LOS ANGELES — Maura Brewer’s video essay “Leverage” (2024) unpacks the modern phenomenon of artwork as asset class by focusing on the monetary dealings of 1 particular person: Daniel Sundheim. Using easy diagrams, inventory photographs, and movie clips, the work avoids simplistic conclusions about the mingling of capital and tradition, as an alternative laying out Brewer’s findings in an accessible method that encourages additional scrutiny.
This is the first entry in Brewer’s ongoing challenge “that traces the history of the financialization of art,” in accordance with the press launch. Using publicly out there paperwork, she tracks 12 art-backed loans that Sundheim, a billionaire investor and Museum of Modern Art trustee, took out between 2013 and 2019, a interval of feverish hypothesis in the artwork market pushed by low rates of interest. As Brewer explains in 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 fingers; they’re merely listed as line objects on the mortgage paperwork, generally known as Uniform Commercial Code Filings.
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 fingers, drawing us in with some extent of human connection, but additionally mediating our expertise, maintaining us at a distance from the precise artworks. This underscores the method through 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.
Sundheim’s narrative is interwoven with autobiographical tales about Brewer’s struggles with cash, artwork, and relationships. After she obtained the largest grant of her profession in 2023, she received a bitter electronic mail from a former buddy, citing previous resentments and rivalries. The relationship between artwork and cash is far completely different for a working artist and for a rich investor. These scenes are illustrated with clips from the 1988 movie Beaches, which follows the tumultuous relationship between two longtime buddies, performed by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Conversely, she makes use of clips from The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s loathsome 2013 celebration of amoral greed, for example the artwork market bubble of the 2010s, which popped as soon as the Federal Reserve raised rates of interest in 2022.
For her exhibition Leverage at artist-run house Timeshare, the video is projected onto the ground, taking over a big swath of actual property. While this makes comfortably viewing the work difficult, it’s additionally unimaginable to keep away from, like an elephant in the room. Its horizontality asserts its sculptural high quality over the cinematic. In the video, Brewer likens the summary marks of “zombie formalism” that topped public sale information 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 Financial Code Filings of arts patrons Ronald Lauder and Peter Norton, with the textual content eliminated. The crisp white traces and containers stand out towards the darkish, gestural backgrounds, which Brewer composed together with her fingerprints, as if asserting the hand of the artist towards the chilly financial logic of the market.
Brewer will not be merely organising a binary between artist and investor, nonetheless. Rather, she pulls again the curtain on these usually invisible or elusive methods that overlap with the artwork world, as they turn 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 in the video, as she cuts a gap via the black background with an electrical knife, reaching her fingers via it and seemingly into our house.
Maura Brewer: Leverage continues at Timeshare (3526 North Broadway, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles) via November 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
