Collateral Effects

“Collateral Effects questions the obfuscation that now stands for contemporary New York and American political discourse and art, and it gives a sense of what it is to live, work and make public in New York – a place where at times critique is read as anti-patriotic and debate as politically arousing.”

Interview with Laura Carton

born 1970 in Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in New York, NY

“I almost forgot what our rights were – I hadn’t seen the Constitution since I was probably twelve in school. I was really struck by it and by just how many of our liberties are now under fire.”

LC: I have here some articles and press about the Pump and Dump investment club. And these are all images that I downloaded from the Internet: they are all porn and the titles are from the actual names of the sites. And in looking at porn I became much more interested in the background: this whole other subtext of class and race and desire that’s camouflaged by the bodies. It started when I saw a scene of a living room and there was a couple on the couch engaged in whatever, and I was looking at the shelf where there was a model ’68 Corvette. I’m from L.A., I love cars, I love driving cars, and then I noticed on the shelf the book The Grapes of Wrath. It prompted me to ask myself: what does The Grapes of Wrath mean to me when I see it in the context of porn? What is this adding to the site of desire? I began to deconstruct the porn site: why did some have top shelf alcohol, why did some have bottom, and what did that mean? And it prompted me to ask why fornicating bodies aren’t shot on white backgrounds. There’s this whole issue of viewer recognition, viewer fantasy, identification, and so I became increasingly interested in the background. I think it certainly plays a little bit on the genre: these images are absolutely banal without the bodies. This one could be a tourist shot, it has a feeling of aspiring to the upper middle class background, with faux Old Master paintings and this kind of lifestyle which is really about whiteness even though the bodies are racially niched. There is such a niche market for porn. So I began an inquiry. I had done this work for quite a while and it was popular here, so it was showing a lot. It was during the research on this that founded the investment project, in around 2000. There was a mention in the Times about a trader at – I think it was Bear Stearns – who was actually fired for talking to the New York Times, saying that pornography was a good investment. So I knew there was a story there. The outgrowth of the investment club came from that. I am very interested in the tracking of the money. The investment club is a little difficult to explain. I am not a trader and I don’t have a trader’s license so I can’t sell stock, so the investment club is a group of people who may or may not have knowledge of the field and who get together to share information and learn how to invest. Pump an Dump is an investor relations project, the formation of an investment club whose focus is to invest in the adult entertainment sector of the stock market. And in the US corporations these holdings in pornography are clandestine. So by doing a lot of research it came to light that a lot of corporations like Hilton Hotels, Marriott, AT&T and Disney all have clandestine investments in porn. I became very interested in transparency and visibility. So “Pump and Dump” is actually a financial term: it’s slang for investors who pump up a stock – usually small companies traded over the counter rather than on the large exchanges – and they get a lot of investors to buy the stock and when they feel it’s at a high, they dump the stock, keep all the money, and stop promoting it. So eventually what happens is that the company goes under and all the investors lose their money, except for the original ones. And it became much easier to pull a pump and dump scam with the advent of the Internet. So I chose the name Pump and Dump not only for the sexual allusion, but also for its connotations of financial fraud. In America there are only two or three porn stocks that trade openly on the exchange. But there are more in other countries that we are investing in, so I have a list of about fifty US companies that have clandestine holdings in porn. They bury it under the term “media and entertainment” so it’s very difficult to spot because they don’t separate it out in their annual reports. But basically through their business dealings, and through their affiliates and subsidiaries, that’s how porn is invested and traded. So this club is really about a social space, which is mostly going to be on the web. My day job is working for very, very high net worth individuals, so I am constantly dealing with hedge funds and financial fields. And that’s very interesting as all these trades and deals and IPOs are kept very secret. So I am interested in showing the financials of Wall Street as visibly and transparently as possible. So all the trades, all the investments, all of everything is going to be on the web, so the user can go to the website and see every trade, quarterly holdings, yearly holdings, and also the meetings. By law the investment club has to meet once a month, and what people really do is to divide up the stock research into jobs, but since I know people here aren’t really interested in doing the research I’ve done most of that, so this is just a way to make money and also to sort of circumvent the art world altogether.

Excerpted from an interview conducted by Shaheen Merali in New York, October 2006.