For my contribution to the Bailout Biennial I made buttons with the amount of money each person in the USA will be paying towards the $700 billion bailout. I will hand out these buttons at the opening and they will be available for people to take throughout the exhibition. They are free since people are already paying enough. I encourage people to wear these buttons, and when asked about them, talk to people about the bailout.
I am also collecting responses from people about what $2,296.84 means in your life, responses which I will record here. If $2,296.84 would fix the current financial situation we might all be willing to make the sacrifices listed here. This project aspires to ground this very abstract number in a way that is meaningful in our own lives, inspire dialogue and perhaps even public response.
If you are unable to attend the exhibition and would like to submit a response and receive a button please contact me through my yahoo account juliejeanus.
Exhibition details:
BAILOUT BIENNIAL
January 16 - March 15, 2009
Golden Belt, Building 2, Floor 3, 807 East Main Street, Durham, NC
26 Artists, 10 States, 4 Countries, 1 Crisis.
Organized by elin o'Hara slavick and Jeff Waites
Exhibition Artists: Lauren Adams, Becca Albee, Joshua Bienko, Clare Britt, Ann Chwatsky, Maria DeGuzman, Severn Eaton, Lorena Endara, Paul Evans, Peter Eversoll, Cathryn Griffin, Michael Itkoff, Andrew Johnson, Geoffrey Owen Miller, Susan Mullally, Shaw Osha, Conor Peterson, elin o'Hara slavick, Susanne Slavick, Hiroshi Sunairi, David Tinapple, Julie Thomson, Paul Valadez, Stacy Waddell, Jeff Waites, Karen Frimkess Wolff
Hours: 10 AM to 6 PM, Sunday hours are 12 PM to 5 PM.
Free, open to the public.
$700 billion is also the cost (so far) of the Iraq war - a debacle we must talk about despite the collective weariness of all things Bush. Here is a link to a website that calculates the ongoing cost of the war and describes the cost in terms of what it means in the lives of people of Iraq and Afghanistan. http://zfacts.com/p/447.html
ReplyDeleteHere is a second link to a timely opinion piece by Frank Rich that appears in today's NYTs. It is entitled Eight Years of Madoffs and chronicles more of the costly debacles on Bush's watch. It encourages a public accounting despite the "all hands on deck" nature of the cluster of crisis the Obama administration inherits. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11rich.html