Performing the limits of finance

Abstract

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.

Keywords:

• finance
• abstraction
• performance art
• materiality
• financial crisis

Notes

1. See http://www.blackshoals.net/project.html. See also Raley (2009).

2. As Raley notes, the installation created the sense of an ‘absence of an externality to capital’ (Raley, 2009, p. 120).

3. This quote is pointed to in a blog posting by Australian graduate student Richard Glover. See http://richardrglover.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/notes-on-financialization/.

4. See Carrier (1998): ‘The core of economic abstraction is … ‘dis-embedded’: that is, the removal of economic activities from the social and other relationships in which they had occurred’ (p. 2).

5. But note the point made by Bill Maurer that ‘calculative’ and ‘social’ practices are not necessarily in opposition to each other. See Maurer (2008).

6. Valenze has noted that ‘In the new world of finance, the “exchange process is portrayed as a lottery, devoid of rationale, principle or justification … the outcome is perceived as negative”’ (Valenze, 2006, p. 83).

7. See http://fergalmccarthy.blogspot.com/2010/07/liffeytown.html. Liffeytown generated widespread, and overwhelmingly positive, reviews within the Irish art scene (one reviewer referred to it as a ‘terrific idea … in all its monopolistic glory’) but also a deluge of attention from the global media. Liffeytown was featured in one form or another by over one hundred media outlets including coverage by Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times and media outlets in China, Dubai, Brazil, and Canada.

8. See: labgallery.com. As one critic noted, the Lab Gallery ‘blurs the line between spectator and insider/outside.’ See Sacks (2010).

9. As Forest’s long-time collaborator Ferdinand Corte: noted, Traders’ Ball called for a ‘dance for a new world, to reinvent this world … to change the world.’ See Corte (2010).

10. See also Grau (2003): ‘The majority of virtual realities that are experienced almost wholly visually seal off the observer hermetically from external visual impressions, appeal to him or her with plastic objects, expand perspective of real space into illusion space, observe scale and color correspondence, and, like the panorama, use indirect light effects to make the image appear as the source of the real. The intention is to install an artificial world that renders the image space a totality or at least fills the observer’s entire field of vision’ (p. 13).

11. For one reference to the idea of ‘making strange’ see de Goede (2005a).

12. I am indebted to Marieke de Goede for her thoughts on the political urgencies of this kind of intervention. There is way, moreover, in which the argument I am making here dovetails with what Michael Power has called a ‘new politics of uncertainty’. See Power (2004): ‘A politics of uncertainty would need to develop the discursive capacity to challenge the manner in which … institutions process events. Above all this will be a public politics in which myths of perfect manageability are laid to rest but necessarily imperfect, humanly designed and operated, risk management systems continue to support an engagement with unknowable futures’ (p. 58).