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reviews michael stevenson
Michael stevenson
vilm a Gold, london
13 July – 12 auGust
All manner of nefarious implications of the West’s
twentieth-century trade policies can be inferred
from the artworks at Vilma Gold, but it is in
Michael Stevenson’s text in the publication c/o
The Central Bank of Guatemala (2006) where the
real meat of the pie can be found. Through long-
term and wide-reaching research Stevenson has
unearthed a matrix of causalities and associations,
both concrete and speculative, which revolve
around the entwined economies of North and
Central America during the 1950s. In making an
exhibition from his findings, he doesn’t attempt to
illustrate this, though; instead he simply isolates a
couple of eccentric images to prompt us.
The show’s centrepiece is a reconstruction
of a hydraulic computer developed by the
economist Bill Phillips in 1949 to demonstrate
the workings of macroeconomies at a national
scale. The description ‘hydraulic computer’ is
totally literal, as the flow of water represents the
circulation of money, and its diversion and change
in flow rate, enacted by pipes, pumps and sluices,
illustrates the effects of taxation, government
expenditure and consumer spending. In the
neighbouring gallery space the film The Living
Circle, released by the United Fruit Company in
the 1950s, trumpets the benefits it provides to an
impoverished region: paying wages that can then
The Fountain of Prosperity,
be spent on nonindigenous goods, infrastructure and leisure, while furnishing North Americans
2005, mixed media,
245 x 157 x 111 cm.
with such indispensable items as coffee, bananas and chocolate. The tone is pompous and the
courtesy the artist
economics simplistically circular; and the insistence on the redemptive effects of trade sounds like
and vilma Gold, london
propaganda to those aware of worker exploitation.
Stevenson’s written account describes his quest to find one of Phillips’s original machines,
a trail that leads him to the US, where he discovered that an economist bent on popularising
Keynesian theory had latched on to the machine and recalibrated it for the US economy, renaming
it the Moniac and peddling it with zeal. Records Stevenson found at the University of California,
Berkeley, indicated that the Central Bank of Guatemala had ordered one in the early 1950s, and it
was this Moniac which Stevenson set his sights on. Although Stevenson’s text ostensibly explains the
artwork, it also elaborates a series of vignettes, character studies and broader political commentaries,
drawing into its compass the Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s and the activities there of the United
Fruit Company, known locally as el Pulpo (‘the Octopus’), which controlled the export of bananas
during the 1950s, as well as much of the country’s electricity generation, communication and
transport systems. Although there is certainly a sculptural aspect to Stevenson’s reconstruction of
the Moniac, and a faded materiality that echoes the period aesthetic of the film, it is in its capacity as
vessel of corollary information that it resonates best. Research-based art often stumbles at the point
of display – just how do you convey history and politics in aesthetic form? Stevenson’s tiered solution
is both enigmatic and explicatory, revelling in the images and objects as well as the historiography
that they have emerged from. Sally O’Reilly
artreview 152
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 6 4/9/07 12:29:03
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