Modelling ‘Headless’ : finance, performance art, and paradoxy

This essay reflects on the author’s experience of a collaborative performance art project – Headless, by Goldin+Senneby – which since 2007 has created a quasi ‘model’ of offshore finance. Headless is not a conventional economic model, but rather an example of an ‘imaginary economics’ that is peculiar to contemporary art (as in Velthuis, 2005). Because of the context in which the project has unfolded, it has been able to develop an effective engagement with and critique of the ‘real’ offshore world. Headless, the essay argues, moves beyond passive representation, to become an active, if deliberately paradoxical, intervention in debates over the nature of finance, spatiality, privacy, and art.