Notes on the Quiz
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Money - A Quiz is set of collage drawings that serve as quiz questions for an imaginary curriculum concerning the nature of Balance Sheets and other Financial Representations. They appear here as on online quiz, but they also exist on 8.5” x 11” sheets of copy paper and can be installed by tacking them up on a wall (ideally between four and ten of them.) Or they can be copied into sets, stapled and installed with yellow lined paper so that viewers can take the test, providing written responses to the quiz questions – which I will grade on a curve.
Tools of accounting shape a large portion of our experience, but we often take them for granted as natural and neutral. A Balance Sheet's column of numbers can convey an air of science or objectivity that belies the incomplete and subjective quality it shares with any other form of "account" or story. Balance Sheets are especially worthy of curious contemplation now, as the world we live in becomes more and more financialized. “Fraught with uncertainty and animal spirits" is a phrase John Maynard Keynes used to describe the financial system. The description applies as aptly to the Balance Sheet, a seemingly sober and stable representation that is actually constructed out of highly malleable parts, a mixture of tangible and intangible elements - cash, time, furniture, agreements, vehicles, expectations, buildings, ideas, payroll, duality and raw materials, to name a few. Items that don't appear on Balance Sheets are just as consequential or maybe more so - air, unpaid labor, the future, structured investment vehicles, enjoyment. This particular set of drawings is inspired by discarded elementary school worksheets and quizzes I sometimes find on the street. These are also tools of measurement and assessment, designed to be objective but inevitably imbued with their own partialities, habits of mind and linguistic quirks - governing what questions are asked and how. |