run the pricing programs with little technical, never mind real mathematical, expertise or understanding. The result was the evolution of parallel but barely connected worlds.” 6 As the key discovery behind derivatives trading, the Black-Sholes formula can be placed at the origins of casino capitalism. But it is also the source of the fundamental disconnect between ground and sky on which the contemporary world model is predicated. On the one hand, the mathematical expertise of the ‘hardest’ natural science, physics, provides the foundation of mathematical certainty that alone can guarantee investor confidence. On the other, the ‘performative possibilities of the dealing systems implemented on the screen’ are what generate the profits, pumping the energy into the artificial stars above our heads and sparking the positive feedback loops of bubble economics. For the cycle of profit-taking and reinvestment to continue recirculating indefinitely without any reference to material production – in short, for the world above to take on a life of its own – only one further element is needed: systemic corruption that can subvert the checks and balances that prevent the formation of speculative bubbles. This corruption takes the form of ‘control fraud’, or the ability of corporate officers to suborn the regulatory instances, both internal and external, that are supposed to keep the system in balance. Corruption at the top can transform the control functions – accounting firms, ratings agencies, Greenspan's Fed itself – into instruments for the maintenance of confidence, despite the obvious signs of market failure. 7



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57 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Brian Holmes



58 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Brian Holmes



The word ‘speculation’ comes from the Latin verb specere, which means to look – in this case, to look into the future. But speculation is also related to the word speculum, or mirror. What the world model of financially regulated capitalism does at ground level is to transform select living environments into grotesquely magnified reflections of the primary relation between the grasping trader and the profit-making opportunities flickering on the screens. The gentrification process that began in the 1970s and reached global scale in the early 2000s has transformed entire cities into glittering mirrors of the desire to gaze into an ever-more opulent future.8 Take one incongruous example: the appearance of postmodern casinos in the impoverished core of Detroit, as a predatory regeneration strategy for the postindustrial city. Across the world, the urban environment has become the necessary and coveted stage for an endless series of speculative performances, whose goal is to justify investment (in the land, in oneself, in a business venture) by evoking the potential of future earnings. Art, in the instrumentalised form of the ‘creative industries’, has been an important vector of this total makeover. Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium represents the self-reinforcing tie between the artificial lifeforms of the trading creatures and their unfolding objects of desire, scintillating with realtime flows of information. The thoroughly contemporary aspect of the work is its second-order cybernetic structure, which imitates the positive feedback loops that characterise the speculative economy. But a more distant cinematic image offers an equally convincing allegory of the present situation: the ‘Magic Mirror Maze’ at the end of Orson Welles' film noir classic, The Lady from Shanghai, released in 1948 at the outset of America's rise to hegemony. The surreal closing scene of this movie offers a prescient glimpse of the distorted realities generated by the spectacular power-brokers of the capitalist democracies. The hero of the film is the working-class Irishman Michael O'Hara, played by Welles himself. Following a chance encounter in New York, O’Hara is lured by his own greed and sexual desire into the intrigues of a rich American couple who sail him across the Panama Canal in a private yacht, embroiling him in a complex murder plot that finally leads to the mirror-maze of a San Francisco funhouse. Drugged and disoriented, he witnesses a wild shootout between the rich but impotent trial lawyer, Arthur Bannister, and his exotic wife Elsa, a high-class Caucasian prostitute born in China, played by Welles' estranged wife Rita Hayworth. Faces and bodies



multiply in a baroque confrontation of proliferating images, before the first shots ring out. As the mirrors shatter and the labyrinth of reflections falls away in broken shards, the husband and wife finally kill each other, fulfilling what the film portrays as their destiny. The Welles character escapes from the world of distorted spectacle into the open air, wondering how he will forget, how he will live on into the future. Ask Why Today it is the magical mirror-maze of the speculative economy that lies in ruins, and the question for the world is how to forget the impossible desires of casino capitalism, how to imagine other destinies. Yet what seems more likely for the present is that the multitudes of artificial lifeforms that briefly flourished on the air routes between financial capitals will now fade away like the swarms of creatures in Black Shoals, leaving the major predators with their weapons intact, still firing at each other. As governing elites around the world desperately attempt to reboot the speculative economy, it is essential to understand exactly what happened in the recent boom-bust cycles. Ask why was the advertising slogan of the former energy-trading corporation Enron, which collapsed in 2001, along with the other imaginary giants of the dot-com boom (VivendiUniversal, WorldCom, Tyco, etc). The slogan is a classic symptom of the speculative economy: an injunction to know that reverses into its opposite. Why ask? is the underlying message. At stake here is the highly profitable function of the veil, which turns sophisticated knowledge, indeed visibility itself, into a weirdly transparent cloak of secrecy and denial. Visible blindness, closely associated with the multiplication of aesthetic surfaces, is the underlying formula of financial governance.



Maybe the most important question to be asked right now is this: What is a derivative? We know that it is a fungible contract, created by applying a mathematical formula to underlying assets or commodities whose prices are susceptible to fluctuation on volatile markets. Derivatives were supposed to mitigate the risks of globalisation with the highest degree of precision and efficiency – implying that all risks, including collective ones, should be formatted for the market by private actors in search of a profit. Yet even though it is salable, the derivative cannot be understood as a simple commodity. Marx described the commodity as that product of human labour whose exchange value, seemingly animated with a life of its own, acts to render invisible the social relations that produced it. But derivatives have nothing to do with production; instead they conceived to manage environmental risks. In this sense they are metacommodities acting to conceal the private deliberations that effectively shape the environment in which any productivity or consumptive activity can take place. The lifeform of the financial markets is now animated by these meta-commodities, and what the glitter of the central business districts hides is the privatization of government. Gentrification is the fetishism of severed democratic relations. Yet as Lee and LiPuma point out, the proliferation of derivatives actually increases the risks that they are supposed to mitigate.9 To understand the larger picture, consider the way that Enron's financialization of electrical energy markets led to rolling blackouts in California, the recall of the Democratic governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has used the credit crisis as an historic chance to destroy public services.10 Government by markets has its consequences. This is the transparent secret of a failed world model. It’s easy to guess the future from the present alignment of the stars. What's ahead for the socalled Western countries is further industrial decline, a fresh round of banking concentration, new locks on the gated communities and deeper decay in society (generalised precariousness for entire sectors of the middle classes, AK-47s in the neighborhoods). This means that the ambiguous position of contemporary artists in the cultures of financial circulation will soon suffer its own correction, as public funds recede and gentrification budgets shift to defensive retrenchment. But being human means reopening the question of your own destiny. The sophisticated forms of visualisation, inquiry and experimentation that develop alongside financial expansion are absorbed into its flux at the peak of each speculative run, only to fall back to the margins when the crash comes again. Today, it looks as though that pattern could finally be broken. Now is the time to chart other paths for social development, in the impalpable space where symbolic constellations are sketched out on living skins.



What goes around comes around Stations and trajectories in systems of circulation

Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



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60 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Brian Holmes



The objects in the front of us are in constant flux, and intrinsically linked together. How do such links and connections work? And what forms do they take? In this text, we are interested in circulation as a socially determined system. In order for circulation to occur there has to be an environment in which it can take place, and which contains measures regulating the flows, as well as providing ideas about mutual benefits. Obviously, there also need to be objects to circulate within such ‘value-loaded’ environments, which, when implemented (ie when something gets circulated), actualise or perform those very values. What precisely is circulated is of minor importance here. Rather, we will focus on the contexts of circulation, as no circulation takes place in a vacuum. More readily, circulation may be described as taking place in a time-space of cultural, social and material as well as physical possibilities and delimitations. In thinking in terms of time-space we proceed from time-geography, a set of notions developed by the geographer Torsten Hägerstrand.1 Time-geography is not a theory of knowledge or ontology but, according to Hägerstrand, a world-view. Pertinent to this worldview is that everything is always on the move. Even if an object stays put in space – eg in a ‘station’– it nonetheless moves through time, forming specific ‘trajectories’, as illustrated in the three typical time-geographic diagrams of varying complexity.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



1 This and the following quote can be found in the extensive documentation at http://blackshoals.net. 2 Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 1997/1st ed. 1986). 3 Today,“the Reuters dealing community consists of some 19,000 users located in more than 6,000 organizations in 110 countries worldwide having over one million conversations a week.” http://about.reuters.com/productinfo/dealing3000/description.aspx?user=1&. 4 Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger, "Inhabiting Technology: The Global Lifeform of Financial Markets," in Current Sociology 50 (2002). 5 http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy0905.pdf 6 Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 7 William K. Black, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 8 For an overview of the theories of speculative urbanism, see my article “Megagentrification: Limits of an Urban Paradigm,” available at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/megagentrification. 9 “The very process that prices and commodifies also conceals its own social character, making more difficult the task of visualizing the systemic risk.” LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, op. cit. 10 See the documentary on Enron by Alex Gibney, The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), where the anatomy of control fraud is retraced from the sinews to the bone.



Figure 1. Examples of time-space diagrams. Descriptions and sources: 1) Development of the landscape during a century viewed cartographically (above) and time-geographically (below). At ‘a’ a certain individual’s trajectory has been emphasised (Hägerstrand 1993: 39).



2) A time-geographic representation of a structural coupling between two persons (Gren 1994: 81).



3) Principal time-geographic diagram of material flows [through different stations] in time and space to a building site (detail of fi gure in Lenntorp 1993: 79).



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Moreover, time and space are seen as limited resources in which everything that takes place does so only as long as it has ‘power’ enough to claim access to these resources, that is, to timespace relations. Therefore, all beings and things in time-space are in a constant relation to, or in power struggle with, their surroundings. Although Hägerstrand mainly focused on the physical attributes of both the existences and the surroundings, we would like to stress the cultural, social, and political implications of circulation. In short, a circulation system may be said to consist of actors and two main components; stations and trajectories. A station is a site where the trajectories meet and where the actors may interact with each other, eg in order to make exchanges. A trajectory is the route, movement and transport given by the actors to that which is circulated, as well as the paths formed by the actors themselves when moving in time-space, eg on their way to and from stations. As illustrated in the figures above – particularly the third – the stations fulfill a prominent role in the system of circulation since they also function as temporal storage for that which is circulated, before it continues its route to another station. The stations are thus tied together by the trajectories between them. A station in this context is a place prolonged in time: not static, but with a (limited) dynamic. The station is under restrictions of various kinds, which also contribute to delimit it in time-space. The restrictions – cultural, social, legal, political or other – can be self-imposed or bestowed from outside, or in combination. An ordinary store or shop is perhaps what would first spring to mind as such a station, interwoven as it is in a net of trajectories formed by the flows of goods, money, staff and customers. Goods are transported to the store, displayed on shelves for the customers to come and pick them up. The goods are then placed in a shopping cart and taken to the cashiers where the goods are paid for. But, as we will see in the examples below, this often taken-forgranted interaction between the customers and the storeowners contains a set of problematic issues embedded in the contemporary capitalist and monetary circulation system.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



The Hidden Flow Exchange project at Heaven during the Swinging with Neighbors Festival, Stockholm, 2004.



The Hidden Flow Exchange A qualitatively different way to form circulation is the Swop Projects’s The Hidden Flow Exchange project, realised by Andrea Creutz and fellow artist Lise Skou.2 This project was based on the idea of the Ecological Rucksack. The Ecological Rucksack indicates the quantity of materials that has been moved in nature to produce the goods: it represents the degree of influence exercised by the goods on the environment. The exchange shop in which the Hidden Flow Currency (HFC) was viable, was located at Swop Projects’s premises in Copenhagen, and occasionally at other art spaces. Visitors to the shop were requested to bring items they no longer needed to be exchanged for HFC. The material and weight of the item was first decided upon, so its ecological rucksack could be calculated by using a table providing data on the material intensity, ie the raw material, fuel and transport services that was used when the material of the item were produced.3 The exchanged item was then marked with a ‘price tag’ displaying its approximate ecological rucksack in kilo, then added to ‘the stock of the shop’ and could then be purchased with HFC. The display of the ecological rucksack aspired to illustrate the enormous refuse produced during the extraction and production of materials and goods. The Hidden Flow Exchange Project intended to function on a pedagogical as well as an operative level, with the purpose to



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reflect on different value systems and question how they are predominantly based on capitalist economic calculations. Furthermore, the project aimed to promote the recycling of goods, contributing towards the re-use of products, as well as enhancing their lifetime. Since the material intensity is not to be found in the final product, and never introduced in the economic sphere, economists describe it as a hidden flow. The Hidden Flow Exchange Project appropriates this terminology in order to comment upon the economists’ one-sided perspective, considering that most production processes have a visible and destructive impact on the environment. In the example of the Hidden Flow Exchange Project, environmental issues are in focus, and this points to another factor, namely that circulation systems affect the surroundings in which they work. In the dominant monetary economy, a number of external effects arise that are not reflected in the price of the product. These so-called external costs, often in the form of environmental damages, will be suffered by other parties than the ones directly involved in the transactions. The Hidden Flow Exchange Project also points to another basic condition: the economy is not one system of circulation, but several systems existing interwoven and parallel with each other, articulating each other over time. Hereby they also constitute, limit and make each other possible.4 Circulation does not only take place in one value-loaded environment, but in different systems embedded in each other, constituting each other’s environments.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



Food Not Bombs distribute free meals in the centre of Utrecht.



Petra Biesta from Food Not Bombs collects vegetables from the grocery stores at Canalstraat, Utrecht.



However, some of the Food Not Bombs’ stations are also situated within the dominant economy (supermarkets etc), which the groups thus make use of in a way not initially intended, eg when they interrupt and divert the refused goods from their intended path from the bin to the dump. From this follows that stations may have ‘multiple positions’, meaning that they occupy a position in different circulation systems at the same time. This multiplicity is not without confrontation, though. When interfering, as Food Not Bombs do, with the capitalist circulation system by not paying for the goods, and furthermore distributing them as free meals in public, reactions are bound to come. Supermarkets, who prefer that people buy their products, have to a larger extent come to keep their garbage in locked premises, or even pour chlorine over them to prevent people from ‘gleaning’ and hereby prevent ‘their’ waste to be of use for others. The problem of multiple positions is maybe not so much a problem of conflicting material interests, since many of the beneficiaries from the free meals would not be able to buy the food stuff in the shop in any case, but rather of the symbolic intent of re-using garbage, refuse and trash. What Food Not Bombs, thus, also make visible, is that in order to make the relations of any market significant to the actors, a certain language has to be deployed by which meaning is communicated. Without words and other signs it would not be possible to make sense of exchanges, no matter in which system of circulation they occur. To tell stories of circulation, thus, becomes a political act in itself.



Food not Bombs An instructive example of the interaction between different systems is the work of Food Not Bombs, which explicitly utilises stuff that actors in the dominant economy have thrown away. Food Not Bombs is what can be termed ‘franchise activism’ and organises several hundred groups worldwide.5 When performing, these groups simultaneously criticise and counter the capitalist circulation system, as well as phenomena such as homelessness and the unequal distribution of resources. Food Not Bombs position themselves in society through this critique of the dominant commercial systems, but also attempt to alter the existing relations. In order to make a statement for sustainable ecology and equal distribution of resources, Food Not Bombs collect left-over food from supermarkets, shops and restaurants in order to ‘recycle’ it into meals that are handed out for free in the streets. A new circulation is thus constructed around goods that are more or less refused by the dominant mode of circulation, and Food Not Bombs have their own stations and adjacent trajectory patterns to re-circulate them.



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Gratis In the project Story Space on Gift Economies, a Swop Project in collaboration with Casco and self-organised groups working with gift economies in Utrecht, distribution networks were investigated. The notions brought up in the project related to how alternative systems of distributing goods, information and services are structured, what constitutes them, and what they represent. These stories were assembled and circulated to a wider audience in the free newspaper Gratis. Gratis appropriated the form of free newspapers such as Metro and Spits, but did not contain any advertisements. While ad-financed free newspapers are also given away without charge, there is an obvious difference in motivation and ideology compared to the activities of the groups who contributed to Gratis. One example of a story re-told in Gratis is the Weggeefwinkel (Give Away Shop)6 located in squatted premises in the same building as the Hoog Catharinje – one of Netherlands biggest shopping malls – who, by giving everything away for free, situate themselves outside of the profit-based system and thereby implicitly comment on that system. Moreover, many of these projects tell of exchange stations as meeting points where participation itself is an essential aim. The Weggeefwinkel is one of few places in the city where people can socialise without having to spend money: it attracts a very diverse group of people who visit or volunteer at the Weggeefwinkel on a regular basis.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



Story Space on Gift Economies at Casco in Utrecht 2006 had a program of collaborative workshops, discussions, distribution of the free newspaper Gratis, as well as a gleaning tour and a public dinner in collaboration with Food Not Bombs.



Bringing the vegetables to Casco.



Traffic jam, when the newspaper Gratis and ‘vegetable harvest’ arrives to Casco at the same time!



Collective effort! Cooking at Casco.



Social Capital However, to socialise is not just to socialise. When meeting with friends and forming new acquaintances one is also adding to the stock of social capital, both on an individual and on a collective level. This social capital might then, when the need eventually arises, be translated into materially related benefits. One society where one’s social capital was a most important factor in order to live what was regarded as a ‘normal’ life was the Soviet Union.7 In general, the problem in the planned state-socialist economies was not monetary, but that there was not enough goods and services to buy at the shops. Instead people did what they could to obtain the needed stuff by networking, as is amply illustrated by the Soviet proverb “Do not have a hundred roubles, have a hundred friends” Through one’s contacts (and indirectly their place of . work) one could ‘get hold of’ – in Russian dostat’ po blaty – various everyday goods and services and it was thus useful to have friends in different spheres of the economy; to get meat it was useful to know a butcher, to get paint or building materials to know construction workers, to get good healthcare to know a doctor, to get good schooling for the children to know a teacher and so on.



With great help from volunteers the free newspaper Gratis was distributed in the streets of Utrecht.



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Money was not the only means and often of less importance in directing the circulation of goods and services, rather it was favours that were being exchanged. One person helped another to get the needed stuff and these exchanges formed into extensive networks of exchange that underpinned and characterised the whole circulation system. Obviously, it did not help to fill the shops with goods, as large part of the stocks were siphoned off their officially intended routes and instead followed routes linked to the networks of the involved persons. When viewing the role of social capital as something that gives access to the flow of goods, it must also be noted that not all persons have the same possibilities, since contacts are not equally shared by all in a given society. Some people will by position (in the social hierarchy), location (being near or distant from important resources) and/or character (being a ‘nice’ person) be better off in forming these networks and are thus more able to benefit from this kind of system when in need. Different persons are thus more or less connected to the system of circulation, reflecting the uneven ‘power geometry’ in society, to borrow a concept from Doreen Massey, who uses it to describe the uneven access to circulations of a different kind, namely the transport apparatus of the global economy.8 When the Soviet Union collapsed and ‘wild’ capitalism replaced the planned economy, the system of blat-exchanges lessened in importance. A post-Soviet proverb illustrates this “Do not have a hundred friends, have a hundred dollars”. When goods and services were up for sale again, money regained a prominent position and became the ‘deficit’ good for most people. The reference to dollars also indicates that there was no trust in the Russian currency, and that real economic power was now based outside the state.



currency it stimulates the growth of the local economy. Interest does have some positive aspects, because you have to pay back more than you got, it forces you to do some activities, which will give you some profit. So it forces the use of the whole capacity of an economy. The problem in a lot of countries, especially in the South, is that there’s a lot of unused capacity, a lot of unemployment, shops and factories that aren’t fully used. So if you have a sort of mechanism you can stimulate internal trade. And if you use local currency, which can only be used within the community, it prevents the money flowing out to parts where it would get higher profits on investments. (…) It also makes people conscious about what their money is doing. The system makes the members think:“I used to do my shopping in the big supermarket in the other end of town but now I spend my money, the local currency, in the local grocery shop. Who, in turn, spend it for example at the painter, who uses it in another company, and this company hires me” The idea . is: ‘Ok, I spend this money in the local shop and in the end it returns to me.’ Not a lot of people realise this, what the power of the money is and how they can effect the system themselves.”9



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Andrea Creutz & Thomas Borén



1 For introductions to time-geography, see Hägerstrand, Torsten (1991) Om tidens vidd och tingens ordning [About the width of time and the order of things], eds. G. Carlestam & B. Sollbe, Byggforskningsrådet, Stockholm.; Hägerstrand, Torsten (1993) Natur och samhälle [Nature and society], NordRefo No. 1: 14–59.; Gren, Martin (1994) Earth writing: exploring representation and social geography in between meaning/matter, Departments of Geography, University of Gothenburg, Series B, No. 85.; Åquist, Ann-Cathrine (1992) Tidsgeografi samspel med samhällsteori [Time-geography in interplay with social theory], Meddelanden från Lunds geografiska institutioner, avhandlingar No. 115, Lund University Press, Lund.; Borén, Thomas (1999) Källsortering för hållbar utveckling? Kretsloppssamhälle och förloppslandskap [Sorting solid waste for sustainable development? Society of flows and landscape of courses], Stockholm Geographical Reports No. 3. 2 In the Swop Projects, initiated 2003 in Copenhagen, material on informal economies and economic systems based on ideas of equal trade and generosity was produced and disseminated. The project included; a series of open discussions and presentations, the establishing of a Give Away Shop, complementary currency systems, Give Away in Circulation – the collection and circulation of ideas on open source systems, the distribution of a free newspaper, etc. See www.swopnetwork.dk 3 A table from Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy was used for the calculations of the quantities. www.wupperinst.org 4 For a discussion on diverse economies (in the plural), see Smith, Adrian & Alison Stenning (2006) Beyond household economies: articulations and spaces of economic practice in postsocialism, Progress in Human Geography 30(2): 190–213. 5 See www.foodnotbombs.net (7 July 2009). 6 See www.weggeefwinkels.nl 7 For more about the informal system of exchanges in the Soviet Union and Russia, see Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998) Russia’s economy of favours: blat, networking and informal exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.; Arnstberg, Karl-Olov & Thomas Borén (eds) (2003) Everyday economy in Russia, Poland and Latvia, Södertörn Academic Studies 16, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm. See also Fruchtmann, Jakob (ed) (2009) The Triumph of Money, Kultura 3/2009 8 Massey, Doreen (1991) A global sense of place, Marxism Today June 1991: 24–29. 9 The interview with Jaap Vink was made by Andrea Creutz at the STRO office, Utrecht, March 29th, 2006, for the Swop Interview Archive. The Dutch Social Trade Organisation (STRO) is a research and development network working with micro-credit systems and the strengthening of local economies through networks of exchange, see www.strohalm.net



Complementary Currencies This contrasts sharply with the objectives of complementary currencies, tried out in many places of the world to empower local communities and make them less dependent on the power geometries of the global circulation system. Complementary currencies may help in forming stations and trajectories that benefit the users in ways the circulation system of the national currency do not. In concluding this discussion on circulation as a socially determined system or systems, let us offer the following quote from Jaap Vink at the Dutch Social Trade Organisation, STRO: “In our micro credit system we deal with complementary currency because this currency can only be spent within the community. So even if you do have to pay interest on these loans, you are sure, by definition, that interest can only be spent within the community. In this sense, you use the interest in a positive way instead of what you see now, that interest leads to a money flow from poor people to rich people or from poor to rich countries. With complementary



Blind Spots: Connecting Nodal Points

Alex Villar



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A few years ago, while researching a project, I came across a curious book whose subject matter I could describe today, not without a touch of irreverence, as a manual on alternative techniques of circulation.1 I had been observing how a number of consumer products continue to circulate beyond their purchase moment, via their public display on the body of the consumer. Such is the case of clothes, jewelry and personal electronic devices, but also of products that are consumed socially like beverages, books, among others. My interest was in finding ways to disrupt the fluid continuity of this process, particularly in finding disrupting tactics already at play in the social sphere. I found in the book I just mentioned a, perhaps extreme, but no less pointed, example of engaging commodity circulation while, at the same time, momentarily but assertively interrupting its image projection through bodily display. Eventually, the lifted merchandise eventually finds its way back into the traditional channels of circulation, but for the brief instance during which time the stolen product is worn in disguise, a different relation to the body is founded, one that reverses the practice of enhancing one's identity via identification with the image conveyed by the wearable product. I am calling this situation a reversal simply because instead of the product covering the body, it is the body that covers the product. Say we uphold this reversal, however provisional and isolated it may be, and enhance its potential through aesthetic recombination, similarly to how Critical Art Ensemble, following Guy Debord, defined it as making use of already existing representations and recombining them in disruptive ways.2



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Following these thoughts, I produced a video called Blind Spots in which I use the instructions from the book as point of departure. While shoplifting was the tactical point of departure for Blind Spots, the video used techniques from a visual vocabulary that references television commercial spots. In the video, from scene to scene, a series of products is revealed out of their temporarily occluded spots in the body and presented against their stated retail prices, similarly to what is used in commercials but here converted from expense to income. The objective was to attain a disjointed encounter between opposing strategies as to short-circuit the subjectivizing mechanisms present in persuasive communication. Such an outcome is not directly transitive from the piece to actual life, but they could function as a discursive rearrangement of established norms, a disjunctive conjunction, to use the terms that Jacques Rancière elaborated as the play in the ambiguity of resemblances and on the instability of dissemblances. 3



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Blind Spots explores a particular facet of shoplifting, the instance of disguise of the stolen commodity. This fact situates the shoplifting gesture at a nodal point that operates a shift in the subjectivizing mechanism ruling the relations between body and commodity. But there are other questions worth exploring in related subject areas, and the occasion of this essay presents the opportunity to expand the initial investigation. A case in point are those situations that involve technology-enabled means to control the movement of products, particularly those devices used in retail to prevent the so-called unauthorized removal of articles.4 In the recent past, EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) was prevalent in retail stores as a means of countering shoplifting; in fact they are still in use. These days, the security industry is heavily pushing for the indiscriminate use of a more evolved technology. Radio Frequency Identification tags, or simply RFID, are comprised of two related parts: on one end, there is an integrated circuit for storing and processing information; on the other, there is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal. This tag can be used not only to track the article’s unauthorized movement but also to control inventory. Walmart notoriously implemented RFID tags in its stock control system and integrated with its suppliers via extranet to minimize the occurrence of out-of-stock items, reduce overstock and automate supply orders. 5 But the most controversial use of RFIDs is to be found in the Human Microchip Implant version of these tags. Initially targeted at serious medical cases that require immediate attention facilitated by the embedding of the patient's critical information in the chip, it has since been used by companies and government to controls access to restricted areas. 6 Counter activity already exists in the form of hacking into the chip via scanning of its signal to either clone or disrupt it, bringing a situation once limited to science fiction literature into the mundane level of commodity logistics management. 7



What remains consistent, regardless of technological advances, is the managerial need to control the physical location of bodies as they flow through space. This body is ever more enhanced by prosthetic devices and voluntary inscription in locatable grids, typically via GPSenabled phones, but it is still the actual body, not solely its virtual double that is the focus of control. Like other technical advancements, the defensive rhetoric appears to amount to a residual, not to say negligible, profit percentage, especially when compared to the enormous gains afforded by new opportunities for profit extraction. For example, GPS-enabled triangulation of the potential buyer at the moment of intersection with a store that matches the consumer's interests as per their stated profile of interests maximizes the chance of impulse buying. Such logic is not a novelty; a cursory look at the developments in retail display systems reveals a direct correlation between logistical rearrangement and exponential growth. The product accessibility introduced by the department store in the retail economy translated into increased impulse driven consumption. On the other hand, shoplifting also progressed as a result but typically at a fraction of the rate of increase in profit. We could say that its very conditions of possibility share the same source with a capitalist invention designed to maximize profits. Not unlike residual unemployment under neo-liberal regimes, shoplifting subsists alongside the retail machine as a necessary remainder. In spite of the disproportion between shoplifting costs and the size of the security industry, shoplifting is portrayed as the villainous debaser, out to destroy the virtues of commercial exchange. But contrary to this vigorous rhetoric laid against it in the manner of a moral battle, shoplifting is not really meant to be extinguished. It is more useful, for the sake of justifying disproportional counter-attacking measures, that this irritant factor be simply sustained at a tolerable level.



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This disguised sustainability allows the system to continuously re-invent its mechanisms of self-defense and in the process recycle itself toward previously unexplored territories. A good example is the recorded music industry. For years now, this industry has been leveling an inquisition-like battle against individuals who engage in free downloading of music from the Internet. It has gone to unimaginable measures to sue teenagers, single mothers and the elderly.8 At the same time, advantageous deals were being arranged, notably with My Space and Google, in China to allow people to do precisely what they have forbade in the U.S. and Europe: listen to music without paying.9 The difference is that when this activity is performed in the terrain of tightly defined agreements, which is to say paved with profitable partnership contracts, the once unproductive listening activity has again become lucrative. Once a new business model is conceived, the moral ban is lifted and the same activity is proclaimed ethical. Now that we have established the lack of moral grounds in such pleads by ascertaining their sole profit logic, it remains necessary to unhinge the fundamental polarity between good and evil that frames the circulation of commodities. To accomplish this task we need to tackle the situation from a tangential perspective. Instead of operating within the available terms as set in place by the given discursive framework, we should dispute the very framework and broaden the scope of the situation. Rather than ask if we have the means to afford this or that product or service, we should inquire on the conditions that determine such affordability. Then we can proceed to adjust reality to need, instead of simply conforming to the reality of need. An extraordinary case in point was the Autoreduction initiative that took place in Turin in the Fall of 1974.10 Following the increase in bus fares by the order of 20% to 50% by two private local companies, the workers whose salaries were not increased to accommodate this excessive



burden, refused to comply. After their vain attempts to obtain results via protests, they decided to auto-reduce the fares back to the original amount, prior to the arbitrary price increase. Faced with the monetary disadvantageous alternative of stopping service altogether, the bus companies were returned to their profit logic and chose to take the money, which they initially refused. In this example, the tactic consisted in assuring the continuity of the bus service. What was renewed, or in this case retrofitted, were the terms of engagement. Once the framework was rejected, what were initially incongruent positions became liberated for creative rearrangement. Without a doubt, this is not a model that can be easily generalized. The event was largely dependent on the political and historical conditions of Italy and the innovations introduced by the Autonomia movement. But the lessons from this specific post-Fordist tactic outlived its timely occurrence and remain available to us in the terms of a theoretical proposition that prescribes the displacement of given frameworks combined with the factual rearrangement of established plateaus of experience. I began this essay with a cursory description of the ideas for Blind Spots and then expanded the scope to include other aspects of its object. While in the first part, I described the rearrangement of the relation between body and commodity; in the second part I exemplified the reconfiguration of the terms of a social experience. There is a marked homology between these two sequences that, in spite of their vast difference in scale, suggest a conceptual transitivity between a singular and isolated gesture on one end and a multiple and interconnected action on the other. The possibility of such transitivity, that is to say of this unobstructed passing between disparate domains of experience, foregrounds the art practice from which Blind Spots comes out. Substantiating my focus on micro-experiences is the idea that a mere dislodging of isolated instances can be connected to much larger events.



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PRINTED PROJECT 12: Alex Villar



1 Caime, Gabriel, and Gabriel Ghone. S(h)elf Help Guide / The Smart Lifter's Handbook (Hagerstown: Trix Publishing, 1996). 2 Ensemble, Critical Art. The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia, 1994). 3 Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image (New York: Verso, 2007) 4 Electronic article surveillance (EAS) system. Electronics manufacturers. http://bit.ly/JflTY 5 Williams, David H. The Strategic Implications of Wal-Mart's RFID Mandate - Directions Magazine. http://bit.ly/ahlmP 6 Bahney, Anna. High Tech, Under the Skin. The New York Times. http://bit.ly/1HT09y 7 Newitz, Annalee. The RFID Hacking Underground. Wired News. http://bit.ly/kN3wh 8 See Beckerman, Ray. Recording Industry vs.The People. Recording Industry vs. The People. http://bit.ly/iUvaf and Borland , John. "RIAA settles with 12-year-old girl" CNET News. http://bit.ly/Prn4R as well as Itzkoff, Dave. "Woman fined $1.92M in music piracy case." The New York Times, June 19, 2009. http://bit.ly/14xcUR 9 Arrington, Michael . Stealing Music: Is It Wrong Or Isn’t It?. Techcrunch. http://bit.ly/Luen8 10 Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents (Los Angeles: Semiotext(E), 2007), p.73.



…the need to be free… (a road movie on freedom)

Elin Wikström



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A couple of years ago, the city of Dundee in Scotland, acquired two new buildings: an art gallery with a bar and a cinema, and a shopping centre, with greatly longed-for shops and cafés (GAP, H&M, Starbucks, etc). The comfort factor is somewhat higher than usual in the Overgate shopping centre in Dundee, but it looks and functions like any other shopping centre. The building is next to the church and spreads out over what had been the large central square. The square as a public space has been replaced by a privately-owned palace, which contains products for everyone, from birth to the grave, not only the latest clothes, food and trips. Brand names have taken over the position previously occupied by religion and ideology; what is bought and sold are not products but messages and dreams – happiness, strength, status, power, success and integrity. The boundaries between advertising and art, marketing and culture are being erased more and more. To consume is to purchase an identity, to signal who one is and wants to be. The rules for the consumer in a department store are somewhat stricter than they are for the citizen. Commercial streets are full of uniformed and plain-clothes guards and the area is surveyed by video cameras. Just now someone is planning to disturb your life. He or she may put a sticker with a subversive slogan on a bus window, or paint over an advertising poster in town. In the same way, some of my social comments sneak into people’s everyday life – this time, in the form of an action on an escalator in the Overgate shopping centre. With the help of Katrina Brown from Dundee Contemporary Arts, I applied for permission from the managing director of Overgate to do my project. After many tos and fros, I got permission. Had I not had it, my action would have been halted after 10 minutes – it took no longer than that to be stopped by a guard. He grabbed my shoulder. I was listening to music and didn’t hear what he said. He ripped off my earphones and asked what I was doing. All I was doing was using the escalator: I was riding up and down, up and down, over and over again. “Why?” asked the guard. “Because I like it” I answered. “Are you mad?” he asked. “No” said I. , , “It’s such a lovely feeling. The building is fantastic and all the people! Look at that man down there in the café. What sort of book do you think he is reading? And have you seen that one of the joker dolls up there in ceiling has lost its head? It looks as if it’s passed out or collapsed.” By now the guard had also gone up and down a few times so I asked him, “it’s great, you hover, fly! Why pay masses of money to some exotic faraway place when you can get kicks for free right here!” Then he began to laugh and said that was exactly why it was forbidden. If you’re going to hang about here, you have to buy something! So I asked my assistant to go and buy me a coffee to gain a little time. “It’s just as well we introduce ourselves,” I said. “I am Elin Wikström. My friend and I have permission to use the escalator for two weeks. You are being filmed now, the



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camera’s over there. We’re doing a road movie on freedom.” By this time, five more guards had arrived. They wanted to see the permit. I didn’t have it on paper, so I had to ask them to ring the art gallery. “I also make movies” said the guard, pointing to the surveillance cameras. I couldn’t , help playing the fool and waving at the guard behind the monitor. I had begun riding at 12. At five minutes to 1, my assistant Elin Strand took the video tape out of the camera and put in a new one. Before she got on the escalator she gave the tape to me and I took it to the gallery. The film was shown on a monitor mounted in the stairway between the entrance and the bar. At five minutes to two, I was back at Overgate. I loaded the camera with a new video tape and continued my ride. Back at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Elin put in the second tape. We went on like this for 6 hours a day for the next two weeks, everyday except Mondays when DCA is closed. Altogether we filled 84 video tapes. We also had bags just like the other customers on the escalator, but instead of shop labels, our bags said “…the need to be free…”. They were printed in the graphic workshop at DCA and had the same design, colour and print type as DCA’s own shop bags. In our bags we had the cassette tapes we listened to and flyers with a short presentation of the project which we doled out whenever we needed to – although it was more exciting to talk to people. People either asked the employees in the businesses and shops or they came directly up to us: “Are you a model?”“What are you advertising?”“Are you collecting money for something?”“Are you from Smack the Pony?” (a comedy programme on TV). “Why are you doing it then?”“If you want to talk” we said removing our earphones” then “you have to ride with us” The guards had a lot of , , . patience with everyone who called for them. One guard told us about someone who came up and said, “Have you seen that girl riding around on the escalator? Is she bonkers or something? She’s been there for a half an hour now. Hasn’t she anything better to do?”“You, then” replied , the guard. “Have you nothing better to do than stand gaping at her?” But sometimes the guards got too involved: a large gang of pale, black-clad Goths that Elin liked talking to were thrown out. We received different reactions. People thought it was a good joke, a good political prank. Gave the thumbs up and gave us presents. Got annoyed and quarrelled with us. Jabbed at us, invited us to lunch and used our camera for advertising. We had serious and enjoyable conversations with those who took time to ride with us; we talked about everything from freedom to holidays, architecture to feminism. Those who put on acts in front of the camera came to DCA to look at the tape, and people who had seen the video at DCA came to Overgate to see us ‘live’. The next to the last hour on the last day, the escalator broke down. I learned from the repairman that if we had gone south instead of in circles, we would have been in London now.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Elin Wikström



aus der Serie: Assets 1-n

Katja Eydel



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In the shopping centre, where people usually run about following their impulses, we voluntarily subordinated ourselves to a structure. Or, as someone said, if you think of an escalator as directed thoughts and desires, you and your friend are like a freely flowing thought or feeling. For us …the need to be free…. concluded with us flying from Dundee to London, putting on our earphones and listening to the Funcadelic song Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. Are we going to die now? In the air, like Thelma and Louise? George Clinton shrieked “Open up your fucking mind and you can fly!” The project was financed by the Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland and Moderna Museet Projekt in Stockholm. Trio Escort (Fredric Bergström and Jesper Norda), Gothenburg, made the soundtrack. Translated from Swedish by Jan Teeland. The project was carried out in the framework of Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland Originally published in 2001 in Elin Wikström, Moderna Museet Projekt, ISBN 91-7100-656-7.



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Elin Wikström



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Katja Eydel



Salomania

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz



89 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz



Asset 31 - Balconies Asset 03 – A10 Center Asset 04 – Model House Colony Asset 01 – Street Furniture Asset 07 – In-the-open-countryside Asset 08 – ILA Schönefeld Asset 53 - Pfeffermühle Asset 11 – BVG Infosäulen Asset 06 – Pflanzbäume Asset 40 – Reclaim the Streets-Event



Alla Nazimova Alla Nazimova emigrated from Russia to New York in 1906. She quickly became one of the most famous actresses on Broadway. She often starred in plays about the emancipation of women (especially those of Ibsen). Later, she was under contract to Metro Goldwyn Meyer and became the highest paid actress of early Hollywood cinema. Her numerous affairs with other female Hollywood stars – such as Dorothy Arzner, Mercedes de Acosta, Eva le Gallienne, Glesca Marschall, or Jean Acker – were an open secret. Unhappy with the roles she was being offered (because of her background, she usually got ‘exotic’ roles in trivial heterosexual comedies), in 1923 she herself produced and directed Salome, a silent film that was to become one of the early experimental art films, even if it was not commercially successful and nearly ruined her career. Performing Salome, the Jewish princess who died for her perverse desire, could be perceived as a layered act of coming out, since her publicly orientalized persona had veiled her Jewishness. Nazimova further discloses but also veils her lesbian authorship by restaging the authorship of Oscar Wilde and the discourse of aestheticism. The costumes were based on drawings that Aubrey Beardsley had made for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé: the Syrian’s painted nipples, the Executioner’s bold S/M look, Jonaan’s uncanny asceticism and the drag queens at Herod’s court. Rumour has it that everyone involved in this film project was lesbian or gay.



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91 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz



Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, written in French in 1891, had its premiere in Paris on February 11, 1896, starring and directed by Sarah Bernhardt. In his version, Wilde turned Salome into the focal point of the Biblical story, providing her with her own gaze and desire. He wrote the title role specifically for Bernhardt – an actress who often appeared in pants roles. A performance planned for London was cancelled. Oscar Wilde himself was in jail at the time of the premiere. The father of his long-term lover Alfred Douglas had left a card at Wilde’s club calling him a ‘somdomite.’ When in defense he tried to sue him for slander, the trial quickly shifted and became an indictment of Wilde, during which not only were his writings described as ‘sodomitical’ and ‘perverse,’ but in which his relationships with (young) men were also presented in detail. The fact that these men often came from other (subordinate) classes also contributed to the conviction. After two years’ hard labour, Oscar Wilde was released in 1897, his health highly compromised, and he died three years later in Paris at the age of only 47.



Alice Guszalewicz This photo can be found in the internet with two different captions, implying two variant narratives of its history. One maintains that it is a photo of a Cologne performance of the Richard Strauss opera Salome with the singer Alice Guszalewicz. Wrongly labeled, it landed in a French photography agency and fell into the hands of Oscar Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann. He printed it in his book – as a photo of Oscar Wilde posing in a Salome costume. In the ensuing years, the photo – reprinted eg in Marjorie Garber‘s book Vested Interests: Cross dressing and cultural anxiety – could quite accidentally instigate research and cultural production following the figure of Salome as ‘transvestic.’ “I want to argue that the dancer is neither male nor female, but rather, transvestic – transvestism as a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture. That is the taboo against which Occidental eyes are veiled.” (Marjorie Garber)



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PRINTED PROJECT 12: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz



Kuchuk Hanem In his notebooks and journals about his voyage to Egypt in 1849 − 50, Gustave Flaubert referred to his affair with the professional dancer Kuchuk Hanem. Later, in his novel Herodias, he produced a famous description of the dance of Salome, probably inspired by the Egyptian dancer. For Edward Said, Flaubert’s transformation of Kuchuk’s material flesh into an occasion for poetic reverie forms a paradigmatic example of the mechanisms of Orientalism − the masculinized, penetrating West possesses for its own purposes the East’s female ‘peculiarly Oriental’ sensuality. As Joseph Boone argues, Said overlooked the fact that the first exotic dancer to catch Flaubert’s eye is not a female dancer but a famous male-to-female transvestite. Kuchuk Hanem is not a proper name but means ‘little lady’ in Turkish (küçük hanım), a term often applied to a child, a lover, or a famous dancer. It remains unclear if this was a name chosen by the dancer to address the colonial tourists, or if this is a careless, shorthand name used by a Western writer.



Loie Fuller Dancer Loie Fuller emigrated from the USA to Europe, where she was known for her sculptural costumes and her innovative and patented light design. Using special mechanisms to move huge swathes of cloth, each provided with its own color of light, she achieved cinematic effects, bringing together the human (female) body, machine, sculpture, and animal. Fuller lived with her French-Jewish partner Gabrielle Block (who always wore men’s clothing) for twenty years without any negative impact on her career. At the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, Loie Fuller was the only participant to get her own theater. While all around buildings and dwellings from the colonies were being reconstructed and women from North Africa were being paid to exhibit their daily lives at the fair and to perform traditional dances, Loie Fuller was dancing sections from Salome. Her technological innovations fit perfectly into the imagery of the world’s fair, which was not only familiarising the spectators with the ‘foreignness’ of the colonies, but was also seeking to justify colonial domination by presenting railways, telegraphs, and – especially importantly – electricity. The brutality of murder was addressed in Fuller’s dance with blood red light. In 1907, Fuller designed another play with the title Salome that explicitly referred to Oscar Wilde’s version. She also toured with Maud Allan for a short time, helping her with her own Salome dance.



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Maud Allan Maud Allan’s The Vision of Salome was first produced in 1906. As a Canadian dancer, she was perceived as a foreigner in Germany and Great Britain, where she mostly performed. The visual juxtaposition of a mobile female body and a very immobile, trunkless male head was a most shocking element of her performance. ‘Salome’ and ‘Maud Allan’ became popular nicknames for queens and female impersonators of the Edwardian era and further confirmed the figure of Salome as a historical icon of ‘sodomite’ subjectivity. In 1918, when Germany appeared to be winning World War I, Maud Allan, who was playing the title role in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, became involved – much like Wilde had – in a trial that ruined her career. Noel Pemberton Billing, a conservative member of the British parliament, had claimed that there was a black list in Germany that allegedly contained the names of 47,000 high-ranking ‘perverts.’ Among them, according to Billing, could also be found many British men who shared Wilde’s preferences and who therefore could easily become targets of blackmail by German agents. Men could be convicted as sodomites merely on the evidence of having seen Salomé and the ‘perverse’ dance of the seven veils. Maud Allan’s trial, for all of Salome’s acknowledged depravities –incest, lust, murder, sadism, necrophilia – also marked the first time she had ever been accused of lesbianism. Paradoxically, it was one of a few sexual practices not present in Wilde’s play. In Britain middle-class women held all-female private theatricals – a movement called Salomania – to imitate Maud Allan’s version of Salome’s dance.



Aida Walker Aida Walker worked as a director, choreographer and performer, improving Williams and Walker, her husband‘s vaudevillian comedy duo. She introduced her version of Salome in 1908, working it into Bandanna Land, a play performed by the company. It was highly unusual for a black Broadway show to include modern dance, but Walker deployed the figure of Salome successfully to position herself within the establishment of white female modern dancers, although her important role often goes unmentioned in historic accounts. At the same time she helped bring authentic Black songs and dances to a form of entertainment that had been dominated by demeaning minstrel shows. Walker and her husband became famous for their performance of the cakewalk, a dance, developed by enslaved Africans that mixed European dance styles like the waltz with their own dance steps, to perform for (and subversively mock) the slave owners. Thus, she always negotiated between her belonging to the Harlem Community and her belonging to the development of (white) modern dance. In 1908 George Walker became ill and could not continue the run of Bandanna Land. Wearing her husband’s male costumes, Aida Walker performed both his role and her own.



Passing the Rainbow

Sandra Schäfer



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Circulation 1 The following sequence of video stills and images are from the film project Passing the Rainbow. The shooting of the film took place 2004 and 2006 in Kabul. The point of departure for the work on the film was the making of another film: the first Afghan feature film since the Taliban took over in 1996, Osama by Siddiq Barmak. Osama was made in Kabul, after the end of the Taliban regime in November 2002. I joined the shooting of Osama and was particularly interested in documenting Barmak’s filmic reconstruction of an historic demonstration of women against the Taliban regime. Circulation 2 In 2004 I travelled to Kabul together with Elfe Brandenburger. We were curious to find out which women – so shortly after the collapse of the Taliban regime – dared to participate as extras in such a demonstration, even though masked by the burka. In spite of it being a staging for a film, the mere occurrence of the staging was obviously highly symbolically charged. Barmak had expected to work with 200 women as extras for the scene, but 1000 travelled to participate – many more than expected. We were interested in asking what these women’s motives for participating were; and what effects acting in the re-staging had on them? Which forms of resistance existed for women who were against the Taliban regime; and what strategies are still used by them in their current daily life? These questions became the linking threads running through our own film project, Passing the Rainbow. In our film, we did not distinguish between fictional and documentary scenes. Rather we were interested in different performative strategies applied in daily life, for political work as well as for acting, and the seamless cross-overs and interactions between these. Also, we were interested in the reasons and intentions behind the protagonists becoming involved in our project. Methodically, we decided to fictionalize some scenes – and others not. Through the fictionalization, we wanted to underline that the film and the issues at stake were not about individual fates, but rather about social conflicts. We had many conversations with some of the women in question. But we couldn’t just put these directly in the film. To show the conversations with the real people in public would have lead to big difficulties for those involved. It was important for us that, from the very beginning, to be able to screen the film in Afghanistan – as well as in the so-called ‘West’. To produce a film for one political context only, would not have been possible anyway, as pirate copies and mobile phone recordings get distributed beyond every political border. This issue was exactly at the core of our project. In 2006, we went back to Kabul with our rough cut, in order to discuss it with those involved. After the feedback, some scenes were altered or even totally edited out. For example, the actress Breshna Bahar asked us to take out a scene in which she dances. Another protagonist who had meanwhile become married into a very conservative family, was not allowed to act or



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Sandra Schäfer



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz



Salomania reconstructs a dance: the ‘dance of the seven veils,’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé. Also shown and rehearsed are sections from Valda’s Solo, which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova’s film. The installation takes Salome as a transgender figure and the motif of a queer appropriation of the exotic. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a wave of excitement about the character of Salome, which soon earned the name ‘Salomania.’ Women got together and imitated the dance of the seven veils. A series of dancers became famous for their interpretations of Salome. The figure of Salome stood for entrepreneurial independence and sexual freedom and became an icon of ‘sodomite’ subjectivity. The script of the silent film Salomé is based on the play by the same name by Oscar Wilde and follows the Biblical story of the Jewish princess Salome. King Herod desires his youthful stepdaughter Salome. She in turn is interested in the missionary Jokanaan (the Baptist), who, however, rejects her. She gives in to Herod’s desire to see her dance, then demanding the head of Jokanaan on a platter as her reward. She kisses the severed head. Film, 17’, and installation Performers: Wu Ingrid Tsang and Yvonne Rainer Camera: Michelle Lawler Sound: Karin Michalski Light: Jennifer D’Urso Sound Design: Rashad Becker Choreography Trainer: Jürgen Bogle Location: Los Angeles



to be seen in films anymore at all. As the scenes we shot with her were important, we did not want to cut them out entirely. Instead, we developed a blur-effect that abstracts facial features without obliterating them. This is how she appears in the movie now – as a figure, but not immediately recognisable. Moreover, there were further protagonists in the film who did not want to be recognised for different reasons: an activist of the clandestine organisation Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA); women who were forbidden to act in films by their husbands, brothers or sons; and a girl who lives as a boy to make a living for her family. Circulation 3 The ‘crossing of the rainbow’ refers to an Afghan myth, which says that girls or boys can change their sex when crossing the rainbow. This story is told by the grandmother to her granddaughter in the film Osama, before she cuts off her granddaughter’s hair. In our film Passing the Rainbow we refer with the title to this myth; and a pupil tells the myth when she speaks about the film Osama. Furthermore, Passing the Rainbow aimed to cross and challenge in different ways gender binarity, as well as other kinds of normative processes. Circulation 4 We refer in our film to the ways other filmmakers tackle the representation of gender in their films. Besides Osama, we also joined the making of the commissioned educational film Little Carpet Makers by Razi Mohebi – which was about the topic birth control. Furthermore, we included clips from the historic epic Rabia-e Balkhi (Rabia from Balkh, 1974) by Daoud Farani, Mohammad Nazir, Toryalay Shafaq and Khaleq A’lil. Rabia-e Balkhi is about the first poetess who spoke Farsi – she lived in the 10th century in the Balkh province. She fell in love with a serf called Bakhtash and believed that love could transcend class differences. Rabia was subsequently murdered by her brother out of lust for power and envy. In Afghanistan, she represents one of the most famous female icons of resistance. Her poems are part of the collective memory and many girl’s schools are named after her. Moreover, we included clips from the action film Qanun (The Law, 2004) by Saba Sahar. The film is about a policewoman who fights against corruption, sexual harassment and child kidnapping. Saba Sahar, who works as a policewoman in her real life, plays the role of the super heroine in this homespun action movie. Circulation 5 Passing the Rainbow was shown for the first time in Kabul in May 2008 in the context of the festival, ‘SECOND TAKE Gender and Society in Cinema’. The festival was curated by Elfe Brandenburger and me in cooperation with the artist group CACA-Kabul and the artist Zara Zandieh. Our film provoked antagonism. Some found the film too ‘polyphonic’. Others regarded precisely this quality as its strong point and recognized the passing of the rainbow as the dramaturgical thread. The 2008 video installation to act in history reflects the creative process behind Passing the Rainbow as well as its reception in Kabul and Berlin, and it uses historical images to trace the representation of women in Afghanistan. www.mazefilm.de



98 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Sandra Schäfer



The director and actress Saba Sahar playing a police woman in her action film Qanun (The Law), which she made herself in 2004. She fights as a super heroine against corruption, child kidnapping and sexual abuse. Also, in her main job, she works as a police woman.



Meeting with some of the actresses playing widows in the film Osama. Some women wear a chador in front of the camera. The chador becomes a mediastrategic masking that allows speaking in public, allowing those speaking to remain anonymous.



When we came back with the rough cut in 2006, we found that a woman who took part in our film was married into a very conservative family and could no longer appear on the screen. Since we didn’t want to take out the scenes in which she acted, we created a blur-effect that abstracts facial features without obliterating them. For the screening in Kabul in 2008, we intensifiedy the effect through a negative mask. We staged a scene, in which Aiqela Rezaie plays the role of a president who invites citizens to consultations in her helicopter. A couple asks for her advice, about how their daughter is treated by the family she has just been married into. This scene we shot 2006 in Kabul, after we found out that one of our protagonists was married into a very conservative family, who forbade her to act in films. We shot the scene with the president for to pick up on this topic and for to contextualisze the blur effect that we put on her figure afterwards.



Malek_a, a girl who lives as a boy, insisted that we record only sound and no image. For the film we created an imagemontage, which gives the spectator the impression that the conversation took place in a car looking out of the window. Parts of the montage show the meeting place for day labourers in Kabul where Maleka goes for to look for work.



Circulating Artworks

Neil Cummings



103



Markets Markets are a brilliant bundle of technologies, assembled to circulate things. All kinds of things. The most visible form of market is the competitive market. A neo-classical economic model of a competitive market pictures rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest − without regard for others − as the motive force for markets. The laws of supply and demand at play amongst these rational individuals extrudes the values − often represented by a financial price – exchanged in any transaction. These fundamental elements; rational agents, supply and demand and price mechanisms function in all markets everywhere, like natural laws. Except, of course, competitive markets don’t actually work like this. Or at least, only in ideological models. Principally this is because the neo-classical model is spectacularly under-socialised. Enabling values to be made, and made present, is part of the work that markets do. And every value expressed as a price is a nexus of myriad social processes. Markets are meshes of embedded desires, needs, rules, technologies, rituals and obligations, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the markets for the circulation of contemporary art. Outside of public museums, and some secretive private collections, artworks circulate through competitive markets. But how does this circulation take place? What are these embedded desires, rules, behaviours and obligations? The bankruptcy of art history, the public failure of criticism and art theory, the lack of consensus over the relevance of art, has enabled the values of competitive markets to dominate our recent evaluations of contemporary art. And markets mark the things that circulate within them. 1



PRINTED PROJECT 12: Neil Cummings



In 2007, our film Passing the Rainbow is shown in Berlin within the frame of the festival SPLICE IN. We organiszed the festival to focus on gender and local political and filmic practices in Afghanistan, its neighbouring countries, and Europe. The following extract is taken from the debate between an Afghan actress and an Afghan film director living in Finland after the screening of a work in progress version of Passing the Rainbow at the festival Splice In in Berlin. SHAKIBA ADIL: “This question depends on the family. There are fanatic families that don’t allow their daughters to decide on something independently. But there are also more tolerant families, like Aiqela’s family, who allows their daughter to work in film, television and theatre. It is not as if no progress has been made. We had twenty years of war in Afghanistan. Time is needed for people to return to normality.” AIQELA REZAIE: “Unfortunately, there are wrong ideas worldwide about the conditions in Afghanistan. If a young woman really makes an effort to work in film, she can assert her interest and nobody can prevent her from doing so.”



In spring 2008, the SPLICE IN Festival is continued in Kabul, we call it SECOND TAKE. The following extract is taken from the debate after the screening of Passing the Rainbow at the festival SECOND TAKE. SCHOOLGIRL: “My name is Adela Adil, I am a schoolgirl at Marefat grammar school. The film is about the situation of women. I think that women have their own moral concepts. In one scene of this film, it was stated that women should take their rights with violence. In the past decades we have seen that violence cannot solve the problems. What does the term ‘violence’ mean in the context of women’s rights?”“ SANDRA SCHÄFER: “I think it was a statement from one of the participants, Saba Sahar, saying that rights must be taken by force. But that is not the intention of our film. We introduce many different strategies of women in our film. So I wouldn’t say that the film’s statement is that women should take their rights with violence, but that it is one statement among many.” ELFE BRANDENBURGER: “Saba Sahar is not saying that rights should be claimed with military violence but more as it is seen in the following scene, where the man follows the woman and she must strike back to protect herself.”



Primary Market The circulation of contemporary artworks is structured by two competitive markets – and prices in one, are routinely half that of the other.2 The primary market is convened by gallerists who organise and manage ‘commercial’ galleries. Whether as small, single-person enterprises or vast corporate machines, what gallerists share is the desire to work directly with artists, to promote their work through exhibitions, and to sell their artworks to potential collectors. To become a gallerist is easy; the start-up costs are extremely small – some enthusiasm, contacts, a small exhibition and office space, and an advertising budget. There are no formal qualifications necessary; no indemnity required, no trade association to join, and no regulatory bodies. The primary market is virtually without a ‘formal’ professional structure. It’s also easy to attract a group of artists keen to exhibit, and typically a gallery will ‘represent’ between 10 and 25 of them. To be ‘represented’, usually means that an artist will be offered a solo exhibition annually or bi-annually and their artworks will be included in appropriate gallery group exhibitions. ‘Representation’ for the gallery includes bringing the artwork to the attention of



curators and collectors, and placing the work in curated public exhibitions, biennials, and at art fairs; nationally and internationally. They also arrange studio visits with select collectors and curators, organise private views to launch exhibitions, assemble press brunches and lunches, and choreograph lavish dinners and after-parties. The primary gallerist chooses, nurtures and develops the artists they ‘represent’ through the creation of a dense social network. Much of the labour of nurture is in the management of the informational prosthesis of the circulating artworks; through producing press releases and exhibition invites, buying advertising space, placing articles in newspapers and magazines, publishing catalogues, documenting and archiving artworks, and by cultivating critics, editors and publishers. These are some of the mechanisms through which an emergent market for artworks is convened. And into this potential market, the gallerist introduces new artworks to collectors. Usually artworks are taken on consignment from an artist for exhibition, and it’s common for the gallerist to take a 50 percent commission on any sales. Sold artworks leave the artists’ studio, pass through the gallery at exhibition and enter private collections. Here they remain until the collector decides to sell, or donate. Unsold artworks return to the sleep of storage, while some linger in the gallery as ‘stock’ to be displayed to prospective collectors, or curators. 3 All ‘represented’ artists have a primary gallery. Any curators, public institutions or museums that want to exhibit the artists’ artworks have to deal with the primary gallery; and, any other commercial galleries who wish to exhibit and sell the artists artworks also have to do business with them too. Gallerists talk endlessly about supporting young artists, they love visiting studios and ‘hanging’ exhibitions; they love art, and prefer not to let commerce and the market ‘complicate’ their relationships. And yet when they discuss gallery stock, or their private collections, they know exactly how much they initially paid, the last market evaluation, any potential discounts to be offered to select collectors or museums, and of course the artwork’s financial appreciation. Primary gallerists thrive by taking risks and having confidence in their ‘taste’. They seek to hedge the risks involved, through their promotional practices and by managing their network of friends and collectors into an economy of taste. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that “taste, is what other people like you, like” 4 If you were to stroll into a gallery from the street with a pocket full of . cash, fall in love with a painting on display, and decide you really, really want to buy it for your home, the gallerist will not necessarily sell it to you. Even if you offer to pay over the asking price. 5 She or he will feel that you are probably buying it for the ‘wrong’ reasons, or are the ‘wrong’ sort of person to own the artwork. If you are not already known to the gallerist, and therefore outside of their economy of taste, then definitely you are the ‘wrong’ sort of person. Nurturing the ‘right’ collector, and placing an artwork with them for the ‘right’ reason is the principle means of control the circulation of an artwork through the primary competitive market. Selling for the ‘right ‘ reasons include placing an artwork with a prestigious collector who will add to the evaluation of an artist and artwork – not necessarily the person prepared to pay the highest price. The ‘right’ collector might already have, or be in the process of, building an ‘important’ art collection. The ‘right’ reasons might include the collector being prepared to sign a resale agreement, a quasi-legal document guaranteeing a ‘right of first refusal’ on any future sale back to the gallerist. 6 The ‘right’ reason could be encouraged if the collector promised to donate the artwork to an important public museum collection at some future date. Gifting an artwork to a national collection removes the artwork from circulation, but also lends prestige to the artist – and therefore future artworks, the generous collector, and perceptive gallerist. 7



Through managing the circulation of artworks, an artwork and artist is never entirely disentangled from their producer – the gallerist. It’s not surprising that relationships, and particularly long working relationships, develop into friendships between gallerists and artist, or gallerist and collector, or perhaps all three. 8 Collectors are often referred to as supporters, or ‘friends’ of the gallery. In the extraordinarily dense flow of gifts and obligations, debts and favours, loans and discounts that lubricate artworks in their circulation, economic transactions merge into relational exchanges. A discount offered between gallerist and collector is as much a sign of mutuality as a display of economic of power. Although they remove artworks from circulation, major public museums are often offered price discounts if they purchase directly from a gallerist. Gallerists often rationalise the reduction as a public subsidy, generously reducing the price in support of the public good. 9 In times of draining market confidence, as bubbles burst, and capital flees from contemporary art to more secure assets, purchases from public institutions can keep commercial galleries afloat; tide them over in lean times. 10 Gallerists do everything possible to delay an artwork’s spiral into the secondary economy.



104 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Neil Cummings



105 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Neil Cummings



The Secondary Market The secondary market for contemporary art is structured through auction houses. Auctions are relational competitive markets, and breathtaking theatre. The twin poles of drama – the flicker between despair and euphoria is endlessly produced, because buyers compete to establish an appropriate evaluation – when the hammer falls. The price is extruded as the auction is conducted by the last person standing in the tournament of value. 11 Of course there are precedents to refer to, and there are reserves, published estimates, and guarantees offered, and yet none of these can be taken as true. An auction has to be convened and set in motion to perform the social production of evaluation, live and in real-time. The primary market relies on deep, personal and complex relationships between artists, gallerists and collectors. In the secondary market, artworks circulate through looser, more diverse and contingent networks outside the manipulation and monopolization of the primary market. While the primary market is reproduced within established communities of taste, the secondary market has to continually perform itself. In theory, an auction is close to the ideal of a ‘free’ market. Anyone can participate, and everyone has equal access to the market, all the information regarding the market is readily available, and artworks are distributed on the ability to pay the ‘spot’ price. Except again, this is an ideological fantasy. Auctions are secretive and information is guarded, auctions are very sensitive to hype, excitement, gossip and rumour. And very, very susceptible to the arbitrary competitive clash of two determined bidders. 12 When two or more collectors are determined to acquire the same artwork, or, when a particular individual wants to make a statement, a sensational or ‘sacrificial price’ can be achieved. A ‘sacrificial price’ inscribes a mark in the market “I can afford this” or “I want this, this much” or “ look at the scale of my desire” or simply “look at me!” There could also be a financial logic in the desire to establish a ‘sacrificial price’. Other comparable artworks already in the collector’s collection will (notionally) have a similar evaluation. Simply, a sensational price recalibrates the market.



Anyone can attend an auction; no tickets are issued, no booking is required. Like legal trials, auctions are truly public judgements. And anyone can purchase an artwork offered for sale, as long as they have the access to the appropriate sum of money, or credit-line. In the secondary market, there are only ‘right’ reasons to transact. The auction does not care where the money comes from or where the artwork goes, as long as international laws are not seen to be broken. In the secondary market, the only taboo is around stagnation. Artworks must always circulate, and their extruded prices escalate. A stalled lot – an artwork offered for auction which does not reach its reserve price – fails to sell. It’s ‘passed’. This can damage the artwork, the artists reputation, all the other artworks by that artist currently in circulation, or exhibited in private collections. Worse, a stalled artwork could trigger a collapse of the current auction, and confidence can simply evaporate from the sale room; in an instant. And even more catastrophically, a failed lot can puncture a bubble and trigger a systemic market collapse. So, artworks that fail to reach their reserve price at auction are literally ‘passed’, they are passed over with a stifled incantation by the auctioneer of words barely audible on the saleroom floor. ‘Passes’ are contagious. Perfectly healthy auctions can stutter, stop and die. 13 If the secondary market thrives on constant circulation, record-prices and buoyant confidence, on the management of a ‘virtuous circle’ of evaluation, ‘passes’ expose the sensitive underbelly of market confidence. If you only want what other people like you want, and they no longer want the goods on offer, its over. Circulation ceases. 14 ‘Passes’ are the inverse of the ‘sacrificial price’. One of the instruments for managing circulation in the secondary market is the reserve price. The reserve is a financial boundary, agreed by the seller / collector advised by the auction house specialist. At auction, if the lot does not reach its reserve it returns to the seller / collector unsold. If bidders drive the price above, it is transacted from one collector, or dealer to another. Reserves are private financial agreements, usually somewhere towards the lower margin of the published estimates. To encourage collectors to circulate important artworks in the secondary market and not with a rival house, financial guarantees may be offered. The guarantee is a fee, which is probably close to the reserve price, paid to the seller / collector up-front. It’s in the auction house’s interest to pressure the edge of the previous market evaluation, to tease-up prices. If the lot is ‘passed’ the auction house loses the financial guarantee, as well as the confidence of the saleroom. To recoup some of their losses after the sale, quietly and behind the scenes, the auction house will try to broker a private sale. The auction house ‘expert’, or collector or dealer active in the secondary market needs to be aware of which collector owns what artworks, how the collection is being developed and through which gallerists, and what artwork is about to be ‘offered’ to the market. 15 A prominent artwork is located, prised from a collection, offered for sale and achieves a record evaluation. It passes from one collector to another, and a window of opportunity opens. An opportunity for other collectors with similar holdings of artworks to ‘realise’ their value, a chance to ‘refresh, or ‘re-focus’ their collection. Or, for the ‘experts’ and dealers, to encourage collectors to buy into this fleeting market opportunity. This is the moment for dealers to ‘flip’ artworks or ‘churn’ the market. ‘Churn’ the secondary market, because it thrives on difference within repetition. There are endless Andy Warhol prints and each one can be narrated into difference. The traditional slow steady, circulation of artworks – with concomitant checks and balances; like a solid record of prestigious exhibitions, a range of critical reviews, citation in refereed articles and scholarly books, representation in respected private collections, museum acquisition, etc – is being replaced by the shriek of record prices, achieved in the secondary



107 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Neil Cummings



Left to right Images 1-3 and 5 Sotheby’s Contemporary, New York May 15th 2007



Image 4 Francis Bacon Study of Innocent X (1962) sold, and leaving the saleroom Sotheby’s Contemporary, New York May 15th 2007



Images 6 Sale catalogue with hammer price Sotheby’s Contemporary, New York May 15th 2007



Contributors

market with artworks straight from artists’ studios. If markets mark the things that circulate within them, then recently, the slower processes of evaluation of artworks has been overwritten by the swaggering confidence of a competitive market bubble. Gallerists, so powerful in the primary, despise the secondary market. It’s an aggressive, volatile and parasitic environment. And yet they participate in auctions, either brazenly in person or discretely by proxy. They bid-up or buy back artworks that have temporarily spun outside their sphere of influence, to ‘protect’ the artists they represent.

108 PRINTED PROJECT 12: Neil Cummings



References Buck L. (2004) Market Matters: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Art Market Arts Council England ACE http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publications Hargreaves McIintyre M. and (2004) Taste Buds: How to Cultivate the Art Market Arts Council England ACE http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publications Lindeman A (2006) Collecting Contemporary Taschen Ruskin J. A Joy Forever; And its Price in the Market. 10th and 13th July 1857. Reprinted in Cummings N & Lewandowska M Free Trade (2003) Manchester Art Gallery http://www.chanceprojects.com/node/281 Smith C. (1989) Auctions: the Social Construction of Value University of California Press Velthius O. (2005) Talking Prices; Symbolic Meaning of prices on the Market for Contemporary Art Princeton University Press



Footnotes 1 “Markets mark the things they distribute” was a phrase Michael Sandel deployed in the first 2009 BBC Reith Lecture. He used an example, derived from the USA, of paying a fee to schoolchildren to encourage them to read. By paying children to read they might begin to believe that reading is a way of earning money. Any inherent good of reading, will be overwritten by the desire to financially profit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/reith 2 This already makes no sense to a neo-classical economist 3 Unofficially, artworks are often ‘kept’ by the gallery to offset un-recovered expenses in the hope of recouping costs at some later date. 4 Bourdieu, P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Routledge London 5 If the artist is fairly prominent in the competitive market, the gallerist will pretend that there is a waiting-list to acquire an artwork. And if you are very, very lucky you will be added to the list. 6 Resale agreements are mechanisms by which the gallerists tries to insure that artworks dos not spin out of their orbit, and into the less manageable secondary market. 7 A gift distributes status, while gifting to a public museum removes an artwork from circulation. In public collections artworks cease to circulate, they become literally ‘priceless’. 8 The one thing likely to destroy these fluid relationships – often unstructured by legal contracts - is if the artist decides to sell an artwork directly from the studio. That’s bad. 9 Although both transacting parties recognise the exchange of discount for prestige; and prestige can increase the velocity and cost of circulation. 10 A political economy of contemporary art, where private speculators absorb the risk – gallerists and collectors - and the public good eventually accrues the benefit – donation to public Museum – was first articulated by John Ruskin’s in his extraordinary lectures A Joy Forever; And its Price in the Market. 10th and 13th July 1857. reprinted in Cummings N & Lewandowska M Free Trade (2003) Manchester Art Gallery http://www.chanceprojects.com/node/281 11 “A tournament of value” is a phrase used by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects to describe auctions. Baudrillard J (1996) System of Objects Verso London. 12 Auctions are prone to ‘rigging’ and price-fixing. Rumours circulate of auctioneers ‘taking’ fictional – usually telephone – bids to stimulate a sleepy sale room, or leverage the bid-price over the lots reserve. 13 At a Sotheby’s sale in New York on the 7 November 2007, almost half the lots failed to sell – the ‘passing’ of Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Fields (1890) is credited as triggering the collapse. The auction house lost $14.6 million in guarantees, and as a consequence 36 percent was wiped from the share value of the company; overnight. http://www.bloomberg.com 14 Auction houses financially profit by adding a percentage to the hammer price, through the buyers premium. The buyers premium is anything between 25% and 12% 15 The three D’s – Debt, Divorce and Death are often cited as the main motives for selling.



Thomas Borén, MSc, PhD, is a researcher, senior lecturer and director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University. Borén’s research interests are connected to urban and cultural geography with a special focus on Russia and other post-socialist states in Europe. In an on-going project he is working with questions on how the changes in the political and economic systems in this part of the world affect urban identities and the everyday life of the concerned cities. Together with visual artist Andrea Creutz at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Borén delivers the interdisciplinary course ‘Space – City – Culture’, where students of Fine Art and of Urban and Regional Planning meet to explore questions on the transformation of urban space in relation to social, cultural and political flows in society. Among Thomas Borén’s works Everyday Economy in Russia, Poland and Latvia (co-editor 2003), Metropolitan Processes in PostCommunist States (2007), and Kring Beringia (2008), Meeting-places of Transformation (2009), Since 2007 editor-in-chief of Geografiska Notiser. Andrea Creutz is a visual artist based in Stockholm and Copenhagen. In 2000 she graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She studied at the MA Programme at Pratt Institute in 2001 and in 2002 – 2003 she participated in the Whitney ISP Program, NYC. In discursive based investigations of value constructions, spatial concerns and issues of representation, Creutz addresses social, political, and cultural questions through various media and interdisciplinary methods. Together with Lise Skou, she initiated The Swop Projects (2003-2006), a long-term art and research project



that functioned as a platform for production and dissemination of material and ideas concerning informal economies and systems based on ideas of open source, sustainable and participatory thinking. (www.swopnetwork.dk) Creutz is a founding member of the artist collective Kvinder på Værtshus/Women down the pub (1997). Andrea Creutz has been a guest professor at The Institute of Sociology at Copenhagen University and from 2007 she is a senior lecturer in Fine Arts at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Together with Thomas Borén, at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, she delivers the interdisciplinary course ‘Space – City – Culture’. Exhibitions and projects include: ‘Different Voices’, Tea Pavilion at the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, CHI; ‘Radical Software’, Den Frie, DK; ‘Story Space on Gift Economies’, CASCO, NL; ‘The Steam Shop’, Lugar Comum, PT; ‘CAPITAL it fails us now’, UKS, NO, and Kunstihoone, EST; ‘The Hidden Flow’, Sparwasser, DE; ‘Minority Report–International Art Festival’, DK; ‘Selected’, Rum 46, DK. Neil Cummings was born in Wales, lives in London and when not working as an artist is professor at Chelsea College of Art and Design; a member of Critical Practice; a trustee of Nottingham Contemporary; and on the editorial board of Documents. May – June 2009, Cummings Film, Lapdogs was screened as part of the ‘Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie’ exhibition at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Since February ‘09 Cummings has been working on a research project entitled ArchivalProcess with Intermediae in Madrid. November 2008, Lapdogs was screened at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, July – November 2008. ‘Post production’ was a special programme curated from the Enthusiasts Archive (www.enthusi-



astsarchive.net) for Manifesta 7, installed in the ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano, Italy. Museum Futures: live recorded distributed was a project launched on the 6 June 2008, commissioned by Moderna Museet, Stockholm Sweden as part of their Jubilee celebrations. The Distributed component is a machinima record of the 2058 centenary interview with the Museum’s executive Ayan Lindquist. Museum Futures: Distributed was included in ‘Sequilism’ at the Arnolfini, Bristol July 2009; as part of ‘The Uncertainty Principle’, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain June 2009; and at a seminar organised by Afterall and the Showroom 28th March 2009. August – October 2007 Parade commissioned for the Contour Film Biennial was exhibited in Mechelen Belgium, and ArtLfe a simultaneous project for Transit Gallery. September – October 2006 Generosity was part of Protections, at the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria. A year long research project Industrialtownfurturism: 100 years of Wolfsburg and Nowa Huta opened at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg – December 2005 and closed in Nowa Huta, Cracow in November 2006. Commissioned by the London Architecture Biennale, and in collaboration with architects 51% studios architecture, Social Cinema consisted of a series of temporary cinemas, each installed for one night only into London's existing urban fabric. For more information visit www.neilcummings.com Katja Eydel lives and works in Berlin. Eydel works primarily with photography on subjects from the fields of politics and aesthetics. Eydel is interested in the realities of social vision that are rooted in political upheavals, utopian moments or traditional systems. Selected exhibitions: 2009 ‘Modernologies’, MACBA, Barcelona; 2007 ‘Model ve Sembol’, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Berlin, Kunstverein Salzburg



(Solo); ‘Ökonomien der Zeit’, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Museum Ludwig Köln, Migros Museum Zürich; ‘ZielscheibenKampagne 99’, Plattform, Berlin. Publications include: Model ve Sembol. Die Erfindung der Türkei (Sternberg Press: Berlin/NY, 2006); Teilt mit (Goldrausch artIT: Berlin, 2006), Belgrad Interviews, together with Katja Diefenbach (b_books: Berlin, 2000) www.eydel.de Zachary Formwalt was born in 1979 in Albany, Georgia (US); and has been living and working in Amsterdam as a resident of the Rijksakademie since 2008. He is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and attended the Critical Studies Postgraduate Program at the Malmö Art Academy in 2004 and 2005. His most recent exhibition, ‘The Form of Practical Memory’ can be seen at Kunsthalle Basel until mid-November 2009. Ralph Heidenreich born in 1957 in Düsseldorf, he grew up in South Germany in a small town called Biberach an der Riss, where he still lives. From early on he was influenced by the offshoots of the student revolt that spread to his provincial school in 1969. From 1977 to 1979 he co-edited a leftist local magazine. He never finished any academic studies, but remained active in the local political movements of the left. A career of any sort was never his intention so he remained working in a wide range of lower-ranking jobs, as a plasterer, woodcutter, programmer, or these days, as a land surveying assistant. During all that time he kept reading and studying political and economic theory. In 2005 he and his brother became, as many others, increasingly aware of the serious changes occurring in the world economy and especially in the financial system. They proposed a book on the topic to their Berlin publisher Merve,



which they finally managed to write together in 2008. He continues to study the economic situation, and is preparing a book on the post-monetary condition. Stefan Heidenreich was born 1965 in Biberach an der Riss, South Germany. He studied Philosophy, Communication Sciences and Literature in Bochum and Berlin, temporarily also Physics and Economics. Coming to Berlin in 1989, two months before the fall of the wall, he got involved in the artists’ movements of the early 1990s. From 1992 – 1995 he was mostly active as an artist with collaborative shows ‘Stolen Objects from Documenta IX’ in 1992 (Berlin, Bilbao, Cracow), and ‘Pynchon in Berlin’ in 1993. From 1993 – 1995 he was a member of the artists collective Museum für Zukunft. From the mid nineties on he focused on writing. In 1998, his first book Was verspricht die Kunst? (The promises of art), was published – a discursive analysis of art as institutional setting, reprinted in a revised paperback edition in 2009. Other books include Flipflop: Datastreams and Culture (2004) and Suchbilder (Searching Images) as Co-Editor in 2004; and Mehr Geld (More Money) in 2008. Since the late nineties he has been writing essays and art criticism for major German newspapers such as F.A.Z; taz, Sueddeutsche; and Zeit. Currently he is working on two books – On University about the historical disposition and current challenges of humanities, and Sorting Images on the aesthetics and structure of large sets of pictures, from Giordano Bruno's mnemotechnics to classical cinema and digital video. Brian Holmes is an American-born (California) theorist, writer and translator living in Paris, France. He has worked with the French Graphics collective Ne Pas Plier (Do Not Bend) from 1999 to 2001; and the French cartography collective Bureau d'Etudes. He holds a doctorate in



Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of the book Hieroglyphs of the Future. He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997. Holmes gives lectures widely in Europe and North & South America, is a frequent contributor to the international mailing list Nettime, the art magazines Springerin (Austria) and Brumaria (Spain) and the interdisciplinary journal Multitudes (France). In recent years, Holmes has been co-organising a series of seminars with the New York City based reading group 16 Beaver Group under the title Continental Drift, working on the issues of geopolitics and geopoetics. He maintains a blog under the same name with the additional subtitle ‘the other side of neoliberal globalisation’ – http://brianholmes.wordpress.com Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist and writer who engages with ideas of social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. Among his works are the ongoing Corrections Documentary Project (correctionsproject.com), On Movement, Thought and Politics, a collaboration with Taisha Paggett, A World Map: In Which We See… and the collaborative 9 Scripts From a Nation at War, made with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne for Documenta 12 (9scripts.info). Recent exhibitions include the Nottingham Contemporary, the 18th Street Centre for Art in Los Angeles, the Gallery at REDCAT, the Tate Modern, the 3rd Bucharest Biennial, and numerous community-based venues throughout the United States. Recent publications include On Knowledge: A Critical Studies Reader (BAK 2008), Radical History Review (2008), Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (2008, 2007, 2005), Art Journal (2007), An Atlas of Radical Cartography (2007) and Rethinking Marxism (2006).



Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry live in Berlin and have collaborated since 1998. Their recent works draw on archives of historical (portrait) photography and historical films. Their focus is the history of sex and gender discourses and practices, as well as the meaning of ‘visibility’ since early modernity. The works reflect the nearly simultaneous invention of sexuality, sexual perversions, and photography as well as their relation to the colonial economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2007, they produced the 16mm film normal work, based on the historic material of the Victorian ‘maid of all work’ Hannah Cullwick (performer: Werner Hirsch. Catalog b_books Berlin, 2008). In 2008, they produced N.O.Body, a 16mm film installation based on the use of photography by the early German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The film reenacts a photograph of the bearded lady Annie Jones, an image that crossed two different discourses of differences, being produced in the context of the US Freak-Shows of the late 19th century and re-published in the 1930s in Hirschfeld’s book on gender deviance. The film and installation Salomania is Pauline Boudry’s and Renate Lorenz’ newest collaboration, including a film, sculptures and a photographic documentation. It is based on the silent Hollywood-movie ‘Salomé’ (performer: Yvonne Rainer and Wu Ingrid Tsang). www.boudrylorenz.de Pauline Boudry works as an artist and musician. As an artist, she works with film, video, and installation. With her band Rhythm King and her Friends she intensively toured and produced several records. Renate Lorenz works as an artist, curator and academic author. She teaches art and queer /gender theory. She recently curated the exhibition ‘Normal Love’ (Berlin 2007), catalog b_books Berlin, www.nor-



mallove.de and the conference / exhibition / workshop ‘Freaky – queer art conference’ (Berlin 2009) www.freaktheory.de Katya Sander (born 1970 Copenhagen) lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen. Sanders most recent solo exhibitions include ‘Production of Future. A Science Fiction About Counting’ at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, ‘TIFO (event)’ at Generator in Trondheim, and ‘The Most Complicated Machines are Made of Words’ at Museum Moderner Kunst (MuMoK) in Vienna. Moreover, Sanders work has been shown in group shows such as in Documenta12 (9 Scripts From a Nation at War, with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt & David Thorne); Kunstraum Universität Lüneburg Rooseum in Malmö; Charlottenborg in Copenhagen; Neue Berliner Kunstverein; CCA Watts Institute in San Francisco; ICCA Bucharest; Artists Space in New York; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; Moderna Museet in Stockholm; Musée de L’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthalle Wien; Aarhus Art Museum; MIGROS Museum, and others. She has worked in various collaborative constellations. Sander’s writing on art, visual cultures, architecture and feminism has been published internationally in various books, magazines and journals. Together with Simon Sheikh she is a series editor of OE–Critical Readers in Visual Cultures, published with b_books, Berlin. Sandra Schäfer is an artist, filmmaker and curator of film programmes who lives and works in Berlin. She studied art, politics and sociology in Kassel, London and Karlsruhe. Schäfer has made repeated visits to Kabul and Tehran since 2002 to work together with Elfe Brandenburger on the film Passing the Rainbow and do research for the film festival Kabul/Teheran 1979ff: Filmlandschaften, Städte unter



Stress und Migration / Film landscapes, strained cities and migration. She is co-editor of the book with the same title, published in 2006 by b_books, Berlin. 2007 - 2008 she cocurated the film festival SPLICE IN on gender and society in Afghanistan, its neighbour countries and Europe that took place in Kassel, Berlin and Hamburg. The festival was continued in Kabul in May 2008 in cooperation with the artist-group CACAKabul, the film organisation Afghan Film and the artist Zara Zandieh under the title SECOND TAKE. In 2009 her book stagings – Kabul, Film & Production of Representation will be published in the series metroZones/media at b_books, Berlin. In her artistic work Sandra Schäfer has previously dealt with themes of representation of gender, urbanity and post-colonialism. Films / videos / video installations / photographies: Urban settings and other kinds too (2002-09), Stagings (2008), Passing the Rainbow (2007), Traversée de la Mangrove (2006), The Making of a Demonstration (2004), A country’s new dawn (2001), Die unsichtbare Dienstleistung / The invisible services (2000), Kontaktfreudig, offen und gewandt im Umgang / The joy of communication, open with an elegant manner, (1999), England-Deutschland (1997), Shift (1996), Doch bin ich wirklich / Of course am I real (1996). (www.mazefilm.de) Simon Sheikh is a freelance curator and critic, based in Berlin, currently undertaking doctoral research on the topic of exhibition-making and political imaginaries at the University of Lund, Sweden. He is a correspondent for Springerin magazine and a columnist for e-flux journal. Together with Katya Sander, he edits the OE series of critical readers published by b_books.



Jason Simon is an artist based in New York. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Culture, College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Recent projects, lectures, texts appeared at Socrates Sculpture Park; ICA London; Castillo /corrales gallery, Paris; Bidoun; Artforum. John Strauss is an artist, a furniture designer and maker, a professor of art and a writer. He currently lives in Ohio, has taught in the Kent State University system, and manages his own furniture company. Michael Stevenson is an artist, born in New Zealand and living in Germany, who has become known for his large-scale installations and, more recently, his writing. For the artist installation and writing come together through the production of a project. On several occasions these two practices have been brought together around an historical object – an obsolete instrument, of state or perhaps commerce – that holds specific interest because of its ability to suggest a broader political economy. The artist’s exhibitions and writings could perhaps find their best analogy in the archaeological excavation. Stevenson’s projects have been seen at Tate Modern, London; Vilma Gold, London; Art Unlimited, Art Basel 38; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands, Panama Art Biennial 8, Panama City, 50th Venice Biennale. In 2010 Stevenson will present work at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, Witte de With, Rotterdam and the Berlin Biennale. In addition JRP Ringier will publish a new book entitled Animal Spirits. This publication is a collection of fables co-written by Jan Verwoert and the artist with illustrations by the artist and his mother. Michael Stevenson is represented by; Vilma Gold, London, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington.



Alex Villar. Born in Brazil 1962, based in New York. MFA from Hunter College 1998 and Whitney ISP fellow 2000. Villar’s work draws from interdisciplinary theoretical sources; it employs video, installation and photography. His individual and collaborative projects are part of a longterm investigation of potential spaces of dissent in the urban landscape; it has often taken the form of an exploration of negative spaces in architecture. Selected exhibitions include the New Museum; Mass MoCA; Drawing Center; Exit Art; Stux Gallery; Apexart and Dorsky Gallery in New York; Institute of International Visual Arts in London; Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo; Galleri Tommy Lund and Overgaden in Copenhagen; UKS in Oslo; Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius; the Goteborg Konstmuseum in Sweden; Galerie Joanna Kamm in Berlin; Signal in Malmo; Galeria Arsenal in Poland; Lichthaus in Bremen and Halle fur Kunst in Luneburg. Elin Wikström is an artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work – with roots in performance, conceptual, and context based art – deals with being subjected to a constructed situation, which leads to reflections on social issues and include her own participation, along with collaboration and exchange with those who commissions her work, audiences and specially invited participants. The topics, places and situations Wikström involves herself in change and the methods she employ in her observations and investigations differ from work to work. The works can last a day, a week, a month or a year. At their conclusion they remain as works, which can be ‘reactivated’ at a later date. Often the various works seem to blend into one another, and earlier works can be seen as pilot studies for later ones. Recent exhibition projects by Elin Wikström, include Should persons seen spitting chewing gum on Göteborg’s pavements be



punished with a 1000 Swedish crown fine?, Live Action, Göteborg, 2009, Togetherness – Moves, Roughly, in Time of the Beat, 10th Open International Performance Art Festival, Open Realisation Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing, 2009 and Reds Against Greys – One Kind of Squirrel versus Another Kind of Squirrel, Futuresonic, Manchester, 2009.



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Printed Project is a curated contemporary art journal, published twice a year by Visual Artists Ireland. Printed Project brings comprehensive thought, argument and opinion to bear on contemporary dialogues and debates; and considers the shared consequences for all, as our culture backs into the future. Previous curator / editors have included: Sarat Maharaj; Lolita Jablonskiene; Declan Clarke & Paul McDevitt; Munira Mirza; Kim Levin; Anton Vidokle & Tirdad Zolghadr; Alan Phelan; James Elkins; Les Levine; Saskia Bos; Sarah Pierce.

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Issue 12 published November 2009 Curator/Editor: Katya Sander Administrative Editor: Jason Oakley Proof Reader: Niamh NicGhabhann Editorial Panel: Noel Kelly (Director VAI), Liam Sharkey, Therry Rudin, Kerry McCall, Siun Hanrahan, Anya von Gosseln, Sarah Pierce, Declan Long Advertising & Distribution: Jason Oakley Subscriptions: Valerie Earley Design: Bennis Design, Dublin Printers: W & G Baird, Belfast Published twice a year. For subscriptions information please visit www.printedproject.ie ISSN 1649 4075 Cover price: a7.50

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Back Issues & Subscriptions

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Issue 6. February 2007 ‘I Can’t Work Like This’ Curators / Editors: Anton Vidokle & Tirdad Zolghadr Contributors: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sarah Pierce, Tirdad Zolghadr, Anton Vidokle, Anselm Franke, Maria Lind, Adrienne Goehler, Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Diedrich Diederichsen, Ingrid Serven, Fia Backström, Joseph Cohen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tom Holert. Issue 5. May 2005 ‘Another Monumental Metaphor’ Curator / Editor: Alan Phelan Contributors: Niamh O’Malley, Georgina Jackson, Steven Duval and René Zechlin, Anna Colin, Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony, Gavin Delahunty and Nevan Lahart, Gavin Murphy, Tim Stott, Ciarán Bennett, Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Karen MacKinnon and Hugh Mulholland, Alice Maher, Mark O’Kelly, Susan MacWilliam, Shane Cullen, Vanessa O’Reilly, Niamh McCann, Katie Holten. Issue 4. April 2005 ‘The New PhD in Studio Art’ Curator / Editor: James Elkins Contributors: James Elkins, Timothy Emlyn Jones, Jo-Anne Duggan, Sue Lovegrove, Frank Thirion, Ruth Waller, Christl Berg, Maria Mencia, Uriel Orlow, Phoebe von Held. Issue 3. October 2004 ‘The Self Express’ Curator / Editor: Les Levine Contributors: John Boone, Soke Dinkla, Jenny Dixon, Catherine Galasso, Ted Greenwald, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Yu Yeon Kim, Vivian Kurz, Thomas McEvilley, Declan McGonagle, Lars Movin, John Perreault, Steven Rand, Walter Robinson, Katrin Roos. Issue 2. May 2004 ‘Letters from Five Continents’ Curator / Editor: Saskia Bos Contributors: Tobias Berger, Annie Fletcher, Basak Senova, Machiko Harada, Francesco Bernardelli, Natasa Petresin, Clive Kellner, Nina Folkersma, Paula Toppila, Raimundas Malasauskas, Ilina Koralova, Nuno Sacramento, Edit Molnar, Nikola Dietrich, Luca Cerizza, Montse Badia, Dominique Fontaine, Sophie O'Brien, Sjoukje van der Meulen, Yukie Kamiya, Florence Derieux, Lorenzo Benedetti , Anja Dorn, Rob Tufnell, Phillip van den Bossche. Issue 1. September 2003 ‘There Once was a West’ Curator / Editor: Sarah Pierce Contributors: Issa Samb, Bettina Funcke, Rachel Price, Aleksandra Mir, Pip Day, Wendy Judge, Gerard Byrne, Simon Sheikh, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Grant Watson, Peter Fend, Asier Pérez, Alan Phelan.



Issue 11. June 2009 'Farewell to Post-Colonialism - Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008' Curator / Editor: Sarat Maharaj Contributors: Dorothy Albrecht, Avi Alpert, Maria Thereza Alves, Saleh Barakat, Ulrich Beck, Ecke Bonk, Conrad Botes, Zoe Butt, Lyn Carter, Amy Cheng, Amy Cheung, Chen Chieh-Jen, Joseph DeLappe, Johnson Chang Tsong-Zung, Paul Gladston, Khaled Hafez, Huang Xiaopeng , Du Keke, Michael Lee, Simon Leung, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Paul O'Kane, Annie Paul, Hans Hamid Rasmussen, Gertrud Sandqvist, Stuart Sim, Gilane Tawadros, Hu Xiang-cheng, ChenYun, Yi Zhou. Issue 10. October 2008 'The Art of Living With Strangers' Curator / Editor: Lolita Jablonskiene Contributors: Lolita Jablonskiene, Zygmunt Bauman, Flash Bar, Brendan Earley, Steven Flusty, Sam Ely & Lynn Harris, Lukasz Piotr Galecki, Tessa Giblin, Daniel Jewesbury, Jesse Jones, Danius Kesminas, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Nikos Papastergiadis, Paulina Egle Pukyte, Simon Rees, Société Réaliste, Apolonija Sustersic, Sarah Tuck, What is to be done? / Chto delat?, Pavel Braila. Issue 9. April 2008 ‘The Call of the Wild is now a Cry for Help’ Curators / Editors: Declan Clarke and Paul McDevitt Contributors: Jonathan Meese, Sophie von Hellermann, Goshka Macuga, Luke Dowd, Liz Craft / Klaus Weber, Markus Selg / David Godbold, Matthias Dornfeld / Sara MacKillop, Mamma Andersson, Jockum Nordström, Jewyo Rhii, Tyler Vlahovich. Issue 8. October 2007 ‘Artistic Freedom – Anxiety and Aspiration’ Curator / Editor: Munira Mirza Contributors: JJ Charlesworth, Pauline Hadaway, Paul O’Neill, Andrew Calcutt, Sonya Dyer, Padraic Moore, Cecilia Wee, Dolan Cummings, Emma Ridgway, Becky Shaw, Andrew Brighton, Josie Appleton. Issue 7. June 2007 ‘Unconditional Love’ Curator / Editor: Kim Levin Contributors: Kim Levin, Ekaterina Degot, Maurizio Cattelan, Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera, Christoph Buchel, Luca Buvoli, Andrea Fraser, Kendell Geers, Oleg Kulik, Maurice O’Connell, Santiago Sierra, Nedko Solakov, Tavares Strachen.