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tomb (ii)
photographer danny lyon documented the “urban renewal” of new york city during the 1960s, which destroyed entire city blocks and displaced thousands of residents.
MANHATTAN, DANNY LYON, 1967
tomb (i)
graffiti of artist's profile on a wall at full link plaza as part of the revolt against the destruction of old beijing. says dali, “i believe that humans are the product of their environment. i am concerned about the changes in our living environment that have been imposed by money and power.”
BEIJING, ZHANG DALI, 1998
is failure required in order to recognize a form as speculative? for the answer, one can look to the thousands of unoccupied luxury properties in cities like san francisco or london or dubai which perform “house-ness” for the purpose of housing money itself, while migrant workers and unhoused people are funneled into slums and on the streets. these particular materializations of speculation are developed because they tend to operate just as they are supposed to, even as the “houses” fail to house human beings. the reason for this is clear: such failures are inconsequential to the logic of speculative momentum, which is only concerned with how its material forms may serve as instruments of capital mediation. speculation works in such a way that even individual financial failures like the isleton fossil can be subsumed by speculative processes and repackaged again as speculative agents—for the security guard was not free from speculative intervention, even if the particular transaction in which he resided had proven to be a failed investment.
speculation is nimble and polymorphous in this way. the reason it produces such scattered temporalities is because speculation itself is a principle of constant mutation, thereby its forms are prompted to mutate with it. its profitability for financial institutions is dependent on these endless micro-movements, and such movements are only possible when the moveable goods at the center of trade adopt these same qualities. perhaps, then, there is hope in the fact that in a material sense, this is an impossible ask, for even if a physical asset is abstracted into a bullet point which is buried within a thousand-page derivative contract, it cannot be instantaneously conjured from or transported across the surface of the earth. after all, form is textured and messy. form leaves traces. to name a speculative form as sculpture is thereby not to attempt to freeze it in a moment in time, or to merely valorize the broad concept of materiality, but to recalibrate the form’s functions toward a freely imagined temporality other than speculative growth. sculpture is, of course, an imperfect process riddled with complications and contradictions, but it is precisely this quality which deems it a worthy resistance to the forceful smoothing of material by speculation into forms which were only ever designed to function in the financial realm. perhaps there is potential for sculpture to serve as a reclamation in this respect—not only of form, but of futures at large.
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