martin bonadeo | texts | change change

Martin Bonadeo creates his works usually by setting out from the space where they are going to be exhibited. The specific aspects of the place are decisive factors of his working system. At first sight, the works which make up this show seemed strange to me as they did not seem to arise from the space where they should have been exhibited. Although it was planned to show them in the Numismatic Museum (of the Argentine Central Bank), I did not feel that the discussions outlined by the works would have arisen from the space´s characteristics. Martin looked for this space in order to show a previously made work, it was simply an ideal frame. Then I understood that I had been observing from a point of view which turned out to be too close: Argentina as a socio-economic space was the place from where the works arose.

"Change change" is a group of works specific for the country and the moment, therefore the fact if they could be exhibited in the Numismatic Museum or not, turns out to be more or less indifferent to me. The Internet base can be interpreted as a space of collective information. This is appropriate, because many of the works carry the generalized worries about the evolution of the dollar exchange rate to an absurd limit. (Someone could argue that Internet is limiting the visibility to a certain socio-economic class, depriving the pretension regarding the collectivity of information contained in Internet, but I feel that this is an art endemic problem.)

Many of the works have a tautological mechanism. Recently, a female artist who I admire a lot, said to me: "in my opinion tautology turns out to be extremely boring". So why is it that these works do not seem boring to me? Tautology does not add information, its conclusions do not have any relevancy; but by using tautology in relation with exchange rate, it is a critical reflection about commonplaces with respect to the notions of "value" associated with currency. If all currencies are made out of the same copper than electricity cables, and the different bills are basically made out of the same paper, where is the value within an economy to be found?

And what happens when we aspire that our papers should be equal to the US green ones? A comment referring to this question appears in the work "Peso convertible" (Convertible Peso): two lines of 100 Argentine and North American 1 Cent coins form the respective positive and negative signal which connect a loudspeaker to a CD player. Out of the loudspeaker sounds the Yankee hymn, possibly suggesting that our aspirations have been dominated and that they transform us more or less in a second class citizenship within the Great American Empire (this sounds a bit pamphlet-like…..)

Nevertheless, the most stimulating reflection is the one about time and history. Old bills which have been saved from destruction, evolution of exchange rates, insinuations with respect to the cyclic process of our currency´s history ………..The show title acquires here a new meaning, obliging us to ask ourselves about what maintains itself constant within such a lot of variability and what are the kind of "changes" that we want and need as a nation.

symbols, paper, value and change
by martin bonadeo

"In this era of conventional abstract money, without any form of representation which would maintain contact with gold, the possibilities to distinguish the difference get more and more reduced."

Rosalind E. Krauss

"When I was a small child, my mum gave me a 1-million-bill in order to buy something at the kiosk. Besides the candy the kiosk-salesman gave me a huge pile of change of green and brown bills. I was happy, I felt that it was much more what I received than what I had handed over."

The choice of the Numismatic Museum for this show is no coincidence. Beyond my work in itself, I felt the necessity to exhibit the content of the glass showcases of this permanent collection. To bring nearer the history of the symbolic material which had mayor influence in the last century, material which now is no more than dead paper and metal buried in showcases, whose value does not go beyond being fetish, just like art. As one can see, it is not the first time that the Provinces issue bonds in an irresponsible manner and that our currency - as element of the country´s identity - was never equal to the dollar and it will never be. They are different symbols representing different values.

The symbolic burden of bills is so strong that the majority does not realize that it is only a question of pieces of printed paper. This symbolic material which is in its operating ways similar to art mechanisms has a violent effect on people´s mood. The special paper printed with expensive ink is no longer a simple mediator between people´s work, goods and services but becomes "the value" which rules our society. Something is wrong. The word "value" is by definition something that should remain stable for a long time and represents something crystallized. Nevertheless, on the stock market (note of the translator: the Spanish word for "stock market" is "Mercado de valores" which means literally "value market") money rises and falls constantly.

Debt, payments, "dollarization", bonds etc. are words that came in to occupy a privileged place in the Argentine vocabulary. On walking through the streets one can hear a necessity of everybody "change change", there is something about all this that needs modification. Many desire the same thing once again: hyperinflation, financial speculation, indexations, but maybe the transformation is so big that we are not capable of imagining what is coming next.

Art is one of the engines for a change, it exists simply because of its possibility of re-signification. Wile many people are trying to stabilize, art is pretending to break through.

Buenos Aires, August 2002

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