Mike Curran
cash flow bad
Ben Cowper
02/2020Ben Cowper︎︎︎ is an independent filmmaker and freelancer based in Minneapolis. cash flow bad is centered around his freelance clients, and includes videos that he has produced for them, and audio recordings and email transcripts of their interactions. By presenting these materials publicly, we invite you to learn more about the mechanisms and precarity of freelance work, the absurdities of capitalism, and, above all, the ways in which we’re all just trying to get by in these United States.
Curatorial Essay
This installation began with a mouthguard. The first time I met Ben, he launched into a story about an interaction with a client named Pam, who worked as an orthodontist in Texas before moving to Minnesota. Pam requested meeting at the mall for a two hour tutoring lesson in Photoshop, which she would use to create Facebook ads for her invention, the “daytime mouthguard.” Ben remembers:
“We sat down at one of those islands with a couch and fake plants in front of an Apple store. The first ad we worked on was a series of images featuring people working in various jobs. The concept was two side-by-side photos: One with the person’s head replaced by a bowling ball, and one with the normal photo. Underneath it would read: ‘Before and after daytime mouthguard.’
“At this point, Pam took out one of the mouthguards to show me what her product looked like. The device was a small, notched piece of plastic that fit between your front top and bottom teeth. She demonstrated the placement on herself, and highlighted the ease of use: “Simply wear the mouthguard all day and if you have to talk to someone then just spit it out into your hand and put it back when you’re done.”
The product was designed to solve “the chronic slouching problem” and “prevent the feeling of having a bowling ball as a head.” Two birds, one stone. When Pam pulled up her Gmail account, Ben noticed several unread emails from Donald Trump. “Turns out she subscribed to his newsletter,” Ben says.
It began with a mouthguard. But before that, it began with Pam’s belief in her potential as an entrepreneur. It’s that same kind of belief that sells 1,100,000 copies of The Art of the Deal, and wins the television program Shark Tank four Emmy Awards. In an environment where self-made fortune permeates the air, you, the individual, are one big idea away from disrupting the economy and transforming the culture.
At one extreme of the entrepreneurship spectrum is somebody like Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork. The company’s literal purpose is to lease shared office spaces to startups and entrepreneurs, but their mission is much loftier: “[To] create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living.” When WeWork’s start-up language is stripped away, what’s revealed is a more or less traditional commercial real estate business masquerading as an authentic community of “creators, leaders, and self-starters [who are] not afraid to fail.” And fail they did: valued at $47 billion in January 2019, WeWork was forced to lay off 2,400 employees in November and Neumann is currently under investigation by the New York State Attorney General for self-dealing, which includes charges of buying properties and leasing them back to the company.
While we might revel in our own hindsight after the public downfalls of figures like Neumann—see Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ epic takedown of Mark Zuckerburg on the House floor for another example—these figures have left their indelible marks on the ways we all try to get by in the contemporary United States. WeWork preys on precarity, offering communal workspaces to people navigating an economy that increasingly stresses individual responsibility over collective organizing. The relative protections offered by employers—a consistent workspace or health insurance, for instance—are swallowed by an unpredictable tide where independent contractors can find themselves untethered, adrift without a flotation device.
Which brings us back to those floating islands at the mall. If Neumann is at one extreme of the entrepreneurship spectrum, Pam is at the opposite. On the opening pages of this zine are two heat map renderings of Pam’s head. In the first image, Pam is not wearing the daytime mouthguard. In the second, she is. (You can notice slight cooling around her mouth and temple in the second, indicating less strain—off rolls the bowling ball.) In this self-starting culture, throwing your entire self behind your product is not just celebrated but expected. And so here is Pam, undergoing a body scan to literally embody her product’s virtues.
One framework for this show could be the absurdity of its characters. We could laugh at Pam for spitting out her mouthguard when she speaks, or cringe at Shawn’s shaky home video. Another framework could be to interpret these works as different scenes of American life in 2020, a gut check for the ways we’re eking out our livings or representing ourselves for others in a time when everything is recorded—and for sale. The stories of the nine clients that make up the show vary, but they all have one thing in common: they all invited Ben to be part of their vision, to make the proper edits so that the beauty of their invention or home video or wedding could shine through.
Though the nature of freelancing requires Ben to be a general expert across various aspects of filmmaking, he most often advertises himself as an independent filmmaker. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2016 with a B.A. in Film and Video Production, but he began producing professional work in 2007. Since then, he’s worked on over 100 projects for a range of individuals, artists, and commercial clients, from Yale University and PBS American Masters to those featured in cash flow bad.
After holding down a number of audio, video, and editing gigs at under 30 hours a week (“So they wouldn’t have to give me benefits,” he notes), he was hired as a full time Video Producer and Academic Technologist at the University of Minnesota in 2018. “Within the first couple months I noticed that no one in the department who worked full time was actually doing anything for most of the day.” While Ben tried to keep busy at first, the appearance became grueling to upkeep: “I started getting migraines from my shitty computer screen and ended up attending every single event I was invited to just so I could get up and go do something else during the day.”
After leaving his position at the University, he jumped back into freelance work and created a profile on Wyzant, a platform where people can search for private tutors. Since then, online tutoring has become his primary source of income, which brings us to the dual laptops stationed at the dining room table. On one screen, Ben helps Bob organize 6,000 photos from a safari; folder names include “5 Star Africa photos” and “Best Big Cats.” On the other, Ben walks Shawn through editing his homemade Halloween video; 15 minutes of the session are devoted to explaining how to position text. The sessions themselves are truly dull, but they’re also important to understand: the setup in the gallery mimics the mechanisms of freelance labor, which in Ben’s case typically happens on his laptop, in his own living room. At the same time, removing these videos from their original, educational setting gives them an isolated feeling, revealing the sometimes bumbling, awkward structures of freelance work and client-freelancer relationships. The unpolishedness is the point.
Wyzant offers relatively consistent work with straightforward payment—Ben knows what he’s getting into when he answers a client’s request. The same can’t be said for all his interactions. Arjun is the creator of iBrics, a STEM toy designed to “prepare today’s K-12 students for tomorrow’s economy,” where students conduct experiments like building flashlights. To promote iBric’s features, Arjun organized an interview with his friend’s 12 year old son, Vihaan. When Ben drove out to their suburban neighborhood, “their house had all of its blinds drawn,” and when he knocked, “it was completely silent. I went back to my car and drove up the street a little bit so I could ‘arrive’ again a few minutes later.” After about ten minutes, Ben got a text from Arjun’s friend reading, “Where are you?” “I could see the house from where I was parked,” Ben remembers. “No one had driven up or come out of the front door. I drove back into their driveway and this time when I knocked, a dog started barking and the father answered the door completely normally.”
Once Ben got inside, the lines that Arjun wanted Vihaan to deliver were clumsy and complicated. A section of the script read, “When it gets dark, the light sensor in dark mode sends a high signal to the white LED, making it light up. It turns off when there is light. iBrics is so much fun!” Earlier, when Ben mentioned his concern over the complexity of the script, Arjun responded, “Kids tend to surprise adults with their quick understanding and articulation.” The raw video featured in cash flow bad is Ben’s attempt at orchestrating that articulation.
When Arjun received the final video, he was outraged over its quality and initiated a refund request on PayPal, the platform he’d been paying Ben through. The full dispute—“The lack of quality of the work product guarantees that we will never use it in any form to promote our product,” Arjun writes—is pasted next to the video, but the main point is this: while a regular job usually offers space for error and miscommunication without serious consequence, freelancers don’t operate under the same protections, and a dispute with a client can lead to a total loss in income (though PayPal ultimately decided in Ben’s favor).
Ben is freelancing in a post-2008 financial crisis economy which, as the writer Jia Tolentino puts it, “[was] the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.” In her essay entitled The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, Tolentino folds the student debt crisis into the 2016 presidential election into companies like Amazon that claim to “disrupt” the market while maintaining the same oppressive barriers for workers that allow for ridiculous profits in the first place. What Tolentino ends up assembling is a culture based on self-interestedness, where “the pipe dream is becoming the dominant structure of aspiration.”And what millennials are believed to aspire to, Tolentino writes, is economic self-determination. “It’s just easier to think millennials float from gig to gig because we’re shiftless or spoiled or in love with the ‘hustle’ than to consider the fact that the labor market—for people of every generation—is punitively unstable and growing more so every day.” It’s not just freelancers who find themselves clinging to a fraying social safety net, but also people like Arjun and Pam, pursuing their own pipe dreams no matter how flawed their products or convoluted their marketing strategies.
Ben recognizes the false sense of abundance that the current economy promises. “I’m not sure what I make of the term ‘gig economy,’” he says. “It sort of implies that it’s thriving but it doesn’t always feel like that.” In reality, federal and state governments are having as difficult a time determining rules about the gig economy as freelancers are navigating its parameters: a new California law requires app-based companies like Uber and Postmates to treat their independent contractors as employees—those companies sued immediately after the law was announced. In 2017, Ben confronted the independent contractor-employee binary while working as a production assistant for the documentary Becoming Helen Keller. At tax time, Laurie, his employer, informed Ben that he qualified only as a freelancer when their conversations to that point had indicated that he was an employee. This meant that Ben suddenly owed hundreds of dollars in taxes. After much Googling, Ben was able to re-classify himself as an employee. The IRS’s exact ruling is displayed in full in cash flow bad, its weighty presence an affront to the idea that freelancers simply “float from gig to gig.”
Undergirding that false sense of abundance are also actual exploitative practices. “So often people have a mindset that they can screw over freelancers because they’re not in a long-term relationship,” Ben says, “and some part of me worries that this could become the norm.” Enter Steve.
Steve was infamous at Hampshire College. “He would try to poach graduating film students with really good sounding offers, like being the director of photography on his documentary,” Ben says. The project Steve tried to bring Ben in for was the production of 3 Rings, a documentary about Demetrius “Boo Boo” Andrade, a professional boxer from Providence, Rhode Island, who Steve was absolutely enthralled by. “Everybody wants a piece of Boo Boo,” Steve wrote in his emails to Ben. He had plenty of footage of Demetrius in the ring, but wanted Ben to help film the “personal more intimate stuff.” “Now that the fight is over, what i really want to shoot now is YOU AND ELANISE AND THE KIDS...BASICALLY YOU WITH YOUR FAMIILY,” he writes to Demetrius, with Ben CC’ed, in a late night email. “At the end of the day I will have lots of boxing triumph but I want this human dimension, TO SHOW WHAT YOU ARE REALLY FIGHTING FOR.” When Ben backed away from the project, Steve continued leaving excited voicemails asking to meet up for many months afterwards. A few of those voicemails can be heard in the galleries.
Alongside Steve’s voicemails is a shrine dedicated to Mike and Cody, with correspondence from another job that didn’t quite pan out. Mike owned two neighboring houses in an Indianapolis suburb. He wanted to hire Ben to make real estate videos to sell the houses as a “buy one, get one,” as Mike himself put it. Any sense of normality around this gig quickly eroded as Mike pivoted from the promotional video to a series of training videos for his newly-developed ultrasound technology. A week before Ben flew out to Indianapolis, Mike wrote, “I also want to coordinate your video production consultation with your transmission device. I may want a ‘TV show format’ that is weekly with a number of schools.” In that email, Mike CC’ed somebody named Cody Nevel, who, after hours of research, Ben discovered was behind about ten other business ventures, none of which seemed legitimate. As the plan and its contributors became more convoluted, so did the payment plan. “I have a slow pay account that I am dealing with; holding up my cash flow bad,” Mike wrote (unknowingly providing us with the name of the show). As a final sign-off to Ben, Mike apologized: “I will get back with you on the scheduling. Sorry for my late realization that this delay had the potential to happen.” He never got back to Ben about the scheduling.
Of course there are many sides to freelance work, most of which are not as objectionable or conspiracy-driven as those described above. While most of Ben’s clients have a narrow vision of what they’re looking for, limiting his ability to experiment, his commercial work can sometimes be a testing ground for equipment or new techniques that end up supporting his artistic projects. “It’s nice that I can justify purchasing equipment for artistic ventures because I know I can also make money using that equipment.”
The bleed between artistic and commercial work is a staple of freelancing, which can be both liberating (if you enjoy filmmaking, why wouldn’t you want to do it for a living?) and exhausting (why would both creating a show in an amatuer gallery if you could instead use that time to teach video editing skills for money?). cash flow bad is found somewhere in this tension, an artistic exploration of contemporary economic and cultural structures animated by Ben’s commercial work. It makes sense, also, for a show partly about the precarity of the economy to take place in an apartment gallery—an unstable venue given that we’re likely violating our lease to make it happen.
cash flow bad is nothing if not sincere. Maybe that’s because the idea for the show came from the accumulation of stories that Ben told me about his clients; the whole show has the feeling of a friend telling you about a ridiculous day at the office. But that sincerity also comes from the clients themselves: In the middle of his wedding highlight reel, Ishaan trades the horse he’s struggling to ride for a Ford Mustang and continues with his processional parade. In a 26 minute audio recording, Ben and Laurie crosscheck names on an email list, which she hopes to promote her film to. The awkwardness, the sincerity, the scam—this is a show about freelancing, but it’s also about people making their way, throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
“We sat down at one of those islands with a couch and fake plants in front of an Apple store. The first ad we worked on was a series of images featuring people working in various jobs. The concept was two side-by-side photos: One with the person’s head replaced by a bowling ball, and one with the normal photo. Underneath it would read: ‘Before and after daytime mouthguard.’
“At this point, Pam took out one of the mouthguards to show me what her product looked like. The device was a small, notched piece of plastic that fit between your front top and bottom teeth. She demonstrated the placement on herself, and highlighted the ease of use: “Simply wear the mouthguard all day and if you have to talk to someone then just spit it out into your hand and put it back when you’re done.”
The product was designed to solve “the chronic slouching problem” and “prevent the feeling of having a bowling ball as a head.” Two birds, one stone. When Pam pulled up her Gmail account, Ben noticed several unread emails from Donald Trump. “Turns out she subscribed to his newsletter,” Ben says.
It began with a mouthguard. But before that, it began with Pam’s belief in her potential as an entrepreneur. It’s that same kind of belief that sells 1,100,000 copies of The Art of the Deal, and wins the television program Shark Tank four Emmy Awards. In an environment where self-made fortune permeates the air, you, the individual, are one big idea away from disrupting the economy and transforming the culture.
At one extreme of the entrepreneurship spectrum is somebody like Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork. The company’s literal purpose is to lease shared office spaces to startups and entrepreneurs, but their mission is much loftier: “[To] create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living.” When WeWork’s start-up language is stripped away, what’s revealed is a more or less traditional commercial real estate business masquerading as an authentic community of “creators, leaders, and self-starters [who are] not afraid to fail.” And fail they did: valued at $47 billion in January 2019, WeWork was forced to lay off 2,400 employees in November and Neumann is currently under investigation by the New York State Attorney General for self-dealing, which includes charges of buying properties and leasing them back to the company.
While we might revel in our own hindsight after the public downfalls of figures like Neumann—see Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ epic takedown of Mark Zuckerburg on the House floor for another example—these figures have left their indelible marks on the ways we all try to get by in the contemporary United States. WeWork preys on precarity, offering communal workspaces to people navigating an economy that increasingly stresses individual responsibility over collective organizing. The relative protections offered by employers—a consistent workspace or health insurance, for instance—are swallowed by an unpredictable tide where independent contractors can find themselves untethered, adrift without a flotation device.
Which brings us back to those floating islands at the mall. If Neumann is at one extreme of the entrepreneurship spectrum, Pam is at the opposite. On the opening pages of this zine are two heat map renderings of Pam’s head. In the first image, Pam is not wearing the daytime mouthguard. In the second, she is. (You can notice slight cooling around her mouth and temple in the second, indicating less strain—off rolls the bowling ball.) In this self-starting culture, throwing your entire self behind your product is not just celebrated but expected. And so here is Pam, undergoing a body scan to literally embody her product’s virtues.
One framework for this show could be the absurdity of its characters. We could laugh at Pam for spitting out her mouthguard when she speaks, or cringe at Shawn’s shaky home video. Another framework could be to interpret these works as different scenes of American life in 2020, a gut check for the ways we’re eking out our livings or representing ourselves for others in a time when everything is recorded—and for sale. The stories of the nine clients that make up the show vary, but they all have one thing in common: they all invited Ben to be part of their vision, to make the proper edits so that the beauty of their invention or home video or wedding could shine through.
Though the nature of freelancing requires Ben to be a general expert across various aspects of filmmaking, he most often advertises himself as an independent filmmaker. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2016 with a B.A. in Film and Video Production, but he began producing professional work in 2007. Since then, he’s worked on over 100 projects for a range of individuals, artists, and commercial clients, from Yale University and PBS American Masters to those featured in cash flow bad.
After holding down a number of audio, video, and editing gigs at under 30 hours a week (“So they wouldn’t have to give me benefits,” he notes), he was hired as a full time Video Producer and Academic Technologist at the University of Minnesota in 2018. “Within the first couple months I noticed that no one in the department who worked full time was actually doing anything for most of the day.” While Ben tried to keep busy at first, the appearance became grueling to upkeep: “I started getting migraines from my shitty computer screen and ended up attending every single event I was invited to just so I could get up and go do something else during the day.”
After leaving his position at the University, he jumped back into freelance work and created a profile on Wyzant, a platform where people can search for private tutors. Since then, online tutoring has become his primary source of income, which brings us to the dual laptops stationed at the dining room table. On one screen, Ben helps Bob organize 6,000 photos from a safari; folder names include “5 Star Africa photos” and “Best Big Cats.” On the other, Ben walks Shawn through editing his homemade Halloween video; 15 minutes of the session are devoted to explaining how to position text. The sessions themselves are truly dull, but they’re also important to understand: the setup in the gallery mimics the mechanisms of freelance labor, which in Ben’s case typically happens on his laptop, in his own living room. At the same time, removing these videos from their original, educational setting gives them an isolated feeling, revealing the sometimes bumbling, awkward structures of freelance work and client-freelancer relationships. The unpolishedness is the point.
Wyzant offers relatively consistent work with straightforward payment—Ben knows what he’s getting into when he answers a client’s request. The same can’t be said for all his interactions. Arjun is the creator of iBrics, a STEM toy designed to “prepare today’s K-12 students for tomorrow’s economy,” where students conduct experiments like building flashlights. To promote iBric’s features, Arjun organized an interview with his friend’s 12 year old son, Vihaan. When Ben drove out to their suburban neighborhood, “their house had all of its blinds drawn,” and when he knocked, “it was completely silent. I went back to my car and drove up the street a little bit so I could ‘arrive’ again a few minutes later.” After about ten minutes, Ben got a text from Arjun’s friend reading, “Where are you?” “I could see the house from where I was parked,” Ben remembers. “No one had driven up or come out of the front door. I drove back into their driveway and this time when I knocked, a dog started barking and the father answered the door completely normally.”
Once Ben got inside, the lines that Arjun wanted Vihaan to deliver were clumsy and complicated. A section of the script read, “When it gets dark, the light sensor in dark mode sends a high signal to the white LED, making it light up. It turns off when there is light. iBrics is so much fun!” Earlier, when Ben mentioned his concern over the complexity of the script, Arjun responded, “Kids tend to surprise adults with their quick understanding and articulation.” The raw video featured in cash flow bad is Ben’s attempt at orchestrating that articulation.
When Arjun received the final video, he was outraged over its quality and initiated a refund request on PayPal, the platform he’d been paying Ben through. The full dispute—“The lack of quality of the work product guarantees that we will never use it in any form to promote our product,” Arjun writes—is pasted next to the video, but the main point is this: while a regular job usually offers space for error and miscommunication without serious consequence, freelancers don’t operate under the same protections, and a dispute with a client can lead to a total loss in income (though PayPal ultimately decided in Ben’s favor).
Ben is freelancing in a post-2008 financial crisis economy which, as the writer Jia Tolentino puts it, “[was] the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.” In her essay entitled The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, Tolentino folds the student debt crisis into the 2016 presidential election into companies like Amazon that claim to “disrupt” the market while maintaining the same oppressive barriers for workers that allow for ridiculous profits in the first place. What Tolentino ends up assembling is a culture based on self-interestedness, where “the pipe dream is becoming the dominant structure of aspiration.”And what millennials are believed to aspire to, Tolentino writes, is economic self-determination. “It’s just easier to think millennials float from gig to gig because we’re shiftless or spoiled or in love with the ‘hustle’ than to consider the fact that the labor market—for people of every generation—is punitively unstable and growing more so every day.” It’s not just freelancers who find themselves clinging to a fraying social safety net, but also people like Arjun and Pam, pursuing their own pipe dreams no matter how flawed their products or convoluted their marketing strategies.
Ben recognizes the false sense of abundance that the current economy promises. “I’m not sure what I make of the term ‘gig economy,’” he says. “It sort of implies that it’s thriving but it doesn’t always feel like that.” In reality, federal and state governments are having as difficult a time determining rules about the gig economy as freelancers are navigating its parameters: a new California law requires app-based companies like Uber and Postmates to treat their independent contractors as employees—those companies sued immediately after the law was announced. In 2017, Ben confronted the independent contractor-employee binary while working as a production assistant for the documentary Becoming Helen Keller. At tax time, Laurie, his employer, informed Ben that he qualified only as a freelancer when their conversations to that point had indicated that he was an employee. This meant that Ben suddenly owed hundreds of dollars in taxes. After much Googling, Ben was able to re-classify himself as an employee. The IRS’s exact ruling is displayed in full in cash flow bad, its weighty presence an affront to the idea that freelancers simply “float from gig to gig.”
Undergirding that false sense of abundance are also actual exploitative practices. “So often people have a mindset that they can screw over freelancers because they’re not in a long-term relationship,” Ben says, “and some part of me worries that this could become the norm.” Enter Steve.
Steve was infamous at Hampshire College. “He would try to poach graduating film students with really good sounding offers, like being the director of photography on his documentary,” Ben says. The project Steve tried to bring Ben in for was the production of 3 Rings, a documentary about Demetrius “Boo Boo” Andrade, a professional boxer from Providence, Rhode Island, who Steve was absolutely enthralled by. “Everybody wants a piece of Boo Boo,” Steve wrote in his emails to Ben. He had plenty of footage of Demetrius in the ring, but wanted Ben to help film the “personal more intimate stuff.” “Now that the fight is over, what i really want to shoot now is YOU AND ELANISE AND THE KIDS...BASICALLY YOU WITH YOUR FAMIILY,” he writes to Demetrius, with Ben CC’ed, in a late night email. “At the end of the day I will have lots of boxing triumph but I want this human dimension, TO SHOW WHAT YOU ARE REALLY FIGHTING FOR.” When Ben backed away from the project, Steve continued leaving excited voicemails asking to meet up for many months afterwards. A few of those voicemails can be heard in the galleries.
Alongside Steve’s voicemails is a shrine dedicated to Mike and Cody, with correspondence from another job that didn’t quite pan out. Mike owned two neighboring houses in an Indianapolis suburb. He wanted to hire Ben to make real estate videos to sell the houses as a “buy one, get one,” as Mike himself put it. Any sense of normality around this gig quickly eroded as Mike pivoted from the promotional video to a series of training videos for his newly-developed ultrasound technology. A week before Ben flew out to Indianapolis, Mike wrote, “I also want to coordinate your video production consultation with your transmission device. I may want a ‘TV show format’ that is weekly with a number of schools.” In that email, Mike CC’ed somebody named Cody Nevel, who, after hours of research, Ben discovered was behind about ten other business ventures, none of which seemed legitimate. As the plan and its contributors became more convoluted, so did the payment plan. “I have a slow pay account that I am dealing with; holding up my cash flow bad,” Mike wrote (unknowingly providing us with the name of the show). As a final sign-off to Ben, Mike apologized: “I will get back with you on the scheduling. Sorry for my late realization that this delay had the potential to happen.” He never got back to Ben about the scheduling.
Of course there are many sides to freelance work, most of which are not as objectionable or conspiracy-driven as those described above. While most of Ben’s clients have a narrow vision of what they’re looking for, limiting his ability to experiment, his commercial work can sometimes be a testing ground for equipment or new techniques that end up supporting his artistic projects. “It’s nice that I can justify purchasing equipment for artistic ventures because I know I can also make money using that equipment.”
The bleed between artistic and commercial work is a staple of freelancing, which can be both liberating (if you enjoy filmmaking, why wouldn’t you want to do it for a living?) and exhausting (why would both creating a show in an amatuer gallery if you could instead use that time to teach video editing skills for money?). cash flow bad is found somewhere in this tension, an artistic exploration of contemporary economic and cultural structures animated by Ben’s commercial work. It makes sense, also, for a show partly about the precarity of the economy to take place in an apartment gallery—an unstable venue given that we’re likely violating our lease to make it happen.
cash flow bad is nothing if not sincere. Maybe that’s because the idea for the show came from the accumulation of stories that Ben told me about his clients; the whole show has the feeling of a friend telling you about a ridiculous day at the office. But that sincerity also comes from the clients themselves: In the middle of his wedding highlight reel, Ishaan trades the horse he’s struggling to ride for a Ford Mustang and continues with his processional parade. In a 26 minute audio recording, Ben and Laurie crosscheck names on an email list, which she hopes to promote her film to. The awkwardness, the sincerity, the scam—this is a show about freelancing, but it’s also about people making their way, throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.