Lender of Last Resort

2008

This project has been developed around the notion of loan: first in its financial sense, but also in regard to the museological. Loan is perhaps best defined as an inter-temporal transfer of value through time. It is probably the oldest financial instrument, dating at least from the birth of writing. Some of the first ever written documents describe loans, in fact bad loans (default being the real reason why the record has remained).

OTTERLO 2008

This project was first initiated at the Kröller-Müller Museum (KMM) as an engagement with the history of the museum collection. The Kröller-Müller collection is a pre-eminent Dutch collection of early modern art; beginning as a private collection it was later transferred into the public realm.

In 2008 at the KMM, a loan (of furniture) from the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) was combined with items from the KMM collection. Together they formed a tableau. The bank loan included the personal effects of the then DNB chairman from the 1920s. During 1924 the central bank intervened in its role as ‘Lender of Last Resort’ (LoLR) to relieve the Dutch banking crisis. The Kröller-Müllers, art patrons and influential capitalists, were both borrowers and executives at the Rotterdam bank that received central bank assistance. This change in fortune had many repercussions for the Kröller-Müllers (amongst other things it suspended further art purchases). The tableau therefore laid out implicitly the museological and the financial.

In the style of a tableau, the installation offered an artificially calm scenario without actors, a repository for sediment from this complex storyline. Although there are hints and traces, there is no palpable evidence of the calamitous processes one might assume would accompany such crises. Instead there is simply collection and loan.

LONDON 2008

A second realization of this project will be developed in London for the Vilma Gold stand at the Frieze Art Fair. Devolving the project from the specifics of the 1920s and the KMM (but reinstating the contemporary relevance of LoLR), the role of lender therefore will be passed to the pawnbroker. Irrespective of the credit cycle pawnbrokers issue loans (against pledges) and in this important role they have been described as a second LoLR.

This second group of loans is the physical outcome of a series of meetings made during summer with London pawnbrokers. The loans themselves consist of actual pawn broking instruments, on loan from local brokers. The loaned objects will be displayed inside a glass vitrine and their details will be recorded in an accompanying document.

Part of the development of this presentation involves re-understand the piece in terms of market. Loan, as a contractual claim is greatly enhanced by its ability to be traded to a third party. Loans, such as mortgages are therefore routinely traded, re-packaged and re-sold. When there is default in this process the repercussions can be global, as seen in the recent credit crunch. In the context of Frieze the piece anticipates third party (as any transaction would first require negotiation with the first party) and so poetically the larger economy is re-enacted. In this way market transaction (or it’s anticipation) becomes a transparent part of the conceptual process.

related: De Nederlandsche Bank, National Pawnbrokers Association


Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands 03.04.08 – 01.06.08

Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park, London 16.10.08 – 19.10.08


publication title: »Fables«