Being and Value

Zeus impregnates Danae with golden rain, who begat Perseus

Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907

"Thanks to the mysterious potential of my purse... we succeeded in overcoming time."

Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, 1814

So here's another one of Zeus's exploits and we're back once more to the subject of money, if it's not coming out of your ears already! In the myth depicted above, the mysterious power of money is yet again on display. Money, here in the form of gold coins, the measure of value and medium of exchange, becomes the instrument of exchange and insemination between god and mortal. Money overcomes, money creates, and as for the body, money gives pleasure.

There's a poetics to money, but often we're simply unaware of it, we tend to focus on larger social structures, institutions and systems instead of the way in which money or the money function is internalized by people. What is the interior life of money, does it pattern thought, and is there an existential dimension that we must be attuned to? This is why the image above and the myth portrayed are so powerful.

One dissonant feature among the showering gold coins is the black rectangle. Apparently, though I have not looked into this, Klimt used the rectangle in other paintings as well, and it connoted maleness. But there is a tangential quality to the symbol here in Danae. Why is it necessary? Doesn't the torrent of coins suffice as a symbol of male virility?

Answers to come...

But I need your help readers... If you're out there.

Ok, so I'll venture to guess that Klimt wanted his viewers or Danae's viewers as it were, to perceive in the form of a glaring, golden image, the homology of the Phallus and money. The connection between the two was old and new in Klimt's time. Let me explain... Klimt shared Vienna with Freud and Egon Schiele, and if you haven't seen his paintings, please look them up. It is my suspicion that Lacan was impressed by their works (but remember Lacan never pronounced the analogy between Money and the Phallus explicity*). Why the proposed connection between Lacan and Klimt and maybe the German Expressionists in general? While it is true that Klimt and Schiele did not depict headless women like the later Surrealists... Klimt and his crew were Viennese... and so was Freud, so why not? Incidentally, there's an article about the Lauder's, and the Neue Gallerie, and their paintings, in the Times today. 'Nough.

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*more on that issue soon!