money and dreams. counting the last day of the sigmund freud money. rainer ganahl . das zählen der letzten tage der sigmund freud banknote

Das Zählen der letzen Tage der Sigmund Freud Banknote

Counting the last day of the Sigmund Freud money.

I started to record my dreams in the summer of 2001 after I saw a 50 Austrian Schilling (ATS) bill on a refrigerator at a party in Brooklyn. I was wondering about the decorative functions of Austrian money in the USA. I was told Sigmund Freud is depicted on it. This was a surprise to me, having used this money for so many years without being aware of its iconography. I soon learned that many fellow Austrians ignored this little fact as well. I found it peculiar and indicative of Freud’s writing itself. With the looming introduction of the new European currency, Austrian legal tender was doomed to disappear. During the remaining eight months that Freud’s paper image circulated in the hands, pockets, cash registries, and banks of Austrians,
I created this dream-artwork, which I entitled Das Zählen der letzten Tage der Sigmund Freud Banknote [The Counting of the Last Days of the Sigmund Freud Banknote].
For this work I tried to remember my dreams and write them down as quickly and accurately as I could, often at the “scene of the crime,” that is, in bed, sometimes shaken up by a nightmare.
After having written down the dream on the computer,
I checked the value of the 50 ATS bill on CNN’s online currency converter. Simultaneously, this online service gave conversions for a number of other currencies.
I complemented these listings with the economic data of two major US stock indexes, the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq. At that moment, I also checked how many books on Sigmund Freud were offered on Amazon.
com and on Buecher.de, a German equivalent to the US online bookseller.

In the period from July 1, 2001 to the end of February 2002, when the actual currency ceased circulation, I produced 144 works with dreams. Thought I mostly slept at night, sometimes I also fell asleep during the day and dreamt. Many works contain multiple dreams, since I quite often dream several times a night. I experienced myself as a serial dreamer.

rainer ganahl on this work: here: Who wants to know anyway ?

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here some short wods on this work by Amy Lien (from when this work was shown at Alex Zachary, Bloodflames III show, 2010)

Towards the entrance of the gallery is a dream narrative, a castration fantasy experienced by the artist Rainer Ganahl, involving the late gallerist Colin de Land. In the dream, de Land dives repeatedly at Ganahl’s testicles (Eier), causing Ganahl to scream, “Isn’t it enough that I fucking have to see you self-destroy yourself and now, you want to drag me down with you!” Hung here, the work summons a vertigo-inducing sense of displacement in Alex Zachary Gallery, a gallery space that appears to retain a hint of its own hedonistic-kinky past. Where are we again and what year is it? What is new? What is old? Who do I know?

The dream is part of Ganahl’s series Das Zahlen der letzten Tage der Sigmund Freud Banknote [Counting of the last days of the Sigmund Freud banknote], a body of work consisting of dreams he recorded between the August 2001 and February 2002, when the Austrian Schilling banknote was replaced by the Euro. The works consist of a typed out dream printed onto the same page that held Ganahl’s original scribbles he made immediately after experiencing the dream. To this page, a 50 ATS banknote (imprinted with the stern face of Sigmund Freud) was attached. Other information printed onto this page include of the value of the 50 Austrian Schilling (ATS) banknote, its converted value in relation to other major currencies, the stock index data for Dow Jones and Nasdaq, and the amount of books on Sigmund Freud that were offered on Amazon.com and Buecher.de at that same time. Ganahl took pains to transcribe his dreams as objectively as possible, and contextualized them occasionally with a few details relating to his waking life.

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MORE WRITING ON THIS WORK BY

Paul Mattick and Sylvère Lotringer - see below: