While waiting to board my flight to Bordeaux at the Berlin Airport a few weeks ago, I wandered around, letting myself wallow in the duty-free zone’s soothing facelessness. Passing a newsstand, a bulky A-frame sign caught my eye: it was an advertisement for the national lottery’s weekly jackpot, yelling “27 MILLION!!” at me, bold font and all caps on a bright yellow background, accompanied by an image of an offensively jubilant grin – the personification of bliss through wealth, obviously. Below, in much smaller print, however, the sobering statistic: “Chances of winning: 1 in 140 million.” Personally, I have never tapped into the field of gambling any deeper than some childhood raffles, which lead me to winning a keychain flashlight or a set of dizzyingly perfumed shower gels once or twice.
I probably wouldn’t even have given the ad a second thought if I hadn’t still been thinking about my recent conversation with artist Russell Perkins, whose latest project explores the aesthetics employed by the gambling industry and the human desire for instant gratification; and was my call to Bordeaux. In his cross-media practice, Perkins addresses the opacity of economic processes and financial activity by transforming it into perceptible form. Linking art and science and often channeling music, his projects have required collaborations with singers, musicians, sound engineers, forensic experts, participants in the financial market, and graphic designers.
The series of eight large-format prints (UV-ink and latex on PVC) entitled $1.5 Million, 100X $25K! or $25,000! $50,000! currently on view in Air de repos (Breathwork) at the CAPC, draws on the aesthetics and visual registers of scratch cards by the American lottery. Available in corner shops, gas stations and newsstands, these tickets promise an immediate win but are notorious for rapidly leading players, mostly from a working-class background, into gambling addiction. Over several months, Perkins analyzed hundreds of scratch card designs from state lotteries across the country and filtered out most frequently occurring images. Using this iconographic inventory, Perkins worked with a team of graphic designers to reconfigure the found material into new patterns, emphasizing the ecstatic, almost erotic moment the gambling industry creates to illustrate the event of winning – as “a kind of orgasmic explosion” (1) Perkins writes in the exhibition’s catalogue: inflated numbers, emoji-esque symbols of dollar signs, coins, stacks of bills, diamonds, cherries aggressively showering down from skies electrified by lightning and blazing flames. Made of latex, the top layer of the prints can be scraped off, just like in the real lottery tickets. The artist did so in certain parts of the prints in an expressive, almost painterly gesture, mimicking the player's frantic eagerness to reveal the potentially life changing result underneath. Rather than satirize, the works, quite literally, blow up the mirage on which the lottery is built and which it keeps feeding: Sudden windfall is promoted as realistic and achievable while the gambling industry’s strategies to draw profit from precarious economies or its impact on health remain blind spots.
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” (2)
If the scratch card works accentuate the Illusio(n) perpetuated by the gambling industry on a visual level, the multi-channel sound installation Resorts World transcription for recorded voices (2020) does so through sound. Legalized with the Reaganomics of the 1980s, the gambling industry has helped U.S. governments recoup lost tax revenue by becoming a popular national activity, with commercial casinos mushrooming across the country. For Resorts World transcription for recorded voices, exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York in 2021, Perkins recorded the acoustic environment of a casino in Queens and transcribed it into a musical score which was then interpreted by an eight-person vocal ensemble specialized in extended vocal technique. What is perceived as mere electronic noise in the casino – the relentless beeping and buzzing of slot machines – is translated into a musical composition, a nod to musique concrète field recordings, but then again retransferred into instrumental form through the human voice. Oscillating between buoyant, almost cheerful harmonies and abstract fragments, the sound piece sonically transports the casino’s sonic chaos into the exhibition space, highlighting its almost comical dimension; a temple of licensed illusion turned into an operetta. Printed on the same salmon-colored paper used by the Financial Times, the score to the sound piece revisits the casino’s function as a neoliberal microcosm and locus of risk-taking par excellence.
Elsewhere, sound also acts as a medium for transporting sites of financial speculation into the exhibition space: An earlier group exhibition at CAPC Bordeaux, Barbe à Papa (2022-23), featured the sound installation Conduit (2022), a real-time system driven by live data from the European Energy Exchange, to which the museum – located in a former warehouse and therefore itself a former trading platform – had subscribed for the exhibition's duration. The incoming live market data continuously modified a recording of sounds produced by Perkins' voice, shifting in tone with each fluctuation. Stripped of any friction and breathing pauses, the resulting stream became an endless sonic asymptote. As the live market data pulsed through the museum’s technical infrastructure, it transformed into a sonic presence, making fluctuations of financial capital perceptible. Hidden beneath a drop ceiling installed by the artist, the amplifying technology remained invisible, creating an acousmatic situation that emphasized the economic activity’s elusiveness and non-localizability.
The field of tension between certainty and uncertainty in which financial speculation operates relies on a very specific language to navigate risk and expectation. Safe Harbor (2023) is based on words commonly used in quarterly earnings calls by publicly traded U.S. companies. These conferences begin with a so-called Safe Harbor statement, in which CEOs acknowledge that future developments may differ from forecasts – and thus limit the company’s liability. In another form of aggregating and processing a huge amount of data, Perkins has taken common phrases and words from hundreds of these calls and reassembled them into a found language poem. In the resulting audio piece, performed by Lillian Paige Walton, the words are isolated from their meaning and randomly jumbled together. Developed in collaboration with graphic designers, the work also includes a series of prints that translate the poem into a graphic score in candlestick chart patterns as used in financial analysis. By mirroring the very tools that corporations use to manage financial uncertainty, in Safe Harbor Perkins once amplifies corporate language, pushing it to the point of absurdity. Reminiscent of concrete poetry, Safe Harbor suggests how corporate jargon sounds like some meaningless gobbledygook to those outside the corporate sector.
The video piece Static (2023) shifts the focus from economic to political spectacle. In collaboration with sound designer Charlie Culbert, Perkins combined found-footage snippets from U.S. electoral rallies, from the 1970s to recent times, with an audio recording of wind brushing through the leaves of a tree outside his bedroom window. Political alignments or precise historical context of the footage remains unclear; the rapid succession of granular, heavily zoomed-in images obscures any specifics: swirling confetti, waving flags, balloons, blurred crowds, clapping hands, raised fists, and show effects at times dissolve into almost total abstraction. The incongruence between image and sound creates a twofold white noise: semantically, as a failure of language and political speech is nothing but hot air; and visually, in that the at times unrecognizably pixelated images, together with the wooshing sound – a Lynchian caption would read: [continuous ominous wooshing] – are reminiscent of a CRT TV screen stuck on “snow”, when all signal is lost. The absence of language transforms the political rally, the vococentric event per se, into pure spectacle, stripping it of any meaning. Static expresses how political rhetoric – like financial lingo, used by only a few – ever so often thrives on noise and theatrics rather than real substance.
Perkins’ approach is critical, but without wagging a moral finger or tipping into satire. His criticism articulates in his very modus operandi: by closely observing the processes he is interested in – by slowing down, describing, and analyzing in detail – Perkins lays bare their underlying structures. Ultimately, this almost forensic act of deconstruction is the basis for the translations into tangible form: sound, music, image, or touch. And that, in turn, is where the poetic dimension of his practice lies. Perkins works explore the opacity and elusiveness on which financial speculation is built, nodding to French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts on the “illusion of economy” formulated in his writings in the Impossible Exchange (3). If Baudrillard argues that the economic transaction is based on illusion and loses itself into the void of speculation, Perkins spotlights this void and magnifies it.
I’d like to conclude on a more sensual note returning to Perkins’ scratch card prints at CAPC in Bordeaux: During the exhibition’s opening, visitors instinctively began scratching the works with coins, catching the museum team off guard. I found this moment telling, and – conservation concerns aside – strangely beautiful. In that instant, the tongue-in-cheek dimension of the works became even more pronounced. Even though the giant scratch cards don’t hide an immediate reward – they involuntarily became participatory works, triggering the desire for instant gratification, and, not least, proving irresistible.
(1) Russell Perkins in Air de repos (Breathwork) exhibition publication, December 2024.
(2) John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo”, in: Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover 1961, p. 3.
(3) Jean Baudrillard suggests that economic transactions, like all forms of exchange in contemporary society, are caught in a system of symbolic circulation in which objects, money, and even knowledge lose their referential meaning and are thus mere simulations. Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange [1999], Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, London/New York 2001.
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Russell Perkins (b. USA) is an artist who lives and works in London. Recent group and two-person exhibitions include Hyle2, Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen; The mole and the snake, Public Gallery, London; Air de repos (Breathwork), CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Ecstatic, Shmorévaz, Paris; Safe Harbor, Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld; 67ème Salon de Montrouge, Le Beffroi de Montrouge; Barbe à Papa, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
Sophie Huguenin is a writer based in Berlin.
