The Currency of Paper

by Alex Kovacs

  The third floor of the museum was entirely given over to a polemic against contemporary advertising. Appropriating examples discovered inside magazines and displayed upon bus shelter hoardings, Maximilian contrasted these with facts related to the realities of industrial production. Workers’ hours and wages were listed beside photo advertisements for the products they had laboured upon, with their images of idyllic consumption. Pollutants that different companies were responsible for creating were named and described, with estimations of quantities and the effects of environmental devastation that these practices were causing. Unlike a number of the other sections of the museum the descriptions and captions provided were absolutely straight-faced and serious in their intentions. Maximilian saw advertising as the essential form of communication in the contemporary world, a medium stripped of all subtlety and nuance, a medium which propagated an outrageous series of lies. Because the bold, luminous colours of the forms that advertising took were so seductive, it seemed all the more important to him to oppose its insidious presence throughout contemporary life.

  Once the creation of the museum was completed, towards the end of 1997, Maximilian locked the doors and abandoned the building to darkness. As with so much else that he had done, it would be necessary for others to find his work and choose to bring it to the attentions of the wider public. Afterwards, it was only occasionally that he thought of its spaces, the exhibits inevitably coated in layers of dust, throwing off shadows through days and nights of neglect, the mannequins and the photographs and the cabinets anxiously awaiting discovery, desperate for rescue from the oblivion that they would otherwise fall into. For his dream to be realised it would take a team of dedicated individuals to attend to it with great tact and care. But somehow he felt certain that such persons existed and that through a number of peculiar movements of fate, suitable people for the job would find their way to Wapping and decide that it was important to open the doors of the museum to all who cared to enter.

  Thoughts Emerging from the Contemplation of Clouds

  (1993)

  “ . . . honestly i think it’s true to say that there are almost no basic questions being asked these days about origins and purposes . . . most people never come to a full apprehension of themselves . . . it’s as if so many people are used to the saccharine comforts of childhood that we refuse to let go of our adolescence . . . have you noticed the way in which many thirty-year-olds seem to retain their adolescent physiognomies . . . think of the vast accumulation of images of youth, the bodies of fashion models, television presenters, film stars, the mass of lifestyle proposals distributed by all of the media outlets . . . collectively, these images cause people to aspire to the appearances and mindsets of adolescents . . . i’m convinced that their facial features are moulded by the continuous dissemination of images . . . believe me, this is important . . . staring for too long at a series of identical images, our bodies are naturally affected by them . . . and this eternal adolescence is further cemented by the clothes they decide to wear, their consumption choices, the cultural forms with which they identify . . . there’s an enormous sadness in this . . . of course, their adolescence is a fake one, only partially successful at the best of times . . . thirty-year-olds can hardly keep the façade up indefinitely . . . finally, most of them look like rotting, overgrown children . . . sad, empty copies of images . . . ” said Maximilian.

  * * *

  “ . . . if you look at photographs or film footage from the ’70s or earlier you’ll find yourself thinking that there was more life in everyone’s faces back then, somehow . . . yes, you can really see the difference, you can see that these faces are a little less eaten away by images, technology, mass production . . . and those people, they were so much more attractive, their eyes hadn’t adapted to the act of staring at television and computer screens . . . their physiognomies look more lived-in, more aware of themselves . . . we form ourselves by staring into mirrors, you know, and not just the bathroom mirror, but the mirror of the stage, the mirror of the street . . . the mirrors of the faces of others, which we imitate, throwing our own gazes upon them and vice versa . . . a television set is a powerful mirror and a particularly poor one to choose as your model . . . of course this decline in self-apprehension isn’t wholly due to the effects of the proliferation of media technologies . . . we are suffering from cultural and spatial displacements . . . the possibility of jumping so rapidly from one location to another, of living within a series of images that flip from one country to another, one object to another, one person to another . . . we aspire to impossible ideals presented to us in images . . . people mimic the pace of dialogue in television programmes when they speak to their intimates . . . their sentences become cut off before they are even realised in a form worth achieving . . . ” said Maximilian.

  * * *

  “ . . . most people don’t actually live inside their bodies anymore . . . it remains an alien entity to them for most of their lives . . . there is the widespread expectation that bodies should remain youthful . . . any disease or deformity is taken as an affront to human decency . . . it’s as if death and disease never occur . . . they are phenomena which should be safely confined to the television screen . . . plastic surgery represents a particularly outrageous form of this thinking . . . everyone forgets their own skeletons, their veins and muscles and organs . . . these are matters for medical professionals . . . food is ingested as if it’s just another product from the production line . . . and of course that’s what food is, from one point of view, but who aside from the people whose livelihoods depend on it give any thought to its relationship to soil, vegetation, sunlight, rain . . . food enters the body and leaves the body . . . in the same way that we simply expect a television to be regularly available to us . . . there’s no exploration of the body’s actual properties, its potentialities . . . ” said Maximilian.

  * * *

  “ . . . it seems impossible for so many people to imagine change at all . . . as time moves on and our social conditions remain dominated by the dictates of commerce . . . the urban environments devoid of community in which neighbours barely talk to each other . . . a reality whose rhythms and prejudices can plausibly be explained entirely in relation to the movements of money . . . yet it would be a reasonably straightforward task to begin breaking down this state of affairs . . . in a matter of a few months it would be possible to move things forward at least a little . . . but no one really wants to do that . . . the majority of citizens have come to believe that this form of living is entirely ordinary and even desirable . . . it isn’t that we’ve reached the end of history . . . no, it’s much more to do with our liking to deny that history has ever existed at all . . . whenever an individual purchases a mass-market commodity . . . an object identical in form to so many others . . . there is a comforting sense that this exchange will always be possible, that the shop where it was purchased will remain fixed in appearance and location for many years to come . . . for as long as the individual may find it necessary to return there and repeat his or her actions . . . the same motions of the body on the parts of both worker and customer . . . each without the least interest in the other as a human being . . . an interaction devoid of communication as our ancestors would have defined it . . . and the market-place demands that this be the case, that speech be kept to an absolute minimum . . . that we ignore each other’s needs and propagate ignorance and silence and suffering . . . ” said Maximilian.

  * * *

  “ . . . we need to achieve a greater awareness of our relations with technologies . . . to avoid being dominated by them and see the degree to which we tend to use them in a state of utter blindness . . . i think it’s ridiculous to simply dismiss technologies as negative entities, as so many of them obviously possess miraculous powers of transformation . . . they can provide us with fresh insights and new horizons . . . but this society is increasingly addicted to telephones and computers . . . we ought to be able to separate ourselves from them for a mom
ent if it’s necessary to do so . . . it should be possible for us to possess a nuanced view of the ways in which we use technologies . . . we should be able to see a telephone conversation, or indeed, any conversation, as holding thousands of potential divergent paths . . . we should attempt to form a better understanding of the ways in which our use of telephones creates and shapes our social world . . . to see that they help us to mould our identities and vocabularies and ideologies . . . and cause us to communicate with each other less and less, diminishing our inner lives and forcing us away from things of actual importance . . . it should be remembered that telephones do not allow eyes to meet each other and glimpse shades of colour . . . i think there is a great and unknown need for everyday encounters which presuppose these eye-to-eye exchanges as necessary . . . nevertheless, we cannot eradicate telephones, but it is surely preferable that we be aware of their effects and that we attempt to educate others of this . . . using subtle and devious methods if necessary . . . to constantly argue that the world is always more than you happen to think that it is . . . and that even the mouthpieces of officialdom and society . . . educators and politicians and journalists and writers . . . these people do not possess the truth, only splintered versions of available truths . . . ” said Maximilian.

  * * *

  “ . . . surely it is possible to imagine other ways of living, different forms of social organization and behaviour . . . what’s needed is not some grand stratagem for renewal, the widespread assumption of a new ideology . . . we need new ideas and transformative actions to be adopted by everyone in a casual way . . . so that the majority of people start to take on board the idea that things can change from day to day . . . even that is a simple notion which eludes the majority of the inhabitants of this particular planet . . . the idea is stamped out of most people’s minds with great invisible violence before it even has a chance of being born . . . and so often a hostility towards change results in the desperate clinging to dignity in the face of enslavement . . . nevertheless it remains perennially possible to educate and inspire understanding . . . to present people with the knowledge that they possess the power to mould their own consciousness given the limits of their situation . . . every teacher in every classroom should know this fact and attempt to act upon it . . . ” said Maximilian.

  The Ignoble Procession Backwards

  (1994–1995)

  When creating the Museum of Contemporary Life, Maximilian saved much of his energy for the fourth and highest floor in the building, the last place a visitor would reach when moving through the space. This floor was entirely given over to an exhibition that provided arguments against many of the political practices of the U.K. government in recent years. “Contemporary” in this instance covered the reign of the Conservative Party since it had first obtained a definitive stranglehold upon the political system at the 1979 General Election under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher.

  Employing a large variety of charts, graphs, tables of statistics, pictures, and paragraphs of analysis, Maximilian sought to create an impassioned argument against what this government had done whilst in power, hoping also to make statements against reactionary politics of any kind. All information would of course need to be frequently updated in future years, but the exhibition was intended to be taken as a template to be used by any future museum curators.

  Amongst his statements were the following:

  That under the government of the Conservative Party the country had descended into an era of selfishness, in which the population began to aggressively pursue property and material wealth to an extent that had never been seen previously. Deregulation of the financial sector helped to foster a country dominated by capitalism, repeatedly destroying many possibilities for human growth. Foreign currency exchange controls disappeared in October 1979, meaning that pounds could now be moved freely throughout the world, encouraging businesses to expand and hide their assets in one or another tax haven. Banks were given the go ahead to ask the Treasury for enormous sums of money which would be taken on credit and never paid back. In 1981 house prices began to rise to absurd proportions after the banks were allowed to enter the mortgage market. Unprecedented levels of credit were sanctioned, often in the form of mortgages, so that vast quantities of pseudo-money circulated throughout the system. As a consequence of this increased credit, individual consumption started to grow by 6% each year, whilst overall production decreased, creating a major imbalance that resulted in huge amounts of hidden debt.

  Throughout the ’80s the Thatcher government repeatedly acted upon the belief that there should be a mass denationalisation of publicly owned assets. Little by little the interests of capital and business were put before the human need for workplaces in which fairness and equality are the rule. This strategy came to involve nearly every organisation that the government could manage to part with, including telecommunications, transport networks, refuse collection, the supply of gas, and even the provision of hospital meals. To make matters worse the general public was then invited to become shareholders in these companies. When Thatcher came to power there were three million shareholders in the U.K., but by the time that she left there were eleven million, meaning that one in five members of the populace now possessed a stake in the world of business. Ordinary working households had now become miniature capitalist investors.

  The government then also began to limit the rights of workers by destroying the power of the trade unions. This was a genuinely poisonous move as historically it has only been through union organisation that workers can possess any voice at all regarding their working conditions. The Employment Act of 1982 allowed employers to sack all strikers. Unions could now be taken to court and fined enormous sums of money for “damages” of up to £250,000 depending on the size of the union. It was now necessary for 85% of the workers in a union to be in favour of industrial action for that action to be legal. Overall trade union membership fell from 13.5 million in 1979 to below 9 million in 1993, representing a massive cultural shift in favour of the interests of business.

  In 1984 and 1985, the Miners’ Strike had brought all of these trade union issues into focus. Thatcher had sanctioned the closure of mines, before government reports about their profitability had even been completed. In the midst of these actions the National Union of Miners called for strike action. 11,291 people were arrested during the disturbances. Certain police forces asked those under arrest about their political persuasions, a feature more often seen in totalitarian regimes. Many of the policemen fighting against the strikers were in fact soldiers who had secretly been told to wear police uniforms and often perpetrated acts of shocking violence, attacking miners on the picket line with truncheons, resulting in six deaths.

  The 1980 Social Security Act had banned the dependents of strikers from receiving government benefits designated for “urgent needs,” as well as bringing in compulsory deductions from the benefits that they were awarded. As the miners themselves earned no benefits whatsoever their families began to live for extended amounts of time in states of dire poverty. During the strike Thatcher referred to the miners as “the enemy within,” a contemptible statement showing a complete lack of human understanding and sensitivity.

  The Greater London Council, one of the few bastions of socialism then present in British public life, was destroyed by Tory legislation. Under the leadership of Ken Livingstone the GLC had brought down tube and bus fares, encouraging the use of public transport and saving the population money which was direly needed in the midst of a recession. The GLC had formed a constant series of campaigns in favour of minorities and the vulnerable. They stood for European integration and proportional representation when no one else would. Livingstone entered into talks with Sinn Féin at a time when they were essentially outlawed as a political organisation. These talks were a highly necessary move for the beginnings of any peace process in Northern Ireland, but it would be more than a decade until any politicians in Westminster did the same. In 1986 the GLC was
abolished in a move that smacks of authoritarian control.

  Arguably the worst actions of the Conservative Party during this period were those which saw the enormous increase in British arms sales, selling to regimes regardless of their human rights records. By the mid-’90s Britain had become the second largest arms exporter in the world after the U. S., being now responsible for 20% of global sales. Almost half of all government research and development funds were allocated for “defence.” Thatcher repeatedly became personally involved in the completion of arms deals and encouraged manufacturers to increase production.

  After attempting to gain independence in December 1975, the territory of East Timor was illegally invaded by Indonesian forces. Over the next two decades around 200,000 people were killed under the subsequent dictatorship, representing about a third of the population. 60,000 of these deaths came about in the first five months of the occupation, a period which involved a horrific series of tortures and mutilations. This was essentially made possible by the supply of American arms, but it was not long before Britain began to make a major contribution. In 1978 British Aerospace sold Indonesia eight military aircraft worth $4.5 million. The Labour Foreign Secretary of the time, David Owen, dismissed arguments against this action by claiming that “the scale of the fighting (in East Timor) . . . has been very greatly reduced.” This was only the beginning of an extensive relationship. Between 1986 and 1990 Britain supplied $522 million worth of weapons to the Indonesian regime. By the ’90s Britain had become Indonesia’s largest supplier of arms.