Events
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Room ST 275, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN London)
Organised by Dr Ricarda Vidal (email: ricarda.vidal@sas.ac.uk)
The Seminar in Visual Culture aims to create a forum for practicing artists, researchers, curators, students, and others interested in visual culture to present, discuss and explore the various aspects of a given theme within the field. In 2009, to keep apace with the present credit-crunching times, the theme is Money.
While the media are providing us with endless analyses of the credit crisis from all imaginable economic angles, it is now perhaps time to look at how artists and writers are responding to Nasdaq and FTSE100, to shiny coins and colourful banknotes and to the repetitive images of worried brokers shouting into their mobile phones. After all, money is itself an object of design and has long been the subject of the creative arts and the credit crunch has not only inspired economists and journalists.
The seminar looks at the relationship between art, money and the everyday – in times of crisis and of affluence. Sessions include theoretical papers, art presentations of new and existing work as well as film screenings.
For more information please contact Ricarda Vidal ricarda.vidal@sas.ac.uk or Flo Austin flo.austin@sas.ac.uk
Programme:
Thursday 29 Jan, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Dr. Yair Wallach, “Money becomes Text: Gold and Paper in Palestine”
In what ways is money written or read? Does the shape of money matters to its use? I will address these questions looking at money in everyday life and high politics in late Ottoman and British ruled Palestine (1858-1948). The dramatic shift from gold coins to paper banknotes in Palestine provides an intriguing example of the abstraction of money and its de-materialisation, its becoming a text of sort. The paper will discuss these developments against Palestine's textual and political economies, as well as the monetary theories of Marx, Keynes and Simmel.
Rebecca Ross (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), “Doing Visual Culture: Currency and Graphic Design”
I will discuss work produced with second year BA Graphic Design students at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for a recent studio project centered around the theme of currency. While the student work itself approaches money from multiple perspectives and with a variety of interests and concerns, the main objective of this talk will be to present this studio project as one model for integrating visual design practice with intellectual agency.
Thursday 26 Feb, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Samuel Thomson, “Artist Futures” (film presentation)
It is certainly no secret that trading in Fine Art can be an extremely profitable enterprise and the idea of a financially speculative art-purchase fund has been touted at various points over the last 25 years. A number of such funds have been waylaid by the recent Crunch and Recession, Art prices apparently having reached their peak. As dealers and collectors look to leave Europe and America for emerging markets overseas, perhaps now is a good time to ask if such speculation has had an identifiable effect on Western Art production in recent years.
Of course, as soon as outsider interests get involved, claims for the autonomy of art wear increasingly thin. How does this affect the status of progressive and critical art? To address these issues we must venture back to the beginnings of Modernism, to the Rationalist’s belief in their own ability to change the world, and to the highly politicised, debt-funded architecture of Baron Haussman and Robert Moses in Paris and New York.
Does the recent debt-funded art-boom similarly reflect an aggressive occupation of our culture by particular ideologies?
We visit galleries!
We visit art fairs!
Clement Greenberg admits he was wrong!
Jon Purnell, Cack-U-Like (art presentation)
The presentation will showcase Cack-U-Like’s ceaseless attack on the commodification of art since the art group’s formation in 2001. Works shown will include their seminal video/performance ‘Demonstration Against Toffs’ as well as more recent works such as ‘Public Request’ and ‘Hypno-Cack’. Cack-U-Like spokesperson, Jon Purnell will not only highlight these aforementioned but will give explanations of Cack-U-Like’s intent and underling ideas. It is a rare chance to see an overview of a much discussed, ground-breaking art group's oeuvre; a display all the more poignant in today’s financial quagmire. http://jonpurnell.co.uk/
Wednesday 25 March, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Marina Vishmidt, “Speculation as Mode of Production: Art, Money and the Formalism of Value”
Speculation, as a mode of abstraction that deals with undefined possibilities, is a faculty common to creative practice and finance. Art and money draw closer, as risk management becomes the common-sense of a thoroughly financialised and perilous social world. In the last few decades, both art and money have de-materialised. They are intertwined in the ideology of freedom; the emancipatory premises of art are closely analogous to, historically bound up with, the liberation from necessity and tradition offered by capitalism. Art is both a commodity and the alibi for the domination of the commodity; money is both a commodity and paves the way out of commodity society, given enough of it. Each is a law that acts most forcefully in its abeyance. But the comparisons also have a limit, and that is where I would like to bring out the side of speculation that constitutes a break with the present; this would be politics. For this, we have to think about work, for work seems to contradict both art and money; it is necessity, it is unfreedom. But capitalist work is also close to art and money; it can be anything, it is an empty form, 'abstract labour'; it is useless without value to give it a law.
Normally, art and money act as buffers for each other's speculative urges. Speculation can be said to pivot on an individual relationship to the unknown; the speculation that constitutes organised political action being instead an outbreak of singularity that casts individuals and their relations in doubt. Can this singularity also be found in, and be fuelled by, the relationship of speculation to art? In other words, if unchecked speculation results in a crisis for money, where does an excess of speculation lead art?
Carolyn Kay, “Economics and Gaming” (art presentation)
In economics and gaming, it is the arrangement, movement and speculative position of familiar ciphers that engages expectations and values. The illusion of randomness, of chance, fuels participation in a rigged game. My installations, sculptures, photographs, and drawings reference abstract systems of valuation and calculation including fiscal and gambling imagery. The subversion of quantitative expectations as suggested systems transform or mutate invites subjective narrative to replace logic and chance. Growing up in Las Vegas with a father who is a professional gambler and my own experiences with various finance related day jobs has influenced my art. My installations use a variety of materials, are often ephemeral and occasionally recycled. Currently, I am exploring new media including digital photography and video. www.carolynkay.com
Tessa Garland, Consumerism and Art (art presentation)
Tessa Garland creates illusionary atmospheric video work out of everyday visits to familiar spaces. In this presentation Tessa will focus upon a body of work that she made in Gallions Reach Retail Park in Beckton, East London. The screened videos were made during the boom years of 2006 when shopping and more shopping was the name of the game! The videos take an ironic view of consumerism and the bizarre nature of the shoppers. The work made at Gallions Reach attempts to create an implied narrative that references early science fiction films from the 1950's - 1970's where strange and darker forces are at work.
Tessa Garland is a practicing visual artist and curator based in London. She has exhibited extensively, in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally since 1990. http://www.tessagarland.com/
Thursday 28 May, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Dr. Diane Gabrysiak (Birkbeck College), “Let’s Make Money – Representing money on film”
In this session, we will be watching part of the recent Austrian documentary Let’s Make Money, completed just before the international financial system collapsed. The film, shot throughout the world, introduces us to the complexities of modern money through a global financial system which appears out of control.
Let’s Make Money introduces specialists and people in the field of international high-finance. It is striking to see here how the money we usually refer to and represent visually – a ‘concrete’ and ‘material’ object (paper or metal) – is now obsolete in the face of the immateriality of high finance and global transactions. The discussion following the screening will aim to address this aspect of money, in a film that attempts to understand money’s meaning, value, and circulation.
Morgan Adamson (University of Minnesota), "Inflation and the Image: Film, Financial Crisis, and the End of the Gold Standard"
My research focuses on the relationship between moving image production and the end of the gold standard in America in 1971. Specifically, I trace the manner in which transformations that have taken place within monetary form in the shift from industrial to financial capitalism are expressed in similar transformations in visual culture, and particularly avant-garde cinema. Though the cinematic image is frequently associated with the commodity form, I seek to develop a more nuanced language for discussing the cinematic image’s complicated relationship to money under financial capitalism. The paper I propose looks at the correlation between the financial crises of the early 1970s and the transformation of the image in post-modernity. Specifically, I explore the way monetary inflation is expressed in moving image production through the Jean-luc Godard’s _Ici et ailleurs_ (1976). My work draws on the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of the relationship between cinema and money as well as theorists and historians of financial capitalism. I argue that since the early 1970s, the crisis of inflation has not only taken hold of monetary systems, but also serves as a conceptual tool to understand moving image production in late capitalism. In order to understand the immanence of money and the image in our contemporary moment, we must take into account the historical roots of the present crisis.
Wednesday 24 June, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Dr. Gavin Grindon (Kingston University), “Art-Activism, Anticapitalism and Value – from the Situationist International to now”
Robin Priestley, The Space Hijackers (art presentation)
www.spacehijackers.co.uk
The Vacuum Cleaner (art presentation)
www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk
This seminar proposes to present and examine forms of art-activism which exist outside of the institutional bounds of the world of the art market, and which oppose themselves not only to this world, but to the world of market exchange more generally, and instead attempt to develop other values in the space of the everyday.
Robin of the Space Hijackers and the Vacuum Cleaner will present the work of their groups and of others internationally, as activity which rejects art as a sphere separate from everyday life and attempts to dissolve artistic practices into the practices of social movements which contest the shaping of everyday life by the capitalist market.
Gavin Grindon will attempt to present a theoretical account of these activities, drawing on their theoretical lineage from the Situationist International onwards. He will argue that in developing through autonomous social movements since the 1970s, they attempt to transcend the theoretical problematics of the Situationist International in micropolitical terms, by attempting to develop other values against the extraction of surplus value from our everyday life-activity by a socialised form of capitalism.