DESIGN A MONSTRANCE, AND THEN DESIGN A MOUSTACHE.

EVERYONE IS GUILTY (REVERSE KREBS CYCLE MONSTRANCE vs MILTON FRIEDMAN)

Carl Gent.
2009.
www.carlgent.com
carl@carlgent.com

Design a monstrance, and then design a moustache.

Research undertaken by Marcelo Guzman, Scot Martin and X.V. Zhang has indicated that the primary mineral zinc is extracted from, sphalerite (ZnS), may have been the key catalyst ingredient in creating important organic molecules on an early prebiotic Earth.

In Everyone Is Guilty I have taken a lump of sphalerite and placed it in the centre of a monstrance made of zinc. Sphalerite has replaced the Sacred Host (the Body of Christ) and the monstrance is emblazoned with the chemistry of the reverse Krebs cycle. The base of the monstrance takes the appearance of a spacetime-diagrammatic representation of the event horizon of a black hole – the complete unknowability, beyond death, where the universe warps into an infinite world outside of physics, the contemporary equivalent to Burke’s sublimity – the unviewable void of a law outside of our law. This warping leads up towards the centre of the monstrance and the appearance of the sphalerite. What does this speak of?

We are confronted with a predominantly Catholic item of devotion – the vessel that can offer forgiveness and traditionally holds the literal Body of Jesus/God. In the absence of God we have been presented with the mundane appearance of a rock and a meaningless equation. Are we to consider these items any less ecstatic than the concept or presence of a divine being? Is the cosmic accident of organic life or sentience any less sublime than the belief in a divine preordained consciousness? If this mineral has been identified as one of the most likely candidates for creating that “divine spark” from which Life on Earth began, how are we to pay our respects? And what happens to scientific enquiry and rigour if it is granted the status of religion?

One hypothesis is that it becomes corrupted. As soon as scientific theory, enquiry and fact are given the virtue of faith it loses its rigour and becomes another authoritarian belief structure with its own codes and absolutist vision. We can learn that utopias are dangerous as they cannot exist alongside or even abide other ideas.

Facing the monstrance at an oblique angle a photograph of economic theorist Milton Friedman is hung. On the back of the photograph photocopies of Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Guzman, Martin and Zhang’s sphalerite research are pasted. Friedman was the father of the free-market model of world economics and whose theories and actions can be said to have directly re-structured a large portion of the world’s economies. Friedman’s theories advocate a deregulated market where economics are treated as a pure science that will find their own equilibrium if the controlling factors of minimum wages, international borders and inflation controls are abolished. In practise Friedman’s measures required brutality and shock-based tactics in order to install these radical measures without complaint and have directly increased persistent poverty, unemployment, war, torture across the world whilst widening the gulf between rich and poor ever further.

Friedman was an idealist – a fundamentalist with a utopian view of world economics that sought to create a pure world system with an almost religious fervour. We can see that an unwavering belief in a world-system is a dangerous thing but if contemporary, non-creationist thinking is not defended with the sublimity afforded to alternative belief structures, how can it be accredited as a plausible, and more importantly, an exciting alternative?

In Everyone Is Guilty we are presented with a conflict. The monstrance, as the signifier of a quasi-religious devotion to the changeable laws of biological existence on Earth faces the utopian absolutist presence of Friedman who has acted directly for and against humanity, causing death and destruction in the name of a pure scientific or economic “greater good”. This fundamentalism can be analysed using Terry Eagleton’s ideas around the fundamentalist’s fear of death as opposed to a healthy awareness and use of biological finitude which can be seen as being represented by the monstrance’s presentation of a simple mineral as the origin of life on Earth.

Friedman’s execution of his goals and advocacy of the brutal methods required to activate them must have been actions taken with no sense of guilt. In a society without the threat of Hell and with the endorsement of a belief structure, a human being can do horrendous things. Presented within a world poised upon the brink of environmental apocalypse I cannot help but feel we have betrayed sphalerite and the glorious outcome of cosmic consequence that created the mineral and biological diversity upon this planet. Knowingly we continue to destroy the world and how can we deal with this New Guilt? Without a saviour waiting for us in the monstrance to forgive us our sins we instead must deal with the world we are given in this life, not within the possible eternity of an afterlife.