Sorcha Dallas

‘Hyperinflation’ 2004

While Craig Mulholland’s practice encompasses a range of media he considers himself primarily a painter and regards his films as a form of ‘extended painting’. ‘Hyperinflation’ was first shown as the central element within Mulholland’s exhibition ‘Bearer on Demand’, at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. 2005. The exhibition was a complex installation that also included sculptures and paintings which addressed the imagery and ideas articulated in the film. The catalyst for the project was a text by William S Burroughs, entitled ‘Immortality’. Burroughs addresses a vampiric process of:

“inconspicuous but inexorable consumption” and concludes:

“The vampire converts quality-live blood, vitality, youth, talent – into quality-food and time for himself. He perpetuates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit.”

‘Hyperinflation’ envisages a night-bound Gothic zone in which the vampire serves as a metaphor for money, its role in systems of exchange and its defining position within the structures of capitalist society. This historical analogy has been used by a number of writers and thinkers including Bram Stoker, Franco Moretti, and Karl Marx. Marx wrote; “Capitol is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

‘Hyperinflation’ was also conceived as a kind of companion piece to Hans Richter’s 1927-8 Dadaist film, ‘Inflation’, which addresses runaway inflation in Germany in the early 1920s. Whereas Richter, an influential film pioneer, had limited technical means at his disposal and used simple montage and collage, Mulholland is able to use sophisticated computer animation technology. His imagery is scanned from coins, old banknotes and his own drawings and paintings, painstakingly assembled to create a deliberately ahistorical and ambiguous space. The film itself thus enacts a vampiric transformation, animating dead and inert matter.