Five Star and Junk Status: Jacki McInes

Jacki McInnes
Five Star
Decommissioned South African bank notes shredded for recycling by South African Reserve Bank, cold glue, glass
2019




Jacki McInnes
Junk Status
Decommissioned South African bank notes shredded for recycling by South African Reserve Bank, cold glue, glass



Overview:  Composed of shredded South African currency notes, Fire Star consists of three five pointed stars, each star a different color.  The companion work, Junk Status, composed of the same material, consists of  four Xs, each a different color .  The three stars are arranged in a row, abote the row of the four Xs.




Artist's Statement:   I am currently working with decommissioned South African banknotes, which are shredded for disposal by the South African Reserve Bank. This material holds great potential for metaphor and is especially relevant in the current Covid 19 scenario with regards to the falling value of our currency, wealth, poverty and waste in South Africa. The works question the extremely high levels of inequality and unemployment in our country, while alluding to informal recycling in the City of Johannesburg as a survival strategy of the City's unemployed and poor.

Please note that I have official permission to access and use this material from the Head of the Currency & Integrity Division at the South African Reserve Bank.

Mark Auslander: South Africa's rand (ZAR) has been reckoned as the weakest in the world against the US dollar. Long term challenges over declining mineral commodity exports and low investor confidence have been further compromised by the mass global selling off of risky assets during the global pandemic crisis and associated economic downturn. The Lockdown, as the artist notes, has had a disproportionate impact on South Africa's poor. Their increasingly desperate predicament is chronicled brilliantly in Themba Khumalo's Waiting for Food Parcels, also showcased in the TLC Extension Collection.

Unlike hunger and material privations, the vicissitudes of the global financial system are highly opaque to most of us, and this is the context of McInnes' work: how to make visible the largely impenetrable dynamics of international currency exchanges?  Her decommissioned, shredded banknotes juxtapose two shapes, which I presume foreground the high-water and low-water marks of South Africa's currency valuations.  One associates the shape of the star with the famed diamond the Star of South Africa, the enormous gem which inspired the South African diamond rush, and heralded the staggering fortunes generated by the Kimberly diamond fields and later the gold mines around the Rand. The diamond inspired the Order of the Star of South Africa, a set of military and civilian decorations, now discontinued, that were associated with the Apartheid regime.  During the period that the Order of the Star was in operation,  the rand, backed by substantial mineral exports, was relatively robust.

In contrast, the rand's vastly declined value is signaled by McInnes' four Xs, giving material form to the annihilation of previous relative economic competiveness. Like a line of Xs in a tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) game, this row seems to mark the end of the game, the definitive loss of the struggle. All previous wealth has been cancelled out; to hammer home the point, the new crosses outnumber the old stars.  X marks the spot, no longer on a treasure map but on a chart or account ledger of loss after loss.  As the artist notes, scavenging and informal recycling by Johannesburg's urban poor is a desperate survival strategy in the current context.

Gazing at these stars and crosses, I am reminded of Karl Marx's famous meditations on the commodity fetish.  Marx notes in Capital (Volume 1) that all commodities, including diamonds and gold, make a mystified claim to having thier value being intrinsic to themselves reflecting objectively the assessment of its worth on the open market. Even the commodity of currency presents itself as having value in and of itself. Yet, Marx argues, this is illusory: the ultimate value of any commodity is in fact generated by the under-recognized value of labor, embedded into these objects through work, for which the laborer is systematically underpaid by capitalist overlords. For over a century and a half, the staggering wealth generated by South African mineral industries was not so much extracted from underground per se as from the backbreaking labor by millions of southern African workers, overwhelmingly black, whose bodies,  health and communities of origin were violently compromised by the mines and allied systems of social engineering.  The story of the fabled Star of South Africa diamond,  for which the Griqua shepherd boy who discovered it was paid only a pittance, is in that sense anticipatory of the generations of exploited black South Africa whose under-valued labor built the national patrimony.

This I take to be the most poignant aspect of this assemblage of shredded bank notes: whether at times of enormous national wealth or impoverishment, the ultimate source of the valuation of the currency has in fact always been the shredding of the bodies, health, and dignity of black South African workers, who for generations were ground up and spit out by the world of the mines. The story of South Africa's economic rise and fall is at heart the story of under-compensated African labor, a set of historical conditions that lay the groundwork for the current public health crisis, in which the poor in the nation's townships and rural areas are especially vulnerable to the ravages of the novel coronavirus

In this sense, I take it as appropriate that the artist has placed the line of crosses underneath the shorter line of stars. The old wealth of the white minority in the Apartheid system rested atop the black laboring majority. The line of crosses might be read as grave markers, for those who lost their lives underground, from mining-derived tuberculosis, and now, from the co-morbidities shaped by seemingly intractable urban and rural poverty.

Having said that, I would like to read in the work a final note of hope, even at this moment of economic despair. The five pointed colorful stars might allude ato the various species of multicolored starfish or sea stars found along the South African coast. These remarkable creatures are known for their capacity to recover from trauma, regenerating a severed arm over time. And, so, I can't help but wonder:  might the arm missing from each of McInnes' four-armed crosses, composed of shredded hopes and dreams, be someday regenerated, returning the currency and the nation to the financially secure five armed star of  yesteryear--free of Apartheid's curses and founded, at long last, on a recognition of the universal dignity of labor?

For more information:

www.artistproofstudio.co.za
 https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/extension-collection

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