The moneychanger or the new economy
"The Moneychanger or the new economy" takes the work by Marinus Van Reymerswaele and turns it into a bitmap image, exploring the determining economic factors and commercialism which typify the power structures created in and around the society of information.
As with his video pieces from the 90s, writes Óscar Fernández,"the e-works of Tete Álvarez deal with this aim of subverting the fetishised objectuality of the artistic, tending towards Paul Virilio's aesthetic of disappearance as a transcendental driving force for a chrono-political reconsideration of post-capitalist society. This disintegration of the work is revealed as a process of stripping down its geographical anchoring, its reified nature and its temporary territorialisation. As of this moment, the experience of art takes place in real time; its importance is no longer one of representation, testimony or simulation.
In returning "to the real", the artistic production of Tete Álvarez abandons the concept of Platonic "techné phantastiké", according to which "the technique of the artist, namely imitation, does not consist of "copying nature", but of "producing simulacra", not a resemblance of the real, but a difference"2 , guiding it towards a policy of occurrence considered from the same conditions of ubiquity, instantaneousness and immediacy which Paul Virilio describes as epiphanies of that absolute power of communication that has tyrannised informational society3 , yet transforming it into resistant aesthetic mechanisms.
Redefining the artistic in the same media channels of post-capitalist standardisation, questioning their mechanisms of feedback, Tete Álvarez moves on from his previous reflections on the televisual phenomenon as a "telepolitan" sublimation of the neo-imperialism of integrated Debordian spectacle and on the artificialism of feigned landscapes as a categorisation of the simulacrum, towards the explicitation of the new post-Ford economic dictatorships. This logical evolution from a criticism of spectacularised society to a more active strategy of control does not identify, however, with either the inoperativeness of the utopia of technological redemption or the specific practice of artistic intervention/integration in the public sphere, powerfully presented from new platforms of active resistance.
Instead, his discourse accepts the concept of "artistic creation on the net as a discovery of the latent operations that lie behind the exaltation of the intense detail peculiar to advertising and consumption"4 , conjecturing an indexical logical discourse, thrown together by a sense of the ironic and the playful, taking shape in indiscriminate visual/conceptual assemblies built on corporate images of multinationals responsible for the perverse yet vulnerable "global fortress" that has emerged from the darkest flip side of the cross-border utopia of Marshall McLuhan".