A World in Miniature

Rye Holmboe

In 2021, Meta collaborated with the Jožef Stefan Institute of Ljubljana, Slovenia, to create an “imaginary mine”. Her interest was in gold, specifically the vast amount of energy required for its extraction. “For just 6 grams of gold”, she explained, “more than a ton of ore needs to be mined, not to mention the workforce, water consumption and chemicals.” Gold is used in everyday objects – smartphones, computers, calculators, televisions, printers – because of its qualities as a conductor and resistance to corrosion. It is estimated that high-tech manufacturing uses 320 tons of gold each year, with less than 15% of it recycled. 

At first the idea was to find 6 grams of gold in environments like rivers, or even dumps, but Meta discovered that it was easier, but by no means easy, to extract gold from technological goods. Smartphones, for instance, contain on average 24 milligrams of gold. “In America, they discard about 461,000 phones a day, which is almost 10 kilograms of gold per day and about 3.5 tons all year round.” The Head of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Technology, Dr Gašper Tavčar, explained how labour intensive the process was going to be. The chemical treatment required to destroy plastics and unwanted metals from phones would cost more than the value it produced; it was cheaper to buy the gold. Meta wanted to make a 6 millimetre gold ball. This would require 1000 phones, which would be too time consuming and costly, so she reduced the number of phones to 200. The gold ball would still measure 6 millimetres, but it would need hollowing out.

The relationship between making and unmaking underpins much of Meta’s work. Timekeepers (2015), for example, is an hourglass that appears to make time stand still, the grains of sand flowing in both directions at once – or so it would seem. I remember seeing the work for the first time in Spoleto, Italy, where Meta was a resident at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios. Its movements were entrancing, the illusion produced through the use of a concave mirror. In another work, Pendulum (2013–2019), a long pendulum connected to a motor swings across the corner of a gallery space, smashing into one side of the wall. The work marks time and space, and makes it difficult to distinguish a creative process from a destructive one. Meanwhile, in Escapement_Experiment No. 3 (2013–2019), Meta attached fine black threads to a monstera plant. These were connected, via a pully system, to a number of different instruments associated with art and construction: a set square, a colour wheel, and hammers suspended over mirrors, at least one of which fell during the show, smashing into its own reflection (to be precise, a thin copper wire attached to one of the threads touched a battery and the current burned the threads on which the hammers hung). The monstera’s movements produced a kind of automatic drawing. When the Surrealists developed exercises in automatism, it was to mobilise the Freudian unconscious. In Escapement_Experiment No. 3, lines are produced by the almost imperceptible movements of a plant, bringing to mind ecology and its relationship to the creative process – nature’s drawing, perhaps, or what Meta calls a “plant drive”.

Meta’s imaginary gold mine examines similar issues but is more concerned with the capitalist mode of production – the drive of money – and the enormous amount of waste that underpins our everyday lives. The extraction of gold requires vast resources and the exploitation of cheap labour – often child labour. Mining companies dump 180 million tons of waste into rivers, lakes and oceans each year. One report estimates that 20 tons of toxic waste is produced for every gold wedding ring. In her imaginary mine, Meta comes at the element from the opposite side of the process. A film called Scraping for Gold (2021) shows a number of chemical reactions performed by a technician at the Jožef Stefan Institute, which were required to extract the precious metal and produce A Grain of Gold (2021), displayed on the fingertip of a prosthetic hand. Over the course of several days, a phone was immersed first in sulphuric acid, then in nitric acid, then in hydrochloric acid, with different solutions used to purify the result. The film’s narrator describes the long and arduous process, which led to the recovery of very little: a millimetre of gold. The ambivalence at the heart of Meta’s project is pronounced, not least because the materials it requires and its products are not imaginary but real. As Scraping for Gold demonstrates, A Grain of Gold required operations nearly as wasteful as those originally used to extract the precious metal. Meta’s project is as concerned with loss, with the squandering of resources, as it is with restoration. 

The French dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille coined the expression “non-productive expenditure” to describe these types of operations. Bataille based his concept on the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his understanding of potlatch, a practice encountered in certain Native American tribes. Potlatch names a tradition of gift-giving that requires an even greater gift in return. If you give me something of value, I will give you something of even greater value, and the exchange continues until one of us goes bust. “It is a competition”, wrote Mauss, “to see who is the richest and also the most madly extravagant”. Participants sometimes gifted all they had; opponents were made destitute because they could no longer reciprocate. Potlatch is a form of exchange driven and motivated by what Bataille called “limitless loss”. It carries within itself the germs of catastrophe and mass destruction. For Bataille, non-productive expenditure could also describe other activities that have no end beyond themselves: “luxury, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexuality (i.e. deflected from genital finality)”. 

As in a game of potlatch, the world in miniature Meta has created in this exhibition exacerbates conditions under which we already exist. Displayed near A Grain of Gold is Human Hamster Wheel and Work (2021), a human-sized hamster wheel connected to a mechanical hand, beautifully made in brass and plaster. Meta has asked the gallery attendant to walk inside the wheel. While doing so, he or she will describe how phones were disassembled and the gold recovered. Every thirty metres the wheel turns, the word “work” is written by the mechanical hand. Meanwhile, Statement A (2018–2020) is a typewriter powered by custom-made pneumatic cylinders Meta made with an engineer. The mechanics are complex and include 180 metres of wire carefully wound by hand around 25 metres of tubing. These are connected to 31 electromagnetic valves, relays, software pins and an air compressor, which powers the entire sculpture. The typewriter counts down from a ton (one million grams of ore) to a gram (of gold), typing out the numbers in words: “one million grams, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine grams, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight grams…” When the typewriter gets stuck, runs out of ink or paper, the gallery attendant resets it and the process starts from the beginning: “From a ton to a gram, I was wrong again”. The effect is frustrating, maddening, wasteful, with no end beyond itself.

Reminiscent of Dada and the work of Jean Tinguely, Human Hamster Wheel and Work and Statement A develop Meta’s interest in protheses and automation. (Meta sees herself less as an artist and more as an engineer.) The works also parody and critique social relations in capitalism. Karl Marx wrote some of his best pages when trying to describe the uncanny logic of capital and the ways in which the social character of labour attains an objective character in the value form. What he called the fetish character of the commodity stems from the belief that value inheres in things themselves, rather than in social relations. Things thus attain the status of people while people are reified, that is to say, reduced to mere things whose sole purpose is to reproduce capital. In a famous passage from the first volume of Capital (1867), Marx described how, once it stepped forth as a commodity, an ordinary thing such as a table started to dance, as if it were a living, mystical thing, or indeed a personage. He described the world of commodities as “an enchanted, perverted, topsy turvy world in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.” The personages of capital are also the protagonists of Meta’s kinetic world, where humans and machines, people and things, enter into a zone of indistinction.

There are tensions here that remind me, unexpectedly, of the work of Santiago Sierra. Known for his controversial installations, Sierra has made labourers perform useless tasks inside galleries, like Meta does in Human Hamster Wheel and Work, and indeed in the processes that led to A Grain of Gold. Workers were asked to sit inside cardboard boxes all day, to have their hair dyed blond, even have their skins tattooed, irrevocably, with the aim of revealing the power relations that structure capitalism and indeed the contemporary art world. Sometimes Sierra engages with questions of ecology, as in Four Black Vehicles With The Engine Running Inside An Art Gallery (2007), where cars were left running inside a gallery until the space was filled with noxious fumes. The installation can be understood as a critique of the car manufacturing industry and the pollution it produces, but Sierra, of course, is using cars to pollute himself. Likewise, when he comments on the exploitation of labour, he exploits labour in order to do so. 

These are some of the dialectics at the heart of Meta’s exhibition. It is difficult not to wonder what a gallery attendant in a hamster wheel might feel like as he or she is turned into a spectacle, a human zoo, for our consumption. The installation was anticipated by an earlier work called Joule Thieves (2019), where a mouse turned a wheel that powered a lightbulb. A joule thief is a self-oscillating voltage booster, but the work’s title seems to pun on joule/jewel and the word thief, suggesting that the energy produced by the mouse was being stolen, the mouse reified, turned into a thing. When Joule Thieves was first installed, it was presented near a large and handsome drawing of an elephant in 104 parts, An Elephant in the Room (2019). The joke, of course, is that elephants are supposed to be scared of mice, which apparently isn’t true. The elephant could stand for anything that we repress, individually or collectively, but lies in plain sight. To my mind, the works are most accurately seen as humorous comments on the reification of nature and the creative process, the price we pay for the lives we lead. In Human Hamster Wheel and Work things are taken much further. The mouse is replaced by a human, a gallery attendant who labours pointlessly for a basic wage. The elephants in the room, so to speak, are surely the exploitation of labour and non-productive expenditures that underpin and sustain the capitalist mode of production, of which the art world and art making form a part. Meta parodies the actual conditions and forces that shape this world: mechanical reproduction and the drive of money. Yet, as with any parody – and this is where Sierra comes to mind – she is caught in a double bind: parody distorts and exaggerates, but it also repeats. This makes it difficult to differentiate symptom from cause, the critical from the collusive.

Which raises a number of questions. Do the works included in this exhibition advocate change, or do they offer a repetition of the status quo, confirming and reconstituting reality as if in a dark mirror? What kind of spectator is implied? Intelligent or stupefied? Illusioned or disillusioned? Will the gallery attendant qua mouse stop working, demand change, a different kind of revolution, or will the wheel keep turning, irrespective of what the attendant knows about his or her condition and the mechanisms of domination? What role does the spectator play in this? Does the exhibition provide us with a critical meta-language, or does it suggest that art is nothing but a degraded version of reality, condemned to repeat and intensify, as in a potlatch, what in any case already exists? Is art predicated on infinite loss? And, finally, does Meta’s authorial position as dramaturge morally supersede what takes place in the exhibition, or is there a hopeless and maybe cynical acceptance that this position is compromised and wholly implicated in the system it sets out to critique? If it is, then who benefits? These are difficult and urgent questions, residing as they do at the intersection of the aesthetic, the economic, and the political. It is the virtue of Meta’s show that they are asked without being answered.