LG Williams Tells Chinese US Concerned About The Deficits
This press release turns the U.S. deficit crisis into a drunken airport-and-Chinatown diplomatic mission. Williams reassures China about American fiscal discipline while speaking to tourists, janitors, homeless Chinese, and pigeons, thereby reducing global finance to a humiliating theater of language, debt, and performance. The piece savages official economic rhetoric--the promises to unwind extraordinary measures, restore discipline, and avert collapse--by placing it in the mouth of an under-employed artist stranded in Honolulu with vitamins and no ticket. Its surreal stupidity is exact: the greater the scale of the financial crisis, the more absurd the language of reassurance becomes. Williams's China speech is thus both parody and diagnosis, a global stimulus plan conducted through broken credibility, tap dancing, and birds.
- DATE:
- June 2, 2009
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Martin Banger; Hu Jintao; Wen Jiabao; Ben Bernanke; Barack Obama
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Honolulu International Airport; Honolulu Chinatown; Federal Reserve; China; U.S. government
- KEYWORDS:
- deficit crisis as drunken diplomacy; airport and Chinatown as geopolitical stage; global finance reduced to humiliation; tap dancing and broken credibility; stimulus plan through performance; debt reassurance as farce