“A Currency of Happenstance”

This essay considers contemporary artist Ryan Gander’s The Find (2023), a participatory art project distributing non-monetary coin in public space to create “a currency of happenstance”¹ engaging chance procedures and choice. Produced by Factory International, it was programmed as part of Manchester International Festival alongside another of its key solo artist commissions, Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons (2023), an exhibition exuberantly received by critic Jonathan Jones as a “fantasy version of [Andy] Warhol’s New York”² as if seen through the eyes of famed Manchester club-owner and record producer Tony Wilson. In its own cultural allusions, The Find similarly resonated with Wilson’s legacy. Wilson named the Haçienda, his fabled club which operated for fifteen years between 1982 and 1997, after “a Situationist text that envisioned a space devoted to pleasure, a refuge against the consumer society.”³ In 2023, The Find used non-monetary coin as the prompt for a Situationist dérive in public space, a challenge to consumerism, and a coin flip game to enable a kind of theatrical distanciation from the everyday. Between Thursday, June 29 and Sunday, July 16, festival volunteers dropped 200,000 silver coins in three designs, each about the size of a 10p piece, at thirteen locations across Greater Manchester. Half of these locations were in the city itself, and others further afield, from Wythenshawe Park to Broadfield Park in Rochdale. As the festival had it, the coins were not “your bog-standard copper coins – they’re collectable artworks, lucky charms and decision-making tools rolled into one.”⁴ The project’s title referred both to (the pleasure of) the chance discovery of the coins, and to the personal discoveries that might be made in flipping them—the choices they might generate being “PAUSE / ACTION,” “SOLO / TOGETHER,” or “Just LISTEN / SPEAK.” 

Ryan Gander is an extraordinarily prolific, award-winning contemporary artist of international renown, and recipient of an Order of the British Empire award for services to contemporary arts. Elected as a Royal Academician in 2021, his biography notes that his multi-form artworks engage “a questioning of language and knowledge, a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork.”⁵ More than that:

His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, a network with multiple connections, the fragments of an embedded story, a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own connections and invent their own narrative in order to solve the charade with its many solutions, staged by the artist.⁶

The Find’s action was exemplary of this narrative modality. But with decision-making at its heart, the project also resonated with a discourse of self-help—ubiquitous in the realm of financial advice on offer from charities and statutory and financial institutions responding to the cost-of-living crisis.⁷ For many people in the context of the cost-of-living crisis, tactical adjustments to spending behaviours are insufficient to address even basic needs. As Frances Ryan glosses a 2023 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report accounting for the radical rise of destitution in the UK, a condition now affecting 3.8 million people, “a decade of austerity and squeezed wages and benefits has ripped the social fabric, making large swathes of the population poorer, sicker and more insecure.”⁸ In this light, we might initially query the formal approach of The Find. It seems to present coin as a device to address “wellbeing in private terms, as a goal that is achievable through the adjustment of habits and patterns”⁹—as Marcus Verhagen critiques various texts exploring “slowing down” amid cultural and economic acceleration. To circulate 200,000 coins which resemble money that might be spent, but which instead invite their finders to consider whether to “pause/take action,” and so on, might in one sense be interpreted as injudicious.

Tonally and contextually the artwork is vulnerable to such an interpretation—one that also threatens to return us to jaded debates about the nature of art, and in turn how resources are deployed to create it. Keeping this tension in view, I argue here that The Find also suggests larger questions about the modern monetary system. The artwork took an aestheticizing, defamiliarizing approach to coin, thereby staging it as both an instrument of exchange and a social question. The cache of coins was circulated specifically in Manchester—“a city that was at the centre of the industrial revolution, and that shaped global capitalism in the 19^th century.”¹⁰ As Emily Gilbert and Eric Helleiner show, the nineteenth century was also the moment in which standardized national currencies gradually superseded a “chaotic monetary situation” consisting of numerous privately and publicly produced currencies accessible both as coins and notes.¹¹ Demands were made on the part of the poorest citizens for “‘small denomination’ money” to enable access to national economic participation.¹² In the contemporary, access to cash is also an object of political contention, but now in the context of the digital. With these historical aspects in mind, I discuss The Find’s participatory aesthetics and ethical claims, asking what its engagement with coin might elucidate regarding continuities and changes in cultural and economic life, and contemporary struggles regarding money.

I participated in The Find with a friend who lives in Manchester and her young child on Saturday, July 8, 2023. Having gathered at Piccadilly Station on a humid but dull day, we embarked on the walk into the city’s streets. The vague destination of our wandering was Aviva Studios and Festival Square, the base of Manchester International Festival, where we imagined some coins might be seen. We strolled and talked, catching up after a few months of not seeing one another. The temperature suggested the prospect of rain. As the walk slowly unfolded, my attention to the streets around began to shift, and I became increasingly preoccupied with successfully finding the coins. My focus on our conversation became distracted by the possibility that they were lurking somewhere about, their potential presence indicated by the flash of metal in the light. My eyes scanned pavements, the surfaces of walls, and nooks and crannies embedded in buildings as we talked. My gaze gradually became more attuned to the streets’ spatial geometry and material textures. I noticed the arrangement of grids of paving stones, the roughness of road surfaces, and bricks which had crumbled away slightly. I became more conscious of the heights of buildings, the grey of the surrounding sky. Rightly or wrongly, I felt a sense that the streets we were walking through, despite their location in the city centre, were peripheral—by virtue of the absence of shops, the presence of the occasional metal fence. No coins yet.

On Lever Street—a street in the Northern Quarter named after one of Manchester’s nineteenth-century industrial families—we encountered a large poster relating to the artwork in a frame behind glass. The sheen of the glass over the poster’s black backdrop reflected us like a mirror. An image of one of the coins floated upon it at a slightly oblique angle, with a phrase above: “Looking for change?” Amid the black, the silver coin gleamed. The image carefully picked out the texture of its ridged edges and ornate internal rim. Pitched somewhere between photograph and photorealistic painting, the image possessed a magical aspect. In the middle of the coin was its instruction: “Just… LISTEN.” More words ran around the edge of the coin, though here it was impossible to make them out: they were “Your silence is louder than their raised voice.” (The reverse of this coin was not shown by the poster: “SPEAK,” embedded in a series of embossed quotation marks, encircled by a cryptic descriptive pairing: “Panoramic Vision * Panoramic Voice.”) A hashtag at the foot of the poster—#TheFindMCR—stitched the material search for coins into the digital realm. Though simple in its design, the poster’s statement was complex. On one level, its question related to the treasure hunt of the artwork, to which we could respond: yes, we are indeed looking for change on the streets of Manchester. The poster thus served as confirmation that we were on the right track, and as an ad for the artwork for those that might not yet be aware of it. On a metaphorical level, it presented a kind of decentring call and response to its audience: “Looking for change? Just listen.” It did not presume that the audience of this artwork was interested in change, nor specify what the change in question might be, nor even insist that change was necessary. It projected one person listening to another, or to wider social currents, or, in a surreal register, for the tinkling sound of metal somewhere in the vicinity, as if the coins might be alerting an audience audibly to their presence. Perhaps amenable to collective decision-making processes, the coins primarily imagined an individual subject.

We continued to walk. I said something about how The Find was making me think about what it must be like to scour the streets habitually for things that might be useful or of value to the seeker. The image I had in my mind was one of impoverishment: of looking for items lost or casually dropped by others on the ground such as money, or partially smoked cigarettes. From this standpoint, the city’s streets seemed an unforgiving scene of barriers and blocks where useful or desirable resources might manifest themselves at random. My friend agreed, and reflected upon how parenting had made her scrutinize public pathways in a much more vigilant manner, but from the point of view of whether or not objects that lay about were safe for her child to pick up. She added, “and, in a totally different category of experience, also Pokémon.” I thought about how, as reported on the Off Menu podcast a few weeks before, the comedians James Acaster, Sikisa, and Helen Bauer participate in their own hunting “crew” for Pokémon Go—an augmented reality game in which individual players collect and interact with digital Pokémon on real streets via an app.¹³ We arrived at Market Street and its imposing Victorian stone buildings. The literalism of street names in the City of London came to my mind—Milk Street, Bread Street, Poultry—their historical derivation, their sculpting of the social world and its priorities. We approached the grand edifice of the Royal Exchange. A sign attached to the building—formerly used for commodities trading, now a ritzy shopping arcade adjacent to one of Manchester’s significant theatre buildings—revealed that it was bordered by Old Market Street, Bank Street, St. Ann’s Square, and Cross Street. Rising up beyond St. Ann’s Square was the extraordinary spectacle of Barton’s Arcade, a metal construction reminiscent of the design of the Crystal Palace which housed the 1851 Great Exhibition, sandwiched uncannily between larger buildings on either side.¹⁴ No coins here either.

We took a moment on a bench near to the Royal Exchange Theatre for a snack and a rest, before heading to Festival Square on Water Street, where a lunchtime gig for children was in full swing. On a covered stage, illuminated by blue lights, a jazz singer was belting out an adapted version of “Blue Suede Shoes” to which the dancing children were invited to suggest lyrics. By now it had started to rain a little bit. I left my friend and her child to dance and wandered out beyond the covered area to see if I could find any coins—scrutinizing benches and the areas adjacent to the food trucks. My heightened apperception of the shape of the landscape had waned, replaced with a vague sense of disappointment accentuated by the dismal drizzle. I rejoined them. Having listened to a couple more numbers from the singer and her band, we decided to head on to the Whitworth Gallery, where Tino Sehgal’s performance This entry (2023) was in progress, alongside a group exhibition, Economics the Blockbuster: It’s Not Business as Usual (2023). Like The Find, both works were programmed within the Manchester International Festival, and both were free of charge. Upon arriving at the gallery’s entrance, a mild adrenaline rush spiked in me as I wondered whether any coins had been deposited there. If there had been, we didn’t find them.

The Find introduced its beautifully designed coins into public circulation to propose that, as Ryan Gander put it in an interview at the launch of Manchester International Festival, “money isn’t our greatest value.”¹⁵ It also intended to question how, under the conditions of consumerism, “we’re all obsessed with things”—while at the same noting the cultural associations between finding money and luck, and quite rightly contending of the artwork’s enticing coins that “you’d be a fool not to pick one of these up.”¹⁶ Neither the artwork nor commentary on it by critics or local journalists made any reference to the cost-of-living crisis—although Gander’s observation in that interview that “you can’t buy anything in Britain for a coin now”¹⁷ hinted at inflation. Instead, in formal terms, it joined a long tradition of the use of coins for non-monetary discursive purposes. Examples on display at the Bank of England Museum include the “Middlesex halfpenny local token, 1700s,” a coin “advertising a show at the Lyceum Theatre at the Strand in London,” and “Spence’s Plan token, 1813,” embossed with the legend “‘NO LANDLORDS / YOU FOOLS / SPENCE’S PLAN / FOREVER’ […] a political message to spread in favour of what Thomas Spence termed the ‘communalisation’ of all landed property.”¹⁸ In strong contrast to this nineteenth century demand, The Find’s moral economy focused on shifts to individual thought and practice which may or may not then open out to wider collective effects. In these terms, Gander framed the work’s conceptual position like this: “we should experience our life in terms of value, in moments, and conversations, and ephemeral things, and memories, creating history.”¹⁹

At the heart of The Find’s vision was thus an encouragement of a gentle rebellion against routine wherein the fulfilment of basic needs was imagined as already given. “Value” in this context connoted prioritising the intricacies and unpredictability of lived experience. Implicitly contrasted is time measured—as Marcus Verhagen glosses capitalist modernity’s construction of it—as “an abstract and universal medium, like money,” of time as an entity “understood in quantitative rather than qualitative terms.”²⁰ That is to say, in its commitment to the ephemeral and the aleatory, the artwork counterposed time as measured and measurable (“clock time”) with a non-measurable experience of time—and used money tokens as the contradictory means of actualising it. In its approach to public space and its refunctioning of coin, the artwork sought to obviate exchange value and prioritize use. The decision-making game itself was conceived by its creator as a method which “helps with agency or helps disrupt the monotony, or that kind of order, structural order that we’re all stuck in that we could escape quite easily, but we never remind ourselves to escape it,”²¹ implicitly positioning the work as an heir of Situationism. Gander also spoke of The Find’s public offering as a democratising gesture: “to be part of a project and then to find out it was an art project—it kind of destigmatizes contemporary art, which needs to happen, because traditionally it’s been for the elite few, and we need to get rid of that completely.”²² 

The next morning, I returned to London. Later that day, my friend sent me some public Instagram posts she had seen about The Find. One shared on June 30 featured three images: a massive hoard of collected coins, a billboard with ten identical posters on a dark teal background featuring the text “Your choice” and the coin inscribed “PAUSE,” and the various coins now arranged in stacks. The caption read “Jackpot #TheFindMCR I will be sharing this. Soooo addictive finding them. Most found in NQ, some around Manchester Art Gallery, mainly not being noticed!” A subsequent post by the same author, dated July 9, catalogued various locations around Salford Quays about three miles from Manchester city centre at which they placed some of the coins. They posted: “Redistributing some of the wealth around Salford Quays this morning. #TheFindMCR @ryanjgander Love the fact that this is a piece of art you can engage with, even if you don’t know it’s happening, simply by finding a coin”—a reflection that resonated with the artist’s own aspirations for the work. The images showed the coins resting unassumingly on walls, picnic tables, granite blocks, paving slabs, and metal planters. In these settings they looked small, camouflaged slightly, like insects, or frogs in ponds. Another post by someone else, shared on July 1, had a sequence of close-ups of the coins on the top of fences, grates, and the ground; this person had chosen not to collect and redistribute the coins herself, but to leave any of the sort she already had where she found them. Seeing these posts graced with so many shiny coins, now hundreds of miles away, made them seem even more desirable in my eyes. My friend planned to take her child to the park the next day to look for them again.

Approaching The Find in terms of redistribution, as these participants did, revealed that the meanings of the work exceeded the processes of movement it initiated in urban space, or the alternative ways in which the coins might encourage a person to direct their own life—that is to say, their micro-economic, self-help characteristics. By virtue of “minting”²³ and publicly issuing coin as an artistic device the project was also, intentionally or otherwise, a comment on the forms in which money is now made available and the manner in which it circulates or is accumulated. On the way back to London, I read a couple of chapters of Brett Scott’s Cloud Money (2022), which explores the politics of “the automation of global finance, a process that first requires the physical money in our wallets to be replaced by digital money controlled by the banking sector—a scenario euphemistically called ‘the cashless society.’”²⁴ In light of Scott’s account, The Find’s local circulation of aestheticized, non-monetary coin took on another character. From the standpoint of the “cashless society” as “aspirational digital modernity”²⁵—a narrative that Cloud Money strongly contests—The Find’s chosen object appears nostalgic, inconvenient, an antiquated form not long for this world. But it looks quite different from the standpoint of cash as a monetary technology that is not imbricated in digital networks, is accessible without recourse to cards or electronic devices, and which enables more immediate control over personal transactions.

And while it did not explicitly engage with this issue, the project took place in a scenario of political contention over the future of cash in the UK, relative to the cost-of-living crisis and to what is termed the “digital divide”²⁶ within the larger global context of the capitalist system and escalating economic inequality. In March 2023, for example, two petitions were debated in the House of Commons under the heading “Cash Acceptance”: their key calls were to, “‘[m]ake it illegal for retailers and services to decline cash payments’, and to: ‘[r]equire all businesses and public services to accept cash payments’, with the exception of internet-based businesses.”²⁷ In September 2023, a Financial Times piece reported that “[c]ash payments increased in the UK for the first time in a decade last year, driven by a post-pandemic rebound, economic uncertainty and the cost of living crisis,” while also noting that “more than 600 banks [were] due to close by the end of 2023, leaving about 4,000 across the UK”²⁸—a story demonstrating the entrenchment of the banking sector’s withdrawal of in-person services in favour of the digital, despite rising public demand for cash. Beyond its focus on individual wellbeing, in choosing to circulate coin in the public sphere, The Find’s action might be interpreted as a refusal of the “claim that a cashless society is inevitable.”²⁹ However, in that very action, the artwork also staged money much as it is conventionally imagined in terms of a “safe-deposit box”: as a limited resource, fundamentally material in nature, to which access is predicated on competition and luck.³⁰

Interpreted in context, this project might be seen as an aspect of an historical moment described by Adam Tooze as a monetary “interregnum”: one of renewed political critique and attention to the politics of money, following global economic crises revealing “neoliberalism’s ultimately doomed effort to depoliticize money.”³¹ That is to say, these crises have thrown into question the notion that money is “neutral or a veil over the ‘real’ activities of the economy (trade, exchange, the use of land and labour).”³² The Find’s action was ambivalent and often contradictory—of necessity, given its chosen object. Its critique of the social prioritization of things was staged through the distribution of a large but limited quantity of fine objects—and indeed Gander reflected that the total number of coins the project made and distributed was determined by “‘cost of the metals and the exchange rates.’”³³ Its creator framed “time and agency and attention” as precious and monetizable, and social media as an industry that accordingly seeks to “steal” time.³⁴ Nonetheless, the project generated a volume of social media posts—some on what was then called Twitter, but the majority on the image-driven platform of Instagram—and it was these that afforded the project its sense of collective undertaking. 

The coins’ aesthetically realist resemblance to 10p pieces and their status as limited editions put them in ethical proximity with “real” money in other, perhaps unanticipated ways. Gander reflected upon festival volunteers distributing instalments of coin around the city: “it’s really interesting how honest people are: people go chasing afterwards and giving them the money, that has happened, but there’s also—they get handed in to security people and police, which is weird.”³⁵ This reaction to the coins on the part of people unaware of the project bespeaks the status of money as an entity engaged, as Nigel Dodd argues, with “power, freedom, justice, and law,” and underpinned along with these aspects by a “nexus of mutual obligation.”³⁶ And in using coin to initiate movement in the city and critical reflection on everyday action, despite its presentation of money as a concrete and limited resource, the work arguably also spoke to this fundamental conceptual understanding: that in capitalism, money is “the real manifestation of ‘abstract time.’”³⁷

Having failed to find any coins in Manchester in July, I was finally able to get my hands on some in November by buying them on eBay.³⁸ Individual and full sets of the coins were then available from a number of sellers. As I finished this article in December, just two eBayers had the coins on sale—one selling individual coins on a “buy it now” and auction basis, and another selling multiple full sets. My own set was dispatched from a seller in Manchester. They cost £5 plus £4.50 postage, a sum I paid via PayPal, and arrived sellotaped to a Christmas card. Receiving them, I was transported to Christmases past, and the memory of gifts of pound coins from grandparents sent via the post. The coins were smaller and lighter than I expected, but the intricacy of their designs was bewitching, with more and more details revealing themselves with every look. At the point of purchase, I had looked at the various sellers’ other items. One was retailing hundreds of other items of clothing and household objects, indicating that the account was likely to be a small business; another carried a small selection of second-hand art books, suggesting the seller to be an enthusiast of art and culture. The seller I purchased from had only one other object on sale—a new Just Eat branded jacket, manufactured for the food delivery company’s couriers.³⁹ The non-monetary coins were here marketed as saleable commodities by virtue of their status as art; the jacket, on sale for a much lower sum than its recommended retail price, was an avatar of the insecure gig economy. A marketplace setting in which multiple ideas and practices—of art, branding, bargain-hunting, peer-to-peer commerce, and digital payment—coincided, the juxtaposition of these items on eBay evinced a vision of contemporary decision-making conditioned not by the meditative exercise of choice in the mode of self-help, but of economic necessity.