Simon DennyI have fond memories of the ‘Improve our workspace’ banner also – a GCHQ (UK intelligence agency) internal graphic describing their workspace-optimising practices for the most iconic state surveillance brand in the UK, which I took and displayed proudly at scale over a mall in Shanghai. More than workplace optimisation, I’m reminded of the role of context, class, race and other forces that differentiate play in this situation. Due to the pandemic I, of course, had my disruptions – an exhibition postponed, another cancelled, a collaboration agreement that had felt solid fray. But I was reminded of how lucky I am – I was able to put energy into teaching, into working with students and thinking harder about my role at the HFBK University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and the mentoring program I run, Berlin Program for Artists. Unpacking the situation with artists in these contexts focused me on things I think are really important, and on relationships with people. 

SDI wasn’t looking for them. The Thatcher auction wasn’t something I was following specifically. But when I saw them, I was totally compelled by the economy with which the scarves seemed to embody her politics in material. I have made artworks that focus on politically conservative figures in the past: Kim Dotcom, Peter Thiel, etc. These are figures with connections to right-wing libertarian worldviews, and those views have scaled through products they’ve worked on, and contexts they’re part of. Thatcher as a figure, to me, rhymed with that – a sort of iconic precursor to some of the technology entrepreneurs’ worldviews and ideologies that I’ve been so invested in unpacking. 

SDSalesforce was an interesting touch point for me in San Francisco – its founder and CEO Marc Benioff, has a reputation as the ‘good billionaire’ as he is so involved with philanthropic projects. He’s quite vocal about the city and, for example, issues around housing and inequality. He supported ‘Proposition C’, which is one legal attempt to try and grapple with the scale of houselessness in the city. Salesforce has a big physical footprint and is very visible in the city as well – there are two large towers downtown that they occupy, and there’s a kind of skyline-like urban raised park that they also erected in the area. I was looking into tax patents, a method for reducing or deferring taxes, and also the kinds of patents that were being filed by Salesforce, and I happened upon a number of patents that describe communities and individuals, which map ‘persona’ formation and look at targeting individuals in social media structures. I felt these were resonant with the ‘individual’ formation of the Thatcher scarf sculptures, with a kind continuation of her worldview through software, so I started to experiment with using these patents to form layered paper reliefs. The reliefs collage layers of diagrams, figurative imagery and text contained in a giant stack of the printed patents – so like profile picture diagrams with words like ‘community’ and ‘targeted data storage’ – stack up on top of each other. I use this interesting rapid-prototyping tool that was designed to produce small 3D prints by stacking, cutting, and gluing sheets of paper in multiple layers. This tool was designed in the last decade and was found to be commercially unviable due to its extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive process. Using this tool, I created paper stacks of the patent documents, and milled out several cloud shapes based on the Salesforce logo as well as a common ‘cloud’ schematic that is used in software diagramming. 

SDThat article was a big help in framing the subjects around the show and, published in the style section of the Times, the image of Thatcher next to a well-known CEO in a Patagonia branded vest was priceless, it really summarises and broadcasts the territory of the exhibition. I can certainly relate to the idea of a treatise-as-exhibition. Presenting an in-depth exposition of, or investigating the principles of a subject was exactly my aim in working on our Serpentine exhibition in 2015. In that case the subject was not a kind of political lineage of individualism from neoliberal policy to software design like the San Francisco exhibition has been, but more a taxonomy of organisational structures servicing the internet – an Amazon owned online shoe retailer, a British state surveillance organisation and a group of informal structures focused around the development of the idiom of the hacker. Another recent show which is now travelling, called Mine, compares data extraction practices to mineral extraction practices, in a distillation of the extractive tendencies of industrial enterprise across paradigms… I could list more. I guess selecting a subject and teasing out interconnected themes through researched material such as a document, a photo, or a quote is what I do.

SDI would imagine he’s probably in LA actually – it's a time of crisitunity (when crisis presents opportunities for some actors), and Palantir, one of the companies Peter Thiel co-founded, is getting a huge amount of Covid-related business regarding expanding data mapping and tracking. I made The Founder’s Paradox exhibition from secondary sources, trying to map Thiel’s libertarian politics onto a geopolitics that included New Zealand and unpacked the ‘exit’ narratives I came across in my research into the ideological underpinnings of crypto and the politically conservative side of Silicon Valley. There are quite coherent predictions of end-of-nation-state events coinciding with an acceleration of the ‘sovereign individual’ figure, belonging to nobody but themselves, unbounded by any form of negative liberty from superstructures like states. In the show these narratives were mapped onto board game prototype sculptures that brought together imagery and narratives common in games like Settlers of Catan and Game of Life, and other fantasy games with this libertarian content. It also contrasted these games with artworks by a hero (and sometimes professor) of mine, Michael Parekowhai – who has used the game idiom to reflect on and critique colonial histories of Aotearoa New Zealand since the early 1990s. Thiel actually visited the exhibition a few weeks after it opened and from there we had a conversation about his thoughts on the show and my way of mapping these politics. It was refreshing because oftentimes I make exhibitions speculating on contexts or people I’m never able to be in touch with directly. Thiel was interested and really willing to spend time talking to me about the context and his interests and the way he saw those politics from his perspective, which was quite rare, and I think rewarding for both of us.

SDHis response was gratifying – that my research and sculptural output had framed the territory in a format that was legible outside of my own schematic. One of the things I am always thinking about is legibility, how I’m able to at once be in-depth and expository, works that are like a treatise, without being hermetic and alienating to a viewer that has different aesthetic frames of reference or only a certain amount of energy and attention. But then of course the proximity to him that came from the dialogue we had, the insight into the context in which he operates was a different kind of information than reading about it. I actually discovered there was a lot more crossover between his universe and others I had already encountered in the crypto world through earlier projects. While I had thought it might provide more material, it actually coincided with me ending that particular vector of work and developing other stories and other research. It became more contextual information than direct input into producing artworks. I think it did allow me to be sure that some of my instincts and research was correct – so that for example when I saw the Thatcher connection, I was sure that it was really meaningful with regard to that cohort of entrepreneurs. Last time I visited California to open the Security Through Obscurity exhibition, I went to a meeting of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society at the Hoover Institution, and Thiel was giving the keynote speech. It’s a very important society, founded by the economist Friedrich Hayek, and was deeply influential on Thatcher and Reganite policy. Thatcher was referenced several times by members of the society and Thiel’s position is highly respected there. I'm not sure I would have been able to join those dots culturally or politically in quite the same way had I kept a bit more distance from the context and from Thiel himself.

SDYes I do. I recently had a brief back and forth with Quinn Slabodian, the author of Globalists, a book detailing the Mont Pelerin Society and the growth of neoliberal supra-national infrastructure which enables this class. He’s also written a piece recently in The Guardian about strong voices trying to leverage the conditions of the crisis into more evidence for future fracturing of a nation state system, very much in line with the ‘Sovereign Individual’ take on the future I referenced in The Founders Paradox and Blockchain Future States exhibitions. 

Quinn’s summary paragraph in that piece points to what you’re saying here: “Nobody can tell what the world will look like after the pandemic. But what we can be sure of is that some investors appear to be already placing their bets on a vision of the future where the wealthy are freed from tax constraints. As nations are divided into different zones according to their respective stages of viral and economic recovery, the well-off could follow Elon Musk’s recent threat to relocate from California to Texas, voting with their feet for locations that elude redistributive taxation. In our post-pandemic future, the flight to safety, away from contagious ‘red zones’, could be a flight from the nation state as we know it.” He also identifies the libertarian thought leader Balaji Srinivasan, who I featured in The Founders Paradox and a number of blockchain related works like Blockchain Visionaries at the 2016 Berlin Biennale. It’s a very coherent worldview and one that appeals to many who see states as the enemy through a negative liberty lens.

Incidentally, Mark O’Connell has just now released a book, Notes from the Apocalypse, which spun out of his Guardian Long Read piece. The Thiel story and my exhibition are central to it.