Over the past several years, Joe Scanlan has read a lot of seminal economic texts and noticed that a strange thing kept happening: where the original authors were talking about absentee ownership, stagnating markets, colonialism and government subsidies, in the artist’s head he heard them talking about artists’ neighborhoods, Chelsea galleries, tae kwon do lessons, Jack Kerouac. Fascinated with these recurrent, uncontrollable synapses, Scanlan rewrote the texts as he heard them in his head and color-coded each alteration. Produced for his exhibition at castillo/corrales in May 2009, Joe Scanlan’s Red Flags contains four essays that the artist has refracted from original texts by Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman and Edward Said, gathered in a slim, elegant book.
CBA