Headless looks like an airport paperback, with gilt lettering, perfect bind and a nice heft. But don’t be fooled. It actually follows a tried and true formula for conceptual art: outsource your work to others, and have them farm it out yet again so that it escapes your control. A decade of performances, conferences and board room meetings about the central idea of Headless, that there is a deep relationship between finance and art, ultimately tries to show that “the writer is the perfect offshore business.” (255). That’s because, at least theoretically, the artist makes value from nothing and reports only to herself.
Illustrations by Johan Hjerpe for Headless. Courtesy of Triple Canopy
What do an artist duo, an economist, an offshore specialist, a ghost writer, a police agent—and others—have in common? They are each both characters within a novel, and also co-authors. They’re all pawns in a pulpy story about the allure of finance that’s the latest iteration of a project by Goldin + Senneby. In the book, it all starts with a down-and-out British expat getting fat in Northern Spain, who one day is contacted by that secretive Sweden-based conceptual art duo.
They have a job for him, that job is a mystery, and that mystery makes this novel. Soon, the anti-hero is meeting lawyers, secret agents and art collectors—some of them real, some of them invented. The riddle at the heart of the story, if it is indeed more than just a rhetorical question, is an offshore financial firm called, unsurprisingly, Headless. To confirm its existence, you would have to check the ledgers in the Bahamas, which is what Barlow actually does in the novel, and probably in the real world too. How are they connected to the secret society Acephale, itself a Greek word for “headless”?
Illustrations by Johan Hjerpe for Headless. Courtesy of Triple Canopy
This question leads our narrator—and perhaps writer—to decapitations, art-world drama, and even an existential encounter with his own editors. But this intricate plot is not that important: the point is to confuse the fictional and the factual. In the end, truth is stranger. Headless, Inc, actually exists, and its parent company Sovereign administrates an art prize to which Goldin + Senneby entered a print (though they didn’t win).
Illustrations by Johan Hjerpe for Headless. Courtesy of Triple Canopy
This blend of theory and fiction is in the air now: Headless joins a spate of other hybrid novels like Lydia Liu’s The Nesbit Code (an academic’s detective-like search for traces of Nabokov) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (an archaeologist’s investigation of the occult powers of petroleum). They have us take note of hidden connections, without ever bringing them fully to light.
Spreading so thin means they no longer have total control. But, as an observer at the opening party put it, “they’ve cracked it—they can only win.” Even a negative review shouldn’t affect them, since it’s just part of the performance.
