Dadara is an Amsterdam-based artist whose guest post on Groundswell describes Exchanghibition Bank, a guerrilla money changing booth, and Pool of Plenty, a pit of custom currency.
“When Bankers get together for dinner they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money” – Oscar Wilde
Do you remember the image of Scrooge Duck diving into his money? Wealth and material accumulation once provided a happy image to children around the world, but have become increasingly dystopian and suspicious in recent times. Financial crisis has removed the pot of gold awaiting us at the end of the rainbow. Insatiable appetites for growth have allowed greed to drive us to the end of an abyss. While there is a great deal of disagreement, there is one consensual truth: something needs to change. But even though the fantasy of riches has gotten ever more distasteful, can you still resist a swim in a pool filled with money?
And that will be my new art project: a pool filled with millions of money bills, bundled in stacks -The Pool of Plenty. A closer look at the pool will reveal that the bills in the pool are not real money, but pieces of aesthetically pleasing art. During today’s financial crisis, art has been frequently cited as an advantageous alternative asset class and diamond encrusted skulls and Picasso’s go for over one hundred million. But do the millions of dollars that might buy you a Warhol or a Koons speak about the social or artistic value?
As the participants will strip down to enter in a pool of artful riches, they’ll realize it’s strictly forbidden and enforced by security guards to take even one bill back home! The pool will provide a mouth-watering oasis, without actually cooling you down. It’ll literally be an oasis in a desert, since I want to build this pool for the first time at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, a festival based on a gift-economy, where money doesn’t exist. This experience will put money back into the face of the participants, who I’d hope would use this time not just as a vacation void of currency, but an opportunity to detach, reattach, rethink and question ideas and values.
A project that will raise questions about money and art and the value of art. It won’t just raise those questions in the dreamlike Utopian setting of a temporary city, Black Rock City, based on a gift economy, but will confront the ‘real’ world as well. In order to do that I will start a bank – the Exchanghibition Bank, with “The Art of Turning Art into Money” as its slogan.
The money bills which will be safely guarded by security officers watching the pool can be bought, or rather ‘exchanged’ at this bank. The first bill issued will have denomination zero, but might become the most expensive bill, because of its beauty and scarcity. The bank booth will be traveling around, sometimes at art festivals or openings but also popping up guerrilla style in unexpected places. And of course the exchange rate established will give the millions of bills in the pool a value of many millions of dollars,
Does that mean the pool is a good work of art?
The exchange rate can be followed at the website of the bank, where all other information can be found as well.
Will the government provide this bank with a bailout? We are not sure, so we are asking you, the public, for a bailout.
Let’s swim in our fantasy while others drown in their reality ! The Money raised with this campaign will make sure the bank booth can be built, banker costumes can be made and money/art bills can be printed, and , NO, no money left over will disappear in greedy bankers’ pockets, but will be used to start filling up the pool!
The project will also feature a blog, which won’t just be a blog about the project, but more importantly, an information- and discussion-platform about art and money and the value of art. It will feature articles such as the burning of a million pounds by the K-Foundation, artist JSG Boggs who draws his own money, and the reclaiming of public space by groups as the Billboard Liberation Front. Also various guestbloggers will write posts, amongst them also the Groundswell Collective!
Money- and Art Greetings
Dadara
CEO and Founder
Exchanghibiton Bank
Critics said that the art world celebrity Jeffrey Deitch’s move to direct the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art would shake things up, and events last week proved them right. Blu, the renown Italian street artist, was commissioned by the museum to paint a mural on the museum’s Geffen Contemporary wing, and work commenced last Wednesday. By midday Thursday, the museum had covered over the work with a fresh coat of paint.
Blu’s mural being whitewashed by LA MOCA. Image by Casey Caplowe / GOOD, click for a slideshow of the destruction.
Blu’s mural was to announce and celebrate the museum’s upcoming Art in the Streets exhibition, which was set to be Deitch’s big splash. The show, a survey of street art over the past four decades, was the kind of unconventional that the art world wanted to see, but it seems that the museum bit off more than it could chew. The piece depicts coffins draped in American one dollar bills – in place of the flag, which is typical for soldiers killed in war. The museum deemed the anti-war message inappropriate, and Deitch himself recently explained that the whitewash was a courtesy to LA MOCA’s neighbors, a veterans care center and remembrance site:
This is 100% about my effort to be a good, responsible, respectful neighbor in this historic community … Out of respect for someone who is suffering from lung cancer, you don’t sit in front of them and start chain smoking.
With a national debate still raging over the Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., many have decried the big museums’ comfort with censoring art to save face. Others still have suggested it’s just a marketing ploy. No matter MOCA’s reasoning, and ignoring for a minute the merits of their argument, the museum’s silence about the issue was inexcusably, uncomfortably long. In his defense, Deitch has said stewardship of a public institution requires balancing “a different set of priorities — standing up for artists and also considering the sensitivities of the community.” Were his sympathies with the veterans, and his thoughts about holding together a community, Deitch should at least have broken the silence to speak publicly about the ordeal. The silence speaks louder than Deitch’s consideration, and the censoring of a loud anti-war statement leads us to wonder, as Art Threat did, whether MOCA believes the needless deaths of young soldiers and civilians is inappropriate.
FEAST (Funding Emerging Arts with Sustainable Tactics) is starting up in Toronto. Carrying on the tradition started by InCUBATE, and modeled after Brooklyn’s own FEAST, organizers Amber Landgraff and Deborah Wang explain how it works:
A sliding scale dinner and funding event, FEAST invites artists and groups to propose projects taking place in the Toronto community. For only $20-25 or $10 for students (with valid student card) you will get a 3 course vegetarian dinner, beverages, beer (for those of legal drinking age), and a ballot.
Diners will vote on a variety of proposed artist projects. At the end of the dinner, the artist or group whose proposal receives the most number of votes will be awarded funds, collected through the entrance fees, to produce their project. The artist or group will be invited back to the next FEAST to present their completed project.
FEAST Toronto has enlisted the culinary skills of chef Lisa Myers, and XPACE Cultural Centre is set to host the community dinner and funding events. Local establishments including A Space Gallery, Amsterdam Beer, and Fuse Magazine are also lending a hand to the fledgling series, which kicks off January 16, 2011. Tickets are on sale now.
Scapegoat Journal made its debut last week in Toronto with an inaugural issue on property [PDF], which we announced last year. Scapegoat explores the relationship between capitalism and the built environment, and from the first, the editors offer their criticism of professionalized architectural design, that architects are complicit in the valorization of capital.
The figure of the scapegoat carries the burden of the city and its sins. Walking in exile, the scapegoat was once freed from the constraints of civilization. Today, with no land left unmapped, and with processes of urbanization central to political economic struggles, Scapegoat is exiled within the reality of global capital.
The profession’s acceptance of capitalist property relations is compounded by its purposeful inaccessibility, its love affair with feigning autonomy and living in a theory-driven world of constant experimentation. “The aesthetic autonomy lauded by
designers and theorists,” Scapegoat writes, “is too often a conservative retreat into classist modes of distinction.” For the editors, the remedy is a move back into lived social relations, asserting that “the necessity of design cannot be reduced to logical, technical, or professional registers because it is properly, and relentlessly, an existential preoccupation.”
Joining them on this adventure are many friendly faces, some are likely familiar to longtime Groundswell readers. In order of appearance: Alexis Bhagat, Nato Thompson, Shiri Pasternak, Alan W. Moore, Adrian Blackwell, and Not An Alternative. The table of contents below lays out the full scope of the issue.
Copies of Scapegoat are available in limited print run (contact the editors via Scapegoat’s website) or the PDF can be downloaded for free.
Disclosure: Groundswell is friendly with the Scapegoat crew.
Groundswell’s collaboration with AREA Chicago and the Design Studio for Social Intervention on Notes for a People’s Atlas of Greater Boston has come to a successful close, and to celebrate, we are making the maps available for download.
In all, fourteen maps were created. Subject matter ranges from family lineages to the student migration of this city with multiple institutions of higher learning. Most are personal, illustrating highly subjective ways of seeing the city, but some include hidden histories, the mysteries of infrastructure, and the intricacies of what makes the city tick without many of us paying any attention.
Keep your eye on AREA Chicago for news about a forthcoming publication on the Notes series. The template for Boston’s atlas is still available for download, and we encourage you to use it.
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