Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles (all photographs courtesy Timeshare gallery, pictures Brandon Bandy except in any other case famous)
LOS ANGELES — Maura Brewer’s video essay “Leverage” (2024) unpacks the modern phenomenon of artwork as asset class by specializing in the monetary dealings of 1 particular person: Daniel Sundheim. Utilizing easy diagrams, inventory pictures, and movie clips, the work avoids simplistic conclusions in regards to the mingling of capital and tradition, as an alternative laying out Brewer’s findings in an accessible method that encourages additional scrutiny.
That is the primary entry in Brewer’s ongoing undertaking “that traces the history of the financialization of art,” in line with the press launch. Utilizing publicly obtainable paperwork, she tracks 12 art-backed loans that Sundheim, a billionaire investor and Museum of Trendy Artwork trustee, took out between 2013 and 2019, a interval of feverish hypothesis within the artwork market pushed by low rates of interest. As Brewer explains within the concise 18-minute video, Sundheim used works in his artwork assortment as collateral to safe loans, with which he purchased artwork, and he put that artwork up as collateral to safe extra loans, in a self-perpetuating loop. The artworks by no means modified palms; they’re merely listed as line objects on the mortgage paperwork, referred to as Uniform Business Code Filings.
Maura Brewer, “Ronald Lauder / Christie’s Inc., Uniform Commercial Code Filing No. 200605190427172, May 19, 2006, New York Department of State, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, Joan Miro, Constantin Brancusi” (2004), pastel on paper, 20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm)
Brewer narrates the ebbs and flows of Sundheim’s loans and money owed, as photographs of the items in query flash by: Basquiat, Grotjahn, Gursky, Koons, Prince, Ryman, Wool, Twombly, and different market darlings. The works seem on the display screen of an iPhone held by the artist’s palms, drawing us in with some extent of human connection, but in addition mediating our expertise, maintaining us at a distance from the precise artworks. This underscores the best way by which most of us work together with artwork now, as uniform digital rectangles on a display screen, as sterile as their corresponding numbers on a stability sheet.
Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles (picture Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
For her exhibition Leverage at artist-run area Timeshare, the video is projected onto the ground, taking over a big swath of actual property. Whereas this makes comfortably viewing the work difficult, it’s additionally unimaginable to keep away from, like an elephant within the room. Its horizontality asserts its sculptural high quality over the cinematic. Within the video, Brewer likens the summary marks of “zombie formalism” that topped public sale data throughout this era to monetary ledgers and spreadsheets, a connection made literal in three small pastel drawings on the wall. These minimalist grids take their construction from the Uniform Monetary Code Filings of arts patrons Ronald Lauder and Peter Norton, with the textual content eliminated. The crisp white traces and packing containers stand out in opposition to the darkish, gestural backgrounds, which Brewer composed together with her fingerprints, as if asserting the hand of the artist in opposition to the chilly financial logic of the market.
Brewer will not be merely establishing a binary between artist and investor, nevertheless. Reasonably, she pulls again the curtain on these usually invisible or elusive methods that overlap with the artwork world, as they change into tougher and tougher to disentangle. “In the debt theory of money, there is an empty hole in the center of the universe, animating all our actions,” Brewer says at one level within the video, as she cuts a gap by means of the black background with an electrical knife, reaching her palms by means of it and seemingly into our area.
Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles (picture Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles
Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles
Set up view of Maura Brewer: Leverage at Timeshare, Los Angeles
Maura Brewer: Leverage continues at Timeshare (3526 North Broadway, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles) by means of November 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
