Juan A. Gaitán
Folding Money
Money is lost: if by robbery, the blame lies with the robber…; if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events.—Plotinus1
This essay was originally written in 2005 and was conceived from the point of view of the history of art, which was my full-time profession at the time. As the text remained unpublished, its original title, The End of Money, migrated with me to the space of contemporary art, where it became the title of an exhibition that I curated in 2010. The hypothesis of this exhibition was that money and images operate similarly today, as avatars of systems and conventions (of systemic conventions) of representation and value.
On one level the exhibition spoke to the desires and nostalgia for matter, which at times takes an intensely materialistic bent (the collecting of art and of objects of value falls into this category, as does the current attachment to gold), and at other times an idealistic one, a non-fetishistic and non-mediated relationship to the physical world that often translates into movements of “return” to a pre-scientific, non-technological world. On another level, the exhibition considered the problem that this essay originally intended to explore, namely, the relationship between image and value that is established in or through monetary economies under capitalism. The status of the banknote as both symbol and avatar of this relationship was given much less prominence in the exhibition than in the original essay, in part because I thought that to focus on banknotes was both anachronistic with respect to current discussions of the economy and too didactic in the context of the discourse on the image that I wanted to explore.
The tone and the subject of this paper are products of a time very different from the time we are in at the moment. In the Netherlands, where I have been based for the past two and a half years, art has become an ideology alien to the interests of the state and, as such, it is something that must be “reduced” (not to say crushed or whipped into shape) to more suitable proportions, which, in the terms set by state funding cuts, means by half. These reductions and the threat of the decimation of contemporary art favour a more patrimonial—material—sense of symbolic capital. In this “intangible economy,” to use the phrase that gives title to this collection of essays, there seems to be a new or renewed enthusiasm for tangibles. In spite of numerous efforts to expand the notion of patrimony so as to include non-nationalistic senses of this concept (making “patrimony” a more malleable category of symbolic capital, including for instance the culture brought by immigrant societies) and non-tangible ones as well (sonic and other non-material products of culture), at least in the Netherlands, the inclination of the current government is to restore a direct correspondence between the idea of a National Culture and the material things that are supposed to represent it: things, in other words, that can be transacted. This is perhaps not surprising in a culture that places so much emphasis on economic “common sense” (investment vs. profit) and whose history is fundamentally based on trade. Yet, beyond such historical essentialisms, it is important to note that the collecting fever that has transformed the art system in the past few decades is also symptomatic of a wider cultural necessity: the need to establish stricter links between wealth and matter. This doesn’t just include art, but also real estate, land, jewellery, and all sorts of collectibles. The fact that now it is possible to buy gold out of vending machines seems to be only further confirmation of this tendency.
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About this Article
Folding Money was first published in Fillip 15 in Fall 2011. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Juan A. Gaitán is a curator and writer. Recent exhibitions include I, YAMA, Istanbul; The End of Money, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Models for Taking Part, Presentation House, Vancouver, and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto. His writing has been published in Afterall, Exhibitionist, and Mousse magazine, among others. He is teaching in the Curatorial Practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Notes
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