The End Of Money

By Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, Peter Fischli and 2 more

This digital publication (with a limited print edition of 100) accompanies the exhibition The End of Money (22 May 7 August 2011).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Witte de With
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9789073362987

Book preview

The End of Money

Edited by Juan A. Gaitán

Content

Introduction

Juan A. Gaitan

Mark to Market Value, Inc.

(1st of 9 text works spread through this publication)

Tonel

The Theory of Money

Pierre Bismuth

Where is the Money, Lebowski?

Making Ends Meet

Dieter Roelstraete

Notes on Improperties

Hadley+Maxwell

Five Acts of Money

Carolina Sanín

Zachary Formwalt

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

Donatien Grau

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

The End Always Comes Twice

Dessislava Dimova

Appendix

Biographies

Colophon and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Juan A. Gaitán

Since the severe funding cuts that will soon hit the Dutch culture sector were announced in 2010, discourse on arts and culture has become almost exclusively centered on the issue of money. Displeasure and outrage have quickly emerged from private into public discussions about the governmental resolution to reduce its spending – a resolution made by resolute bureaucrats whose reasoning they have kept mostly to themselves, in spite of the (suspiciously) spectacular tactics used to publicize their radical decisions. According to the rumors and the numbers, the cuts will affect institutions across the board. National museums will lose 20% of their operating budgets, presentation houses (of which an as of yet undisclosed six will remain) an equal or higher amount. Music, theatre, and dance are in no better shape. Neither are individual artists, who now face a 50% reduction in available funds. But it also seems that this is not a new problem. Once one has factored in the exceptional growth in and of institutions dedicated to arts and culture, in the Netherlands cultural funding is now 20% of what it was twenty years ago. It being so obvious that an efficient reductions system has long been silently in motion, why the decision to open, even to offer, this issue up for public debate? (The counter to this question is, of course: What is it that is not being debated publicly when we speak about money for the arts? Surely there are other areas of much more general interest for the public sphere that are being affected by this neo-liberal move away from government subsidy).

Unlike former cuts, which in spite of laying the ground for the current ones were motivated by less dogmatic concerns, the current cuts constitute an inimical demand for cultural institutions to become financially self-sufficient. In the more immediate future this means that cultural institutions will have to internalize the dominant logic of the economy and find ways to justify their existence in the terms set by this logic (numbers); in a more general sense, however, this may not be an isolated assault, directed exclusively at arts and culture. It is very likely that this neo-liberal economic attitude extends to other, more essential areas of daily life: health, education, housing. Thus we should at least acknowledge the possibility that this assault on culture is part of a much wider project – the systematic dismantling of the welfare state and of all the vestiges of a socialist system, and the re-direction of tax money towards other areas of government. (But which? If one follows the American model, one would have to conclude that the move is towards: banking and military operations, followed by infrastructural subsidies, followed by sporadic and merely palliative subsidies for health, education, housing, though only at the level of investment interests and not at the level of individuals; parallel to this is the re-direction of large quantities of money destined to produce long-term revenue such as lines of credit for foreign countries.)

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

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

Like that of several other optimists, Lippard’s utopia was underpinned by an enthusiasm for the machine and its promise to emancipate humans from labor – or, if not from labor tout court, then at least from the more laborious aspects of labor. To put it in the terms set by Hannah Arendt: the hope has been to establish a continuity between thought and action that industrial labor precluded. At least in the more sophisticated theories of modern labor and alienation, there was never any doubt that individual workers actually had thoughts while engaged in repetitious tasks the more common meaning given to the concept of alienation (alienation from the product of one’s labor) gained the sense of an even more important alienation – of action from thought. The aim was to affect not thought alone, but creativity, which can only take place when there is continuity and a convergence of thought and action.

Such utopias have of course been fraught with aporias and paradoxes. The most important ones take us back to Hegel’s conception of the end of art: As Dieter Roelstraete argues in his essay, for Hegel the end of art is marked by the incorporation of the work of art into history – which means that it is consequently released from the space of transcendental correspondences. In this sense, art and money are subjected to inverse transformations. Money loses the ties to necessity that more immediate forms of exchange still carry and becomes the standard itself; art, on the other hand, loses ground in the space of mimetic representations (and transcendental correspondences) as the material world is systematically incorporated into the determinations of monetary value and economic interests. Gold is the conductor of both operations, as it is the last link to nature in the development of monetary economies, the principal (though not the most expensive) symbol of symbolic value, and the last (or latest) of the elements to be folded into the world of speculative economics.

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

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

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

The Theory of Money

Pierre Bismuth

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

Money is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Money is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and