About The Dollar Ribbon by Nili Lerner
In the last few months, the world’s economy crash compelled me to make a point about a strong held idea regarding free market capitalism. The dollar ribbon, which I created, represents these ideas which in essence imply that our ability to work and our social stability drives the dollar value up or down.
In most basic economic theories, demand and supply drives the market price up or down and free market is the market that runs by that rule. Only that demand and supply both are driven and tightly connected to people’s social condition. Every product traded on the market is in it self a product of knowledge and organization. Nothing can be produced or trade with out these two functions. On the demand side it is even more apparent. You need people who demand the product, even a basic product, and are able to acquire it. Adding growth, which is the corner stone of Wall Street, to that basic equation of supply and demand, gives us a very interesting solution:
The model of American capitalism powered by the stock exchange market is based on a growing, organized, healthy, and educated population. When the rich get richer but the gap between poor and rich get bigger, it can appear as growth for a short while but it eventually collapses. The equation of free market must include the gap as a variable, and its effect on the market equation is exponential.
These crucial social indicators are missing from our current system that evaluates assets. And most tragically many components that contribute to increase the social strength of a company like fair wages and health care insurance are not represented on a company’s balance sheet as assets.
Our free market, growth driven, capitalism that failed to include the social aspect as assets created a support system to keep it alive. We put the government in charge of it, and we call it social services, education, infrastructure investment, ext. But this was not enough to actually support our growing wealth. We had to use more of our profit to minimize the gap so we came up with non-for-profit org. Non-for-profit org are not really an act of pure good will. This is not charity for the sake of others. Non-for-profit is the best strategy of our blind capitalism to secure its statues.
The dollar ribbon represents how essential is our social strength to the health of the free market organism. And being formed into a ribbon give the dollar its real value – work.
About Nili Lerner’s Art
In my recent works, the dollar ribbon made out of an actual dollar, and the unemployment tie which, combines rope and tie into a tie noose, I use the process of deconstructing a concept that is expressed in a tangible form, analyzing it and than rebuilding it in different configurations. The finished product is a new product. The new configurations, which make use of the same materials and forms associated with different paradigms, bring about the synthesis of a new optional reality.
The materials and the forms, which I used in my previous works also usually, have strong associations with specific functions, but are being manipulated in different configurations. I weaved strips of my child drawing’s Xerox through picture wires nailed to a wall recreating her work through my work. I covered a Xerox print out with single stitches over each letter of her name characters, which makes the paper appear as an unidentified material to the viewer eye, I shaped my daughter’s dark hair locks into neat ,one inch in diameter, circles and embroider them, as a line of circles on a white, four feet long piece of industrial lace which I found in my mother’s closet after she past away. I bring my children into my artwork using visuals other than their own image as the construction materials; to over- come the resentment to ones- own -children subject matter. This allows me to reintroduce this “family-picture-album” part of my life as a matter worthy of my own artist’s attention as well as the public, opening a door to the viewer to reconsider their own preconceptions.
About Nili Lerner
I am an artist. I live, work and raise my children in NYC. Making art is my way to learn and change, to get exited and motivated. Becoming an artist was never a choice I made, but rather a force stronger than my will. I was born in Israel to holocaust survivors, which pioneered a kibbutz in hope of creating a better and just world. Growing up in a community, which puts social justice above all, plays a grate roll in my worldviews, while experiencing the evolution of utopian ideas implemented in real life environment gave me the opportunity to develop a critical understanding of that process. Having lived in NYC, the capital metropolis of capitalism, may seem as an act of turning my back to these social principals, but the basics of any social justice can be practice at every step of the way where ever one choose to live. It is an individual responsibility to be assumed by each of us at any time in every location and every position we hold.
