TLmag37: L’âge d’Or / State of Gold

Gold, The Alchemy of our Auras

By Lise Coirier

If the memory of the living is contained in matter, gold escapes time and awakens in the light. Artefacts are receptacles of our souls and our history. They constantly oscillate between moments of glory and tragedy; preserved, restored, passed on or sometimes destroyed. Gold is the pollen of our civilizations near and far and also the object of all our covetousness. If in the fields of golden wheat, the gravediggers have interrupted the harvest, there is still human resilience, ready to face this ineluctable passage of the seasons that punctuate existence. Kiki Smith, Kiki & Joost, Adi Toch, Fabienne Verdier, Vera Vermeersch, Bela Silva, Anselm Kiefer, Lionel Estève, François Halard, Amedeo Sconamiglio and Bosco Sodi all attempt to capture the quintessence of the sacred and divine in their visionary gaze and gestures. The rites and symbols, the techniques and media they use are all modes of artistic expression that place man at the heart of a free system, a metaphysics and a singular cosmogony. Gold as a pigment in art, a mediator between peoples, often gives form to a bridge between earthly and heavenly and eternal lives… “The more we live in the immaterial, the more we love matter”, declared Yves Klein. What is the point of talking about kilos or gold bars? If only to find in it the value of (the) refuge? Gold captures our attention: authentic or “fake”, glittering or sublimating our bodies and silhouettes, it reflects our religious or pagan beliefs, our sensitivity and also our exuberance. Captured in the object, gold offers a formidable heritage of forms and uses from Egyptian antiquity to our most contemporary culture. It acts as a compass guiding us to the four corners of the world, East and West, for better or for worse… The golden ring would nevertheless signify the strength of a union. The “Golden Age” is perhaps best seen as a quest for a sunny morning, a moment frozen in the sun, a re-birth of the elements, air, fire, wind, water and light… a suspended moment. Silence is golden and speech is silver. Let’s stay awake, amazed.

L’eta dell’oro

By Marco Sammicheli

Gold has long been the metal of maturity. And yet, in the scarcity of its extraction, the present of this mineral resource still speaks to us of power, representation, decoration and symbols. Until 1971, the international monetary system regulated trade using the value of gold. It was US President Richard Nixon who revised the Bretton Woods Agreement one night in August, effectively cancelling convertibility between gold and the US dollar. Even today, in the midst of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the units of measurement that govern international economic agreements are of extreme importance, and what is more, they are at the heart of the system of sanctions that has hit the rouble. The threat is to the devaluation of currencies and the crisis of an energy supply system, already among the triggers of the conflict that brought war to the heart of Europe. The State of Gold is an open title and the state of art that this image evokes is at the centre of an incredible transformation in which metaphor and investigation, creativity and actuality become possible visions. The field of research that the magazine wants to bring to the reader’s attention through in-depth articles on the arts, natural sciences, infrastructures, historical heritage and religion is precisely that of the speculative, semiotic and social value of gold and its many derivatives. The diversity and quality of the content is made possible by a collection of contributions from reporters and researchers working in Europe’s most prestigious magazines and newspapers, universities and museums.

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