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