Crisis in the Credit System
A notable feature of reportage about the world’s current financial situation is how little imagery there is with which to illustrate it. The language used in newspaper and television coverage is that of high drama – reports are liberally peppered with words such as ‘disaster’, ‘meltdown’, ‘chaos’, ‘crisis’ and ‘crash’, but the pictures that accompany them do not depict hundreds of people queuing for bread, families walking the streets with their worldly possessions, piles of valueless banknotes carted around in wheelbarrows or bankers throwing themselves from tall buildings. Rather, our images of economic catastrophe so far amount to commodity traders barking prices at each other (much the same as during boom time, then) or silver-haired CEOs looking ashen-faced before governmental committees; panning shots across the London or New York skylines; businesspeople entering steel and glass corporate headquarters (or leaving with the contents of their desks); graphs depicting plummeting prices and computer screens displaying numerical information incomprehensible to the average person.
In the absence of visual subject matter that might inspire a latter-day Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange (at least for the time being), how can today’s artists make work about the relative abstraction of the current economic recession? For an early response check out Melanie Gilligan’s online film Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part drama commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is, according to Artangel, ‘the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists’ and it is an attempt to convey something of the strange gap between the human cost of economic breakdown and the abstract financial mechanisms that have led to it.
Gilligan’s film takes as its starting point a brainstorming workshop run by an investment bank. The characters are asked to take part in a role-playing game, which develops from the familiar (hedge-fund managers spinning profit from the misfortune of others) through to the surreal (a financial analyst is put under hypnosis in order to forecast stock market activity, and ends up delivering gnomic utterances on the state of the markets). In one enjoyably absurd but thought-provoking scene, the role-playing bank employees discuss how financial instruments can be abstracted from the nature of the material asset, likening the weightlessness of share trading to a language in which words do not necessarily have to have the meaning commonly ascribed to them: ‘I could say ‘tree’ but it doesn’t have to mean ‘tree’, it could mean ‘jet’, and suddenly we have expanded our word-generating profit margin exponentially and we can take profit from more meanings and numerous positions on it.’
I am entirely unqualified to say whether the film engages successfully or not with the complex systems of futures, derivatives and hedge funds, so if I have any reservations they are minor aesthetic ones. The task of articulating the broader themes occasionally has a clunky effect: characters tend towards stereotypes (in one instance, a brash businessmen boasts: ‘I crave the battle’, which somehow comes across more like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s health club managers than Michael Douglas in ‘Wall Street’) or struggle to deliver lines about abstract financial theory without sounding like they’re reciting from a textbook. Although the ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ theme tune by Petit Mal (Gilligan and writer Benedict Seymour) is fun and reminds me a little of The Red Krayola’s soundtrack to 1980s feminist sci-fi film ‘Born in Flames’, it is a little too retro-sounding – I felt it needed to be as steely and corporate as the film’s graphic title sequence, rather than reminiscent of Stereolab’s fusion of Marxist theory and Francoise Hardy.
For the most part, however, ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is compact, pacey, and finishes with a neat twist, using the current economic downturn to ask what I think is an old-fashioned art question: what is the relationship between the abstract and representation?
A notable feature of reportage about the world’s current financial situation is how little imagery there is with which to illustrate it. The language used in newspaper and television coverage is that of high drama – reports are liberally peppered with words such as ‘disaster’, ‘meltdown’, ‘chaos’, ‘crisis’ and ‘crash’, but the pictures that accompany them do not depict hundreds of people queuing for bread, families walking the streets with their worldly possessions, piles of valueless banknotes carted around in wheelbarrows or bankers throwing themselves from tall buildings. Rather, our images of economic catastrophe so far amount to commodity traders barking prices at each other (much the same as during boom time, then) or silver-haired CEOs looking ashen-faced before governmental committees; panning shots across the London or New York skylines; businesspeople entering steel and glass corporate headquarters (or leaving with the contents of their desks); graphs depicting plummeting prices and computer screens displaying numerical information incomprehensible to the average person.
In the absence of visual subject matter that might inspire a latter-day Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange (at least for the time being), how can today’s artists make work about the relative abstraction of the current economic recession? For an early response check out Melanie Gilligan’s online film Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part drama commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is, according to Artangel, ‘the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists’ and it is an attempt to convey something of the strange gap between the human cost of economic breakdown and the abstract financial mechanisms that have led to it.
Gilligan’s film takes as its starting point a brainstorming workshop run by an investment bank. The characters are asked to take part in a role-playing game, which develops from the familiar (hedge-fund managers spinning profit from the misfortune of others) through to the surreal (a financial analyst is put under hypnosis in order to forecast stock market activity, and ends up delivering gnomic utterances on the state of the markets). In one enjoyably absurd but thought-provoking scene, the role-playing bank employees discuss how financial instruments can be abstracted from the nature of the material asset, likening the weightlessness of share trading to a language in which words do not necessarily have to have the meaning commonly ascribed to them: ‘I could say ‘tree’ but it doesn’t have to mean ‘tree’, it could mean ‘jet’, and suddenly we have expanded our word-generating profit margin exponentially and we can take profit from more meanings and numerous positions on it.’
I am entirely unqualified to say whether the film engages successfully or not with the complex systems of futures, derivatives and hedge funds, so if I have any reservations they are minor aesthetic ones. The task of articulating the broader themes occasionally has a clunky effect: characters tend towards stereotypes (in one instance, a brash businessmen boasts: ‘I crave the battle’, which somehow comes across more like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s health club managers than Michael Douglas in ‘Wall Street’) or struggle to deliver lines about abstract financial theory without sounding like they’re reciting from a textbook. Although the ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ theme tune by Petit Mal (Gilligan and writer Benedict Seymour) is fun and reminds me a little of The Red Krayola’s soundtrack to 1980s feminist sci-fi film ‘Born in Flames’, it is a little too retro-sounding – I felt it needed to be as steely and corporate as the film’s graphic title sequence, rather than reminiscent of Stereolab’s fusion of Marxist theory and Francoise Hardy.
For the most part, however, ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is compact, pacey, and finishes with a neat twist, using the current economic downturn to ask what I think is an old-fashioned art question: what is the relationship between the abstract and representation?
