The Nation Is Bankrupt: Lecture Performance
"You are Jamie Dimon and your perfect wife has left you. Your perfect daughter won't return your phone calls. Your economy is collapsing."
The Nation Is Bankrupt is a solo multimedia lecture performance that tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis through the semi-fictional love letters of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. The performance presents a more libidinal version of the events of one seminal weekend of the crisis in September of 2008, and the decade of cynicism and hypocrisy that followed the decisions made that weekend.
The letters in the performance are a cry in the dark from the insular world of high finance that continue to bring us all to the brink of financial, physical and moral ruin. As the crisis unfolds, with free market ideology teetering at the edge of oblivion, Dimon has time to reflect on the roots of his brand of capitalism — sparked from enlightenment ideals, bent to justify colonial rule and maligned beyond recognition by present day machine run markets.
The performance blurs the line between subject and performer. As the Jamie Dimon onstage wrestles with the abstractions in his life, the composed tone of the performance unhinges. The abstractions of the economy have begun to unravel and are having disastrous effects in real life and on his identity. At the same time, the abstracted distance from which Dimon has lived his personal life and formed his opinions of the world is also collapsing. As his world implodes, a white man in a suit, confidently assured of his place at the center of attention, begins to unwind.
"I fear that my actions have started an inevitable downfall; financial, moral and physical"
Video Excerpt: Introduction
Live Performance Excerpt: Letter To Lover #1
Performed at Kresge Theatre, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, November 2016.
Live Performance excerpt: Letter to Daughter Julia
Live Performance (Full) Dixon Place, NYC August 2015
Performance Details
Technical Details:
Performer: Nathaniel Sullivan, single performer
Running Time: 45 minutes - 1 hour (variable)
Visuals: projector and wall or screen. Video feed run from Quicktime on laptop.
Sound: One microphone (either handheld or clip on), PA system running sound from laptop and mixing with vocals.
Room: Dimensions very adaptable; I have performed this piece in theatrical settings for 125 people and in smaller gallery spaces with folding chairs set up for 20. Either set up works.
Performance History:
Maine College of Art, Portland, ME
IPPE Conference, Lille, France
May Day Rooms, London, England
Nieuwland, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ
SLA307, New York, NY
IPPE Conference, Berlin, Germany
Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
Kresge Theatre, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Performancy Forum, Brooklyn, NY
Dixon Place, New York, NY
Prelude Festival, New York, NY
Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn, NY
Spark!, Syracuse, NY
Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Brooklyn NY
Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, NY
Performance flyer, November 2016
Detailed Performance Summary
While being held at the Federal Reserve, Jamie Dimon writes letters to lovers, family and colleagues. He gives a blow by blow account of a seminal weekend in the financial crisis, a precipice for the neoliberal order.
On Saturday morning, Dimon writes a much younger lover and compares the CEOs of America's largest banks to high school archetypes.
"The Stoner", John Thain from Merrill Lynch
Next, he writes to his daughter expressing his concern that the neoliberal order might be over. The market has become machine run. He feels his world slipping away, his loss self engineered.
On Saturday evening, Dimon writes a co-worker / lover and tries to come up with a metaphor to describe capitalism. Is it the skyscraper? Evolution? He concludes that the enduring metaphor for capital in the 21st century is masturbation.
"What about evolution? We speak of markets as rational, self correcting."
Willing to face his fears, Jamie writes a love letter to an algorithm. He tries to relate to a money making machine that he loves, but ultimately one who doesn't have a body and operates outside of perceptible time. In the middle of the night, Dimon gives in to an onanistic impulse. He descends into madness, a personal hell that is being actualized in the futures markets.
"You are terrifying. You are 24/7 capitalism. You are capitalism in its purest form...without humans"
After a wretched night, Jamie Dimon wants to come home. In a bid for a second chance, he runs his love for his wife through a risk pricing model. He insists that he did not have sex with their maid.
"I fear that my action will begin the inevitable downfall; financial, moral, physical."
In the next instant, Dimon writes the maid, lusting after her. He wonders about the notion of privilege that all the college kids are talking about. What the hell is white privilege supposed to be? He's Greek. He compares their love to his newly acquired Gauguin paintings.
"The paintings make me think of our love, the way I look at you like a foreign creature in my bed"
Early Monday morning, the dust settles. There is a bailout in the works. Everything is going to be fine for Jamie Dimon and men like him. The bailout means that risk has been socialized, yet profit remains private. Writing to his Co-Head of Investment Banking, Dimon imagines that the economy is like a garden, a perfect cultivation meant to serve him and designed to suit his desires and passions.
"Bill, isn't this the kind of risk climate we have been dreaming about for centuries?"
"Bill, isn't this the kind of risk climate we have been dreaming about for centuries?"
-Jamie Dimon