Helen Knowles

Dave Beech

Trickle Down – A New Vertical Sovereignty confirms the place of Helen Knowles within contemporary debates on art and financialisation. For economists and sociologists the study of the relationship between art and the prevailing condition of global financialisation has focused mainly on the analysis of art’s financialisation, changing patterns of art funding and art sales, the changing role of banking in the art market and so on. For at least one curator, however, financialisation is a key factor in the periodisation of art. Writing in 2009, Nicolas Bourriaud claimed that a new era began the previous year, saying “the collapse of the globalised financial system in Autumn 2008 appears to mark a definite turning point in history”. The credit crunch, for Bourriaud, announced the end to postmodernism just as the 1973 oil crisis allegedly signified the end of modernism.

For Costas Lapavitsas, one of the leading theorists of financialisation, the crisis of 2007-8 “cast light on” the anatomy of contemporary financialised capitalism, but “financialisation is the outcome of historical processes that have taken place across the world since the 1970s”. It is the bypassing of national regulations on finance and the collapse of the Breton Woods agreement in the first years of the 1970s that led to the simultaneous decline of Keynesianism and the rise of financialisation. Prior to this, what Lapavitsas calls the “first wave of financial ascendancy” transformed industrial capitalism between the 1870s and the 1920s, when giant monopolistic corporations and the banks dominated global economic activity. This is the longer historical trajectory of finance capital within which to measure the claim that financialisation supersedes industrial capitalism by supplanting profit with rent, wages with debt, capitalists with shareholders, commodities with money, and so on.

When we note, also, that the first joint stock companies were established in the seventeenth century to finance and profit from colonial trade, and that the first financial crash - the South Sea Bubble - took place in 1720, not to mention the importance of brokers and lenders in the Renaissance, it is clear that the rise and rise of finance has been an ever-present in the economic history of art from the Medicis to Sotheby’s Mei Moses index. At the same times, the subjective, cultural and ethical consequences of credit, debt and speculation have been depicted throughout this period from Botticelli to Thomas Gokey’s “Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper”.

And, as the history of art shows, the rise and rise of financialisation is also, at the same time, the spread and spread of financialisation from the profiteering of a moneyed elite to the colonisation of everyday life. As such, when artists engage in finance, they do so by implicitly stressing one stage or other of the spread and spread of financialisation. When, for instance, in the 1970s, Christo and Jean-Claude sold sketches of public works as shares in the work-not-yet-produced (partly to liberate their practice from the problems associated with the commodification of the artwork), they invoked a model of finance as entrepreneurial speculation not dissimilar from the financial techniques adopted by Hogarth and his peers who attempted to overcome the problems of aristocratic patronage by producing multiples paid for by subscription by the general public.

When Andreas Gursky photographed stock exchanges around the world throughout the 1990s, he focused on the official centres of financial institutions rather than the spread of finance into the workplace, consumption and the home. Melanie Gilligan, who satirised financial institutions in her four part film “Crisis in the Credit System” in 2008, also sought out finance in its official centres. A different locus for finance was identified when Rose Finn-Kelcey, in the 1980s, made a picture of Van Gogh’s infamous “Sunflowers” painting out of coins, presenting finance as the storage of value in art as an asset, a trope of finance that resonates with the Renaissance depiction of money-lenders. Different again, the art duo Vermeir & Heiremans converted their home into a financial index, or at least appeared to do so. In this example, financialisation is spectacular and fictive and engulfs the real world through an elaborate series of media representations which finds its equivalent in art through their use of data and graphs which mimic the financialisation of their own home.

There is, therefore, another difference that cuts through the history of art’s engagement with finance. Consider the difference between Cornford & Cross’s mountainous landscape image derived from graphs of financial performance, on one hand, and David Cross’s campaign for his workplace, the University of the Arts, London to divest from banks that profit from the carbon fuels industries, on the other hand. One depicts finance whereas the other modifies financial transactions directly. Politically, the contrast between the two is striking today, but at the time of the South Sea Bubble it was not. For instance, despite Hogarth’s objections to financial speculation (expressed in his “Emblematic Print on the South Sea Scheme”), he was innovative in the use of lotteries, auctions and subscriptions to sell his prints.

However, the implied stability of the difference between fact and fiction is itself called into question by the history of financialisation. The birth of financial speculation in the stock market is the birth of fake news. In fact, the South Sea Bubble in 1720 both depended on fake news for the exponential growth of its financial ascent and led inexorably to a moral panic about fake news when the bubble burst. Finance arose in the eighteenth century out of speculations on colonial trade combined with the new dominance of paper money and the publication of news. Coffee houses fostered both banking and publishing. In fact, the best - or at least the most conspicuous - way to manipulate prices in the stock market was to spread false reports in the press.

In the immediate aftermath of the first crash, the problem of financial speculation seemed, primarily, to be a moral problem with a moral solution. This approach was taken up again in the 1960s and 1970s when the post-war recalibration of advanced capitalism, which used new forms of credit to fuel the mass consumption of mass produced goods, was attacked primarily from the perspective of the consumerist behaviour of people mesmerised by advertising.

“Any account of the new world of finance runs the risk of neo-Luddism — of treating finance itself as necessarily a domain of delusion and chicanery”, warns Robin Blackburn. Historically, the problem was quite different. Mary Poovey points out that popular publishing in the eighteenth century did not draw a firm line between fact and fiction so the problem of press reports of false hopes of financial gain in speculative investments was usually blamed on the character of its victims rather than through demands for tighter restrictions on publishing and financial markets, repeated today in unheeded demands to prevent billionaire news magnates from broadcasting fake news. As important as this is, the core threat of financialisation is not eliminated by the regulated decline of lies.

Finance is the economics of risk. According to Niklas Luhmann, the opposite of risk is not safety or security but danger. For him, risk is future damage produced resulting from our own decisions whereas danger is future damage attributed to external events. Modernity, in Luhmann’s account, corresponds to the “remarkable shift from danger to risk perspectives”. However, Luhmann adds, in complex modern societies, risks taken by others become dangers to everyone else. Writing in 1990, Luhmann gives us a perfect picture of both the financial crisis and the climate emergency when he said “the real dangers in modern society are the decisions of others”.  Jeremy Deller comes closest to this when he invited visitors to his Hayward exhibition in 2012 to emboss their own books or bank notes with the statement “Hell is other people’s money”.

Finance is the epitome of the Feuerbachian concept of alienation. “Religion is the disuniting of man from himself”, he said, in which God becomes subject and ‘man’ becomes object. Indeed, for Feuerbach, the nature of humanity becomes evident only through its products, but in doing so the human is alienated from itself within a world of objects and objective relations. Finance is the living embodiment of the dialectic in which human beings alienate themselves by constructing a world that subsequently confronts them as an alien power.

There is a strong psychological aspect to financialisation. “Just as risk management underwent a populist migration from boardroom to living room”, according to Randy Martin, “other models of selfhood have come tumbling out of financial markets”. Marina Vishmidt borrows the idea of ‘human capital’ from neoliberal economist Gary Becker to characterise the subjective and structural condition of workers and consumers remodelled as investors in themselves, a condition that Vishmidt sees as exemplified in “the speculative subjectivity of the artist”.

Finance is more remote from production, exchange and lived experience than any other form of value extraction. It is also more mobile and fluid than land-owning capital or commodity owning capital. The ideal of the individual who makes decisions based on rational self-interest is replaced with a psychological profile based on risk, speculation, uncertainty, arbitrage and opportunism.

This is the social basis for interpreting Pil and Galia Kollective’s “Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet” staged in 2007. In this work, Oscar Schlemmer and Karl Marx provide a dual logic for the choreographed movement of six performers in asparagus costumes in three acts entitled ‘The Commodity’, ‘Labour’ and ‘Capital’. Jonathan Griffin, writing in Frieze magazine, described the asparagus ballet as having a “cheerfully blasé attitude to meaningfulness and a taste for the redeeming power of the absurd”. The cultural logic of financialisation sheds a different light on this.

Goldin and Senneby describe their practice as exploring “the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions”. Their work constructs curious narratives around value and labour that endow the real with fictional and speculative qualities.

Helen Knowles makes works that engage with the contemporary condition of financialisation in ways that fuse fact and fiction in a complex construction of unstable meanings. Her work underscores the point made by Fredric Jameson when he argued that financialisation has created “a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world, not because as in modern (or even the romantic) period culture withdrew from that real world into an autonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been suffused with culture and colonized by it”.

Trickle Down – A New Vertical Sovereignty does not withdraw into a sphere of fantasy and imagination or aesthetic experience but mixes actual economic transactions with a four-screen video installation and soundscape to build a complex picture of financialisation as social structure, subjective experience and c

Dave Beech is Reader in Art and Marxism at the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His most recent book Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (Pluto 2019) is out now. Art and Labour (Brill 2020) is forthcoming. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His current art practice translates the tradition of critical documentary film into sequences of prints that combine photomontage and text art.