King Midas asked the gold-toothed coyote, “How many values did you have to feed on in former times? What good teeth did you have? And today? What’s missing? –a question for dentists? economists? – artists?
King Midas is typically read as an allegory on the inherent uselessness of pure exchange value: when it comes down to digestion, gold is just another heavy stone. In the valley of looming debts, Midas, no longer allegorical, becomes tacit function: we credit everything with value and, likewise, our values are provided by an endless credit. We virtual Midasians exert ourselves to give value to everything we touch, whether it is the production of more values (virtual time/space of credit), evaluations to extend existing values (debt creditor relations), or the rearrangement of what and how we value (when debts are collected). If everything we touch takes on value (meaningful enough for mercantile), we consequently we undergo an inflation of values by valuing less but more often. This is the aesthetics of deficit. Deficit is not as a blanket denunciation of contemporary art, but as the very condition of its practice. “Gaseous values will lead to more then a little virtual indigestion,” laughed the gold-toothed coyote. To defer this reckoning with our deficit spending, and in the face of our values becoming empty morsels, we go into a frenzy of exchange hoping the mechanical programs of communication will sort us out.
An economist’s response: exchange does not strengthen bubbles, it stabilizes them.
Anything refusing to be exchanged must be exterminated at all costs or else cause the whole bubble, the alibi, to implode. Mr. Saul Alvarez’s Transmutation of gold into lead, when coexistence is no longer plausible presents such a conundrum: are convictions too unseasonable for equivalence, too pregnant for peer evaluations, made presentable only in death? “Participate or perish because only dead men are heroes,” said the gold-toothed coyote...
such a conundrum: are convictions too unseasonable for equivalence, too pregnant for peer evaluations, made presentable only in death? “Participate or perish because only dead men are heroes,” said the gold-toothed coyote. Glassed in a bell jar and permanently dialed in, trying to contact the dead, we aesthetic watchers get only busy signals…feedback images. The Gold toothed coyote had no use for equivalence, so we, equally, had no use for it. To eat with gold teeth does not require secondary evaluations (you, me, commentators and fraternizers). If the gold-toothed coyote ‘exchanges’ it does so only by eating all that is exchangeable, it gives ‘value’ only when it takes you for food. But the dead don’t eat, so the food manufactures teeth.
A dentist’s response: eating with dentures made from dead heroes isn’t conviction; it’s survival.
If coexistence is no longer plausible, exchange bubbles work to eclipse those convictions by the litter of symbols made in its image, then our aesthetic bonds are reduced to a redundancy, a paper fantasy, or worse, an honor for the deceased. “What is left for me on this fashion island of gilded cardboard cutouts and dentures made from the dead?” sneers the gold-toothed coyote. Alvarez’s Between a rock and a hard place sets an unruly scenario into play: beyond these inflated optometrists and subsidized pessimists we are always in the process of manufacturing options when there are none. In the matrices of deficit all is conversational, exchangeable, even if it be critical, all of it becomes domestic; options only happen when we accept that there are none and in turn become one. The state of the contemporary coyote, and those artists forced to wear the ‘pelt’, are too hungry and too excited by the domestic standards and marked Vogelfrei: declared an outlaw whom anybody may shoot at sight. In Manufacturing Options (revisited) Alvarez’s gritty abstraction opens wide: crime is not a literal transgression against the State but something unseen acting in the domestic, an aesthetic moment without conversation or invitation by a witness. Maybe this reveals Mr. Alvarez’s suspicion: images can separate us from our compulsion, but when the aesthetic consequences are lived out nothing will stop us from merging with our metaphors. If watching becomes a virtual malaise, and aesthetic moments are prior observation, can there be anything more catastrophic for contemporary art? Is it coincidence that in Mr. Alvarez’s sound drawings the police and viewer exchange roles, horrified that in these abstract shapes something is withheld from view, then convicting the shapes because of it? Metamorphisms cannot be refuted; only defeated.
An artist’s response: If we are no longer allowed to be open with our convictions, then forced into secrecy we are destined to become convicts.
