Golden Age; On the contemporary agency of gold

I propose a theoretical and practice-based research project examining the changing role of gold since the departure of the major world economies from the international gold standard, tracing the implications of this shift for its agency as a material within contemporary art.
Via an examination of the use of gold in recent visual and material culture histories and an economic analysis of its changing status, I intend to reinterpret its agency as an art material. After Nixon removed the dollar from the international gold standard in 1971, gold lost its role as a standardising agent, marking a shift away from Marx's theories involving gold as the ultimate money-commodity towards what John Maynard Keynes called money's link to the future - in other words speculation.
References to gold in visual and material culture have often emphasised its status as a repository for standardised (economic) value. By analysing the contemporary role of gold in the post-1971 context of our globalised neoliberal economy I aim to delineate a different and more nuanced articulation of gold as a material for contemporary art. Alongside this in-depth research, my creative art practice will supplement these studies by focusing on the process of electroplating, whereby a micron thick layer of gold is deposited onto a metallic substrate. The film and installation works produced will test theories and concepts emerging in the research, utilising this alchemic reaction to re-articulate the position of gold
within contemporary art.
In summary, the project is grounded in detailed research into the unique materiality of gold and its historical, economic and symbolic roles in recent art history and culture, and will offer new analysis of economic, anthropological, art theory and psychoanalytic texts and theories referring to gold's agency complemented by creative art practice interrogating this position further.