Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1451967
Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle
{"title":"Laboratoire Déberlinisation – Art, Finance, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary African Art: An Interview with Mansour Ciss Kanakassy","authors":"Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1451967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451967","url":null,"abstract":"Mansour Ciss Kanakassy (b. 1957) is a Berlin-based Senegalese artist whose practice addresses the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Africa, in particular as it is expressed in the financial systems of the former Francophone colonies of West Africa, where the currency, the CFA franc, historically tied to the French franc, is now pegged to the euro. The acronym CFA originally stood for Colonies Françaises d'Afrique – French Colonies of Africa – and now Communauté Financière Africaine – African Financial Community. In 2001, Ciss Kanakassy created the Laboratoire Déberlinisation (Déberlinisation Laboratory), a multifaceted project that traces contemporary African issues to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which divided Africa among the great powers of Europe. The project, which includes the creation and circulation of a pan-African currency, the AFRO, and an international travel document, the Global Pass, has been extensively exhibited throughout Africa and Europe, and in China. In this interview, we discuss the origins of the Laboratoire Déberlinisation and the role of the AFRO in understanding the financial entanglements of neocolonialism.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"135 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451967","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45599519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1455359
Ken Browne, Gareth Kennedy, S. Browne
{"title":"The Myth of the Many in the One","authors":"Ken Browne, Gareth Kennedy, S. Browne","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1455359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1455359","url":null,"abstract":"This artist project consists of the script and a selection of stills from The Myth of the Many in the One, an artist video produced in 2012. The script is composed from a redaction of business biographies in an attempt to decode the masculinist myth of the visionary, entrepreneurial genius – tech gurus such as Bob Noyce (1927–1990), Bill Gates (b. 1955), Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and others. It addresses these ideas of privilege and predestination by parsing the stories told of their formative boyhood years. Working on location in San Francisco and Silicon Valley with a child actor and a voice-over artist for this video, a peach orchard reminiscent of “The Valley of Heart's Delights” – how the area was known in the 1950s before the tech boom began – provides a significant mental and emotional backdrop to this narrative. The Myth of the Many in the One is the second part in Kennedy Browne's “Redaction Trilogy”, which explores the paradigm of early twenty-first-century capitalism. The first part, How Capital Moves (2010), interrogates labour, redundancy and outsourcing in early twenty-first-century tech manufacturing. Real World Harm (2018) is a 360° video experienced on an Oculus headset. It proposes a thought experiment concerning the digital rights of citizens, and the responsibilities of corporations managing and mining online identities and communities for profit.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"118 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1455359","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48631649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1455355
Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle
{"title":"Art in the Age of Financial Crisis","authors":"Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1455355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1455355","url":null,"abstract":"This issue addresses the long financial crisis of 2008 and the nature and diversity of artistic responses to it. This financial crisis is understood as a globalized result of late capitalism that nonetheless is experienced differently at local, regional, and national levels. It is multi-faceted in nature, a phenomenon that has historical roots and precedents that inform contemporary responses. Artists are not restricted to engage with the economy through one specific vehicle of inquiry or one type of medium and message. Therefore, the central question that this issue poses is: what is the artist’s role in finance, crisis, and the economy? Should artists: fix the economy; explain it; attempt to alter it; reject it; participate in it; or none of the above? The articles, artists’ projects and interviews presented here attend to these questions through a wide-ranging lens including: studies of historical precedents such as the Great Depression of 1929 and currency crises in Latin America in the 1970s; artistic direct interventions within financial systems that reveal and challenge their opaque processes and value systems; alternative currencies highlighting the neo-colonialism of global financial markets; and blockchain-based rethinking of art market ownership models. These multi-faceted projects spanning different time periods and geographies offer crucial and distinct theoretical positions. This issue, which saw its origins in a panel for the 2017 College Art Association Conference in New York City, adds to scholarship on these pressing topics and seeks to foster a continued discourse on the intersections of art and financial crisis.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"1 - 12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1455355","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44016430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1436800
Jillian M Russo
{"title":"The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered","authors":"Jillian M Russo","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1436800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1436800","url":null,"abstract":"The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), which operated from 1935 to 1943, was a program created by Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), WPA director Harry Hopkins (1890–1946), and FAP director Holger Cahill (1887–1960) to employ American artists throughout the Great Depression. This article reexamines the FAP by looking more closely at Cahill and defining his populist approach to American art, which made the FAP not only a massive work-relief program for artists but also a major public education initiative. Cahill’s democratizing ideas on art were sparked by his experiences as an Icelandic immigrant and hobo in the Midwest and informed by the theories of Progressive era philosophers including John Dewey and John Cotton Dana. The FAP, in addition to employing prominent artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sponsored local and national exhibitions and established thousands of local art centers, including the renowned Harlem Community Art Center. These accomplishments laid the groundwork for the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and success of the post-war American art market.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"13 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1436800","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45768340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1435609
A. Whitaker
{"title":"Artist as Owner Not Guarantor: The Art Market from the Artist’s Point of View","authors":"A. Whitaker","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1435609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435609","url":null,"abstract":"The events of 2016 in which the painter Peter Doig (b. 1959) was sued in US Federal Court for failing to authenticate an artwork for a speculative investor encapsulate a view of the art world from the perspective of collectors and not artists. This paper imagines what would happen if artists were to retain 10% equity in their work in the primary market, rather than receive resale royalties in the secondary market. This idea applies the Coase Theorem in economics, concerning the relationship of property rights, pricing, and trade. Accordingly, those equity shares could trade in a standalone marketplace well before an artwork was sold, providing patronage for artists and more diversifiable art fund structures for investors. Technological systems such as the blockchain (e.g. bitcoin) make such a system timely, by providing cheap accounting and automatic provenance. This proposal stands in stark contrast to much of the writing on resale royalties, which treats payments to artists as welfare or subsidy, or emphasizes a lack of enforceability. In fact, assigning equity shares to artists allows them to participate more accurately, from a free-market-economics standpoint, in the value that their work creates. This realignment of price and value could radically alter and also stabilize the art market in relation to both recent financial crises and the increasing financialization of art objects. Such a system has broad applications to the alignment of price and value in many other sectors of creative work, and beyond.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"48 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435609","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47638613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1451966
Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle
{"title":"The US’s Economic Promises Are Over: An Interview with Miguel Luciano","authors":"Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1451966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451966","url":null,"abstract":"Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. The island was left without electricity and clean water for months. However, the natural disaster was not the only cause of this lasting devastation. The financial fall-out from predatory loans, which led to Puerto Rico’s inability to invest funds in its own infrastructure, caused an enduring humanitarian disaster. Artist Miguel Luciano (b. 1972) in this interview discusses his work in relation to the 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis and the legacy of the over 100-year span of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory, which gives the US disproportionate control over the island’s economy. Luciano’s aesthetic economic investigations also examine the impact of the financial crisis and immigration on the Puerto Rican diaspora living in the US mainland.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"143 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451966","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49380527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1450343
Elena Shtromberg
{"title":"Currency, Art, and Economic Crisis","authors":"Elena Shtromberg","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1450343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1450343","url":null,"abstract":"The condition of a country’s currency is perhaps one of the most effective barometers of its economic state, a topic that has been amply examined by economists. Currency as artistic medium is lesser-explored terrain and yet its study can prove revealing of a country’s economic and historical circumstances while poignantly commenting on the whimsical nature of the art market and the commercial value of works of art. For this study, I will explore the work of artists who employed currency as commentary on their country’s respective economic crises and the political conditions that led to them. I have selected a small sample of artworks with currency focusing specifically on the circulation of the US dollar, or rather it symbolic dominance, in Latin Ameircan economies. In this study, I examine three case studies spanning several decades, among them: a series of banknotes by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles entitled Zero Dollar, created during the late 1970s and 1980s; a multimedia installation Circulante (Circulating) from 1998 by Ecuadorian artist Patricio Palomeque, and the video piece Inversión from 2011 by Cuban artist Glenda León. All three artists used their work to foreground the instability and fragile structures underpinning currency while critiquing the expansion and reach of the US dollar in their countries.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"33 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1450343","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41528864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1435477
Derek Curry
{"title":"Public Dissentiment: Hacktivism in the Age of High-Frequency Traders","authors":"Derek Curry","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1435477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435477","url":null,"abstract":"Public Dissentiment (2016), an artwork by this author, is an artistic research project and an online tool that helps protestors negatively impact the price of a publicly traded stock by applying the same sentiment analysis tools used by stock trading algorithms. In contemporary stock markets, high frequency trading bots that continuously buy and sell stocks, increasingly perform the role of market makers. These bots provide the market with liquidity by usually being ready to take the buy or sell end of a stock trade. However, these algorithms are also reading news stories and social media posts at lightning speed, and when they detect uncertainty they will pull out of the market causing a stock, or group of stocks, to drop rapidly in value. This text examines the technical and legal aspects of the contemporary networked stock exchange system that make Public Dissentiment’s intervention possible and provides a context for these factors through an analysis of how they produced a space for artistic intervention. Locating this work in the frames of hacktivism, tactical media, and other historical precedents for both network and financial interventions further contextualizes this project. Public Dissentiment falls into the category of mass action hacktivism, which is closely associated with tactical media and culture jamming, and typically includes a performative element. The application is a prototype for how protestors can leverage technology in the age of networks.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"115 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435477","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46597714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1451968
Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle
{"title":"Insurgent Finances: An Interview with Gabriela Ceja and Fran Ilich","authors":"Marisa Lerer, C. McGarrigle","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1451968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451968","url":null,"abstract":"When the financial crisis of 2008 exposed the opaque workings of global financial markets, it led to calls for alternate economic models to replace the excesses of contemporary capitalism. A decade on, it can seem that those calls went unheeded. However, in the collaborative social practice of Fran Ilich (b. 1975) and Gabriela Ceja (b. 1984), sustainable alternatives modeled on ancient modes of exchange are being developed with projects that are deeply embedded in economic practice; whether that is running a functioning microbank complete with complex financial instruments in Spacebank or serving Zapatista coffee from Chiapas, Mexico in the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op in the Bronx in New York City. In this interview the artists discuss how, through building alternative durable and sustainable economies and exchange networks, another world is possible.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"168 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1451968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45728396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual ResourcesPub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1435488
Jennifer Gradecki
{"title":"The Art Index as Art","authors":"Jennifer Gradecki","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1435488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435488","url":null,"abstract":"For artists already participating in the art market, appropriating the tools of finance may help them to gain more control and protection in this financializing field. Art Investment 2014-Art Asset 1 is a tactical intervention by this author that is grounded in institutional critique methods – including Bourdieuian sociological analysis – that uses scraped stock market data-feeds to visualize the performance of companies on the Skate’s Art Stock Index (SASI). The SASI is an art industry index fund that provides investors with access to the art market without buying art. Art indexes such as the SASI reduce the impact of an artist’s work to a data-point averaged alongside the expected quarterly profit of major auction houses. As such, the SASI represents a total financial abstraction. Examination reveals the index’s lack of objectivity and raises doubts about its ability to represent the industry. Art market financialization threatens to shift the field from pre-capitalist logic, which disavows profit-seeking, towards increasingly profit-driven motives, leading to financial abstraction and the transposition of technical obscurity from the field of finance. Art Investment 2014-AA1 makes the SASI into an artwork: its placement in a museum underscores the role of the museum in the market. The ‘art index as art’ exposes and inverts the logic of art investment, while questioning assumptions underpinning the art index: including the notion that value can be financially abstracted from art objects. Despite the discontinuation of the SASI, art market financialization shows no signs of diminishing, and there is still room for creative intervention.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"34 1","pages":"65 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435488","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46029906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}