Letter to the Bank Manager #93 (playing the system all the way to the bank)

Jef Bourgeau

is an American photographer, painter and conceptual artist who has become notorious through his sculptures, photography and curatorial work. The most famous and provocative of Bourgeau's work plays on the relationship between iconic imagery and irreverent materials, together forming a new context often drawing upon current controversies and, perhaps, the willfully provocative.

Jef Bourgeau is the founding director of the Museum of New Art (MONA), of Detroit's artCORE (empty storefronts to galleries), and co-founder of the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography.

Letter 93

Dear BM,

I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms and name brevity, expression brevity. In the age of Twitter I’d like to be able to say it all with very little I guess. There is poetry to be found in them thar hills. BM I believe to be an apt and effective acronym for “bank manager”. My own name defies such easy reduction. Reduce my name and you’ll get a fine broth maybe but nothing workable. The best I can do—assuming I dust off my middle name, Handler, is this: AHOC—isn’t working for me. However might there be a forgotten other middle name? Let’s say Dennis, comes before...you know—Handler. ADHOC works. My Underemployed Runners Guild, of which I am the sole current member becomes URG which I kind of like—expresses something of the frustration I generally feel these days especially regarding the cynicism, the greed, the dog eat dog spirit that currently prevails. I am at heart an optimist. I am a throwback, an achronistic presence on the contemporary “Art and Banking” scene: Without time; in a state of timelessness; deficient of time, Erroneous in date; out of the right chronological position or order ....
Out of whack I may be but I am also free. I’m not charging you for this am I? If anything is truly out of whack and demonstrates to the core the very meaning of Koyaanisqatsi (Hopi for “unbalanced life”) it would be the world of Banking and Finance.

I’m also having fun pulling words apart to figure them out. Corporation for example is a good one. If corporations are people are people corporations? Corps is body, corporeal is having body, corpse is a lifeless body. My mind wanders. Did you look at that link I sent in my last letter RE: the movie The Corporation? There is a moment in the documentary when we witness the CEO of a huge international conglomerate giving tea to a group of protestors in his own back garden. As the current CEO of one myself—my family—I’m not without sympathy. He and his wife appear to be the nicest people but the results of their profit motive are so awful they do not bare contemplation and there lies the problem. The deaths, the diseases, the murder, the mayhem, the displacements, the hunger caused by the actions of such corporations are too hard to innumerate, and too painful to grasp. Now if, as the protesters suggest (now sitting on the grass sipping tea and looking confused) this makes their hosts murderers, then it is not an impossible jump to the conclusion that we are all culpable who live in a western landscape reaping the rewards (even at the bottom) of our economic geography.

On a slightly different note I must share a quote from today’s New Yorker magazine from an article on Damien Hirst by Peter Schjeldahl:  “...there’s mythic bite to Hirst’s career: the working-class lad who gulls the toffs and makes them like it”. I love the idea of the unethically wealthy buying the very art that mocks them. The trouble is one cannot help feeling on some level Damien Hirst is laughing at everybody else, you and I included. It is why I for one watch him at a wary distance. I cannot love what he does. He plays the system just as traders do. The super rich who bought his art are now sitting on massive investments. It is a win win for both of them. Ultimately they are in cahoots. I wonder if Damien Hirst ever incorporated?

In Debt (also referenced in my previous letter), David Graeber highlights the etymology of the words hostage, host, hostile and even hospitality all derived from the same Latin root and all points back to how strangers relate*. You and I really should get that beer I discussed in our earliest letters and think about the implications of the relationships that most banks set up with their customers, the hollowness of which we are all becoming only too aware.

You no doubt are fully aware of the mixed tone of the letters I send to you—one moment polite and reasonable and the next seething with fury—but I do not apologize. Bankers wobble but they never fall down! At the very least I want your head to spin.

Yours sincerely,


Art (Dennis) Handler O’Connor



PS—In the same issue of the New Yorker Gary Shteyngart (in an amusing piece) suggests outsourcing tweets. I have all the time in the world but you, as a responsible financier (or financial instrument?) have the weight of the world on your shoulders. Just thought this might be useful.


DEBT, The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber—p.101, The Moral Grounds Of Economic Relations, 1st Melville House Printing: May 2011

Letter to the Bank Manager #92 (are you a person or a corporation?)

http://movetoamend.org/occupythecourts

Dear Bullrider (I’m guessing you’ve bounced back from your latest travails, travails never so big you cannot pass the cost on to your customers!),

I think at this point you know, and I know, that my letters to you, Art’s letters to the banker, are 99’s letters to the one. Art is a euphemism for life, humanity, in all its glory and failings—and Banker is a euphemism for the Corporation. As we all now know corporations are people, or have been designated as such by bodies like the Supreme Court (also people—apparently people who don’t know what a person looks like which is good because justice is supposed to be blind—right?). We also know that Corporations are Brands. They are a brand of person we usually call  disassociated, disconnected, unfeeling, and, as far as society is concerned inept and dangerous. Society generally puts such people somewhere where they can perpetuate no harm. Trouble is they are connected to each other and as such are very powerful. If you like they are the first plug in the wall and we all depend on adaptors to draw on their power. Depending on the very elements in our society that by any definition can only be seen as psychotic is a tragedy.

As you know I try always to drive a wedge between the human you, whose feelings I insist on working on despite the fact that getting to them causes me much angst and physical pain. To cut through your thick skin such that you feel the pain you cause requires the use of a chainsaw and I usually end up with multiple blisters and sore muscles before I have even made a dent. I will however keep trying to get through. It may be that one day your guard is down, your men are off drinking coffee, your food taster is otherwise engaged, your letter reader is home with the dastardly flu and it is you—yes you— who picks up this letter and, bored, decides to open it. On the off chance this should occur I’ve decided I should include in bold colorful type (for the moment may be so fleeting I have to catch your eye) a suggested reading list, or suggested links, movies etc.

I’ll try to do so from now on. I’ll reference the things I’ve heard, the news stories that added another notch to my world weary heart. I will share with you that which I believe you should know. Lets move beyond the probability that you will dismiss all and everything I put forward as only the left wing, pinko, conspiratorial, radical, environmental garbage talk of an out of touch, artistic individual, and assume you are made of softer material, have flexibility, and are open for business.

Let’s talk.

Sincerely,

Art O’Connor

Here is the first list:

Debt, The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber. I believe the author went to LSE in London, is a self described anarchic economist, and has been described as one of those who provided philosophical underpinnings for the Occupy Movement. The book is fascinating and full of material I’d love to qoute but best you just take a look at it yourself.

The Corporation, a movie by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan