Marsch durch das Zinstief
2021/22
Digital offset printing on chromo board with partial UV varnish finishing
Signed
29 x 21 cm
Edition 22
Price
€ 160,– (incl. VAT., excl. shipping)
Order
versand@k-strich.de
Zeit ist Geld – Eine Schnecke ist eine Schnecke
2021
Signed
Digital print on blueback paper
84 x 49.5 cm
Unlimited edition
Price
€40,– per sheet
€200,– for the complete set (incl. VAT., excl. shipping)
Order
versand@k-strich.de
Time is Money – A Snail is a Snail
Luise Marchand observed snails as they dragged their bodies across notes and coins, climbing up the folds and stacks, while gingerly and yet full of curiosity stretching out their feelers. With their flat planes of light colour, the images she captured of these scenes remind the viewer of stock photography. Grouped under the didactic title Time is Money, the photographs of the snails in their landscape made of money could indeed serve as effective illustrations for advertisements or news reports. And yet the combination of snails and money is not quite as frictionless as one might initially presume; it actually creates all kinds of problems. Because it seems that each of the two elements develops a number of characteristics that only become apparent in their unlikely encounter. Perhaps it could be compared to that sensation in your mouth when you eat a soft-boiled egg with a silver spoon. Each in their own right, snails and money are acceptable. We are used to thinking of their origins in nature or civilization as separate. Luise Marchand’s snails drag themselves across notes and coins as they usually would across grass and fallen fruit. That this warm and slimy act of contact, ultimately a touch that devours, is being performed with agents of the market economy – of all things – makes it into something sexual with an unsettling effect. Notes and coins are anal objects. The cultural practice from which they originate is based on the moral values of work ethic and frugality. People cling to notes and coins, they hoard them, even after the digital age has brought about the dissolution of their paper and metal forms. Notes and coins indeed do not belong to a snail’s natural environment, nor do they belong to the part of everyday human life in which snails are interested in. As the clearly most primary natural element in the images, the snails creep across the most mediated (or estranged) part of a culture.