Monetary Anxieties.
Quirky is exactly what describes artist Andrew Hurle in his lecture given on the 12th of March. Layered amoungst his history lecture on money, and the place it had in Australian and worldwide society, lies deeper connotations of how people are enslaved by the value given to mere sheets of paper in later forms of currency.
He mainly focused on print, the medium he is currently researching, and his current main body of work revolves around banks, and the power they held. He was particularly interested in the tin replica’s the Commonwealth Bank gave out and how it tied the kids into a long life relationship with the Commonwealth Bank.
In a slightly disjointed manner, he moved onto describe the way in which paper money and the production of it, went about. I thought his lecture was factually interesting, especially in the portions where he noted there were many forms of US bank notes before any sort of official production of banknotes began, how any person could produce banknotes with a printing press.
Aside from the facts, his ideas about money were things I had already learnt in history and high school economics and provided no new takes on how money worked. His lecture was disjointed to some extent and left me wondering if it was a history lecture or the explanation of money and its history as an art form.
