Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.