A Million Keys

Julien Previeux- A la recherche du miracle économique (2007)

This piece was included in Julien Previeux’s solo show Management of Change and Conflict, which was on view at the Jousse Entreprise Gallery last Spring. Previeux attended business school before he became an artist, and one could easily speculate that his concern with the nature of current economic structures is an extension of his studies. He produces concise and instructive meditations on value, work, and profit in a world economy marked by globalization and the primacy of information.

A la recherche du miracle économique (In Search of the Economic Miracle) is a triptych made up of three drawings. In the centre of each panel is an excerpt from Volume 1 of Capital, the border, or outer rim, is covered with an amorphous grouping of key words spotted in Karl Marx’s text. The system of deciphering used to highlight these key words goes back to the biblical code. In the Middle Ages, monks used this code to reveal the secret meanings in sacred texts. The decoding technique shows hidden terms according to equidistant series of letters, words are laid bare by choosing a starting letter then by leaving out the same number of letters each time. The words are linked together by arrows suggesting relationships of cause and effect and membership. This network of lines form a graph which Julien Prévieux uses to chart the twists and turns of financial scandals and economic crises. In the first panel, the text written in 1867 predicts the Great Depression. The dates, facts and sometimes even the names of the people involved in the slump can be found. The second drawing brings together terms having to do with the very recent Enron scandal, symbol of today’s malfunctions and of deregulation taken to the extreme. The people running the company, the politicians implicated in the affair as well as a whole set of terms concerning the failure of the company are found in the same way. The third and last element of the triptych depicts a future event: a widespread fall combining the development of an informal economy and the failure of the classic monetary system.

In these conditions, the search for the economic miracle looks to be pretty tough, the oracle tells of nothing but a series of catastrophes, a chaotic picture of the years gone by and the years to come. The events presented are so many icons of capitalism’s spectacular failures. At one and the same time a book of economic analysis and revolutionary tool, Capital is a real “bible of the international workers’ movement” (Engels), and it’s to give him additional power, a prophetic power from which to extort hidden meanings.

The act of deciphering or decoding is at once complex, long and ridiculous. It forces economic analysis into some sort of mystical corner and points the finger at the overly “magical” interpretation of certain texts. The work gives its reading model and serves as a commentary highlighting the need to suspect the secret entries in all work.

Julien Prévieux explores the boundaries between artistic praxis and economic reality, he extracts a kind of visual poetry from a complex reality in which the past, the present and the future get tangled up in a network that is forever wrapped and looped around itself.