MONEY

Jochen HÖLLER – „Money“ The young, Lower Austrian artist Jochen HÖLLER (*1977) extracts, interprets and systemizes the complexity and essence of elemental themes from society, technology, religion and culture. After finishing his studies in sculpture HÖLLER turned his focus completely to work with paper. Underlying his paper works is a classification system – he plays with conventional notions of order and information transfer, he questions the comfortable habit of consuming information in a ready-made form and takes advantage of an active use of cultural artifacts.

In his second solo exhibition at Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna titled „Money“, Jochen HÖLLER brought together over 50 books on the subject of money from various disciplines such as economics, economic theory, money theory, fiction, philosophy, sociology, self-help literature, etc. in order to artistically deal with the topic using their contents.

Jochen HÖLLER paraphrases the meaning of money and the perpetual motion of our society, as follows: „Money is a means of exchange, means of payment or some even say it is a value holder. Money makes you happy, it makes you sexy, it gives power – money brings freedom and independence, money solves problems, has many faces and characteristics – money moves the world!

Already as a child the differences between rich and poor is read in fairy tales. It is the guiding principle of our society! We want to have a lot of it, and above all, we always want more! However, only the belief in its value lends money its status!“

The central work of the exhibition, „The Money Centrifuge“, attempts to understand money, in order to make money from knowledge on the subject. For this sculpture 32 books about money from all areas were consulted in order to filter out the most important information from a total of 10,865 pages. This object presents a sort of centrifuge out of which the central information is extracted and deposited on the underside of the sculpture through a funnel. The extract is a pile of money (ca. 26,000 words).

Literature: John Maynard Keynes „Vom Gelde“, Ludwig von Mises „The Theory of Money and Credit“, Heinz Hoswig „Das Geld“, Emile Zola „Das Geld“, Joseph Schumpeter
„Konjunkturtheorie“, Georg Simmel „Philosophie des Geldes“, Martin Felix „Geld – Die wahre Geschichte“, Felix Denise „How to Get Rich“, John Steinbeck „Geld bringt Geld“, Hero Möller „Die Lehre vom Gelde“, Friedrich August von Hayek “Production and Prices”, Paul Sulitzer “Money”, Jean Paul Getty “Wie wird man reich”, Andre Kostolany “Die Kunst über Geld nachzudenken”, Wolfgang Fienhold “Geld machen, aber richtig!”, Wallace D. Wattles „Die Wissenschaft des Reich werdens“, etc.