The financial services industry employs language as a tactical device to lend its activities the appearance of complexity and ethical legitimacy while also creating an aura of linguistic impenetrability. As has been discussed by writers such as France Moretti and Dominique Pestre, this apparently benign “bankspeak” can also be used to obfuscate what are arguably much more nefarious economic agendas. ‘Confidence Games’ is a painting that takes the form of a flowchart of such terms. A series of two-word financial phrases have been sourced from research into the industry and are connected together to create an abstract map of this particular linguistic strategy. The diagrammatic work also takes inspiration from the ornate and laboriously-researched drawings of artist Mark Lombardi. However, unlike Lombardi’s work, ‘Confidence Games’ draws out notional and tenuous relationships between these insidious phrases in a much more speculative fashion, in order to express a sense that this wordplay can have inscrutable effects on our day-to-day lives. At the same time, the organizational logic of the flowchart collapses under this same scrutiny to call into question the stability of how financial systems use language. As a work of creative research, this outcome expands the potential of using language and painting to metaphorically reflect on ideas of instability and precarity found in the contemporary economic experience.
Moretti, F. and Pestre, D. (2015). Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank Reports. New Left Review, [online] 92, pp.75-99.
Available at: https://newleftreview.org/II/92/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak