For many centuries money, or the love of it, has been associated with evil. Since at least the Reformation, it has been associated specifically with the Devil.  Indeed, right up until the end of the nineteenth century the figure of the ‘money devil’ was a common one in popular prints throughout Europe. More recently, as money has become ever more thoroughly ‘normal’ in everyday life, its association with the demonic has diminished.  Still scary, on occasions (i.e. when we don’t have any), but hardly devilish…..

Tricky Money makes the case for money always being demonic: not (quite) in the sense of being the product of some Satanic plot, but in representing an aspect of daily life that we (a modern, western we, that is) find difficult to articulate. Money is hard to pin down. It is both real and unreal.  It stands for a space between that we seem not to have a language to describe. But in the past we had a richer concept of social space: one that used a cast of strange characters to represent and embody the in-between: Trickster, Devil and Fool.

Tricky Money argues that far from losing its association with these entities, money has taken their place – it is them.

Angus Cameron is a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester researching into the themes of spatiality, representation and performance. This has encompassed topics of money, offshore finance, boundaries and cartography. He is currently collaborating with the Swedish performance artists goldin+senneby through which he acts as spokesperson on their ongoing project ‘Headless’ (2007-) approaching the sphere of offshore finance and its production of virtual space.