Helen Grace – Speculation: The October Series
This work began in Hong Kong, as well it might. The ‘financial capital’ is poised between east and west, with a ringside seat on the spectacle of the global markets. Hong Kong becomes a unique vantage point on the dramatic spectacle of the Global Financial Crisis, convulsions we are still living through.
Helen Grace is herself a singular vantage point, making ‘generative art’ from long observation of aesthetics and economics and how they come together. In Speculation: The October Series, Sydney audiences recently got to see a selection of the works that she has made and exhibited in Hong Kong, making ‘market sentiments’ into art.
The frightening paradox of the market is that, for all it is presented as a blind force of indefeasible calculation—even of rationalism—it is dominated by the notion of its moods. ‘Investor sentiment’, ‘business confidence’, the twin antimonies of fear and greed: while economics is a science for pessimists, the market is a place of pragmatists betting on other people’s feelings. Or so it seems. Sometimes, in the inimitable words of business journalist Alan Kohler, the market just behaves ‘like kids on red cordial’.
Some of Grace’s works bring out this mad empiricism of the global markets, where ‘market sentiment’ collects together the fugitive and irrational moments of investor behaviour, and spins it into objective fact. For example, in Sleep Per Night – April - December 2008, minutes of sleep are plotted against days of the month, overlaid on a sepia photograph of the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. The ‘bio-data’ is generated from the artist’s own diaries from the time, which was a time of sleepless nights for investors.
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