Golden Parachutes, or How to Jump out of an Airplane and Not Lose Your Briefcase

With the attention being given to former Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon's almost eleven million dollar cash payout after serving five months as CEO, it seems pertinent to examine the often large gap between the losses felt by shareholders vis-à-vis CEOs when a company falters, a matrix more commonly known as the "golden parachute".

Calculated as pay per day, Dixon's payout is more than the average annual salary of most Australians. Meanwhile, Qantas staff face another $1.5 billion in cost-cutting over a three year period, following last year’s 88 per cent fall in full-year net profit.

Alan Joyce, the current CEO, inherited the airline just as the global financial crisis struck and, as a result, received no short-term cash incentives (which were worth $1.2 million to him as the head of Jetstar in 2008), and a large reduction in the value of his share-based payment.

In contrast, it seems that Geoff Dixon and his chief financial officer Peter Gregg "timed their bailouts from the airline to perfection" (ABC News Online, "Dixon's $11m parachute from Qantas nosedive"), with Dixon's $1.86 million base salary boosted by $3 million in long-term benefits, $3.2 million in share-based payment, $1.7 million in annual leave payout and $657,000 in termination benefits. The total pay is the equivalent of almost ten per cent of the company's profit. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's financial newscaster Alan Kohler devoted a moment to the story in between reporting the Dow Jones and NASDAQ.

Recently in the Australian Financial Review ("Investor spotlight on 'disgusting' big bonuses", Sep 19-20, p. 3), Patrick Durkin writes:

"After the worst year for investors in decades, superannuation funds and their money managers have told boards to expect greater scrutiny of the pament of bonuses based on 'underlying profit'--a figure that excludes the worst damage of the financial crissis and inflates executive payouts.

...

The local investors are likely to win support for tougher standards from the group of 20 leaders' summit in the us after European leaders agreed on Friday that the G20 should set binding rules on financial sector pay, backed up by sanctions.

The EU decision came amid reports that the US Federal Reserve was considering surprisingly far-reaching proposals to rein in risk taking at financial institutions. The Wall Street Journalreported that the Fed's plan would, for the first time, inject govenment regulators deep into renumeration decisions traditionally reserved for the bank boards, allowing it to reject policies it believes encourage bank employees to take too much risk.

After the EU leaders' meeting, the Fed backed reductions in pay when bank performance deteriorates and said governments should explore ways to limit bonuses to a proportion of total pay or a bank's profits or revenue."

Sydney-based Stockland's eco-friendly offices

The article goes on to cite a few examples:

"Stockland reported a record $1.8 billion loss this year but managing director Matthew Quinn received more than $1.2 million in bonuses based on the company's underlying profit of $631.4 million.

Ports and rail company Asciano reported a $244 million net loss, its share price fell from $3.47 to $1.34 during the year and total shareholder returns were negativce 49.52 per cent, but chief executive Mark Rowsthorn received a bonus of $741,678 based on an underlying profit of $655 million."

With the 2008/2009 collapse of numerous stockbroking firms and some major banks, the spotlight on reckless CEO behaviour has meant that today's CEO and brokerage stories talk not only about investor losses but the possibility of regulation--particularly in the banking sector. How these regulations are enacted could well be one of the biggest economic overhauls since the twentieth-century rise of Keynesian economics.

On the other hand, Robert Wade, a former World Bank economist and current Professor of Political Economy at the London School of Economics, voiced a more realistic interpretation of events on the ABC's Foreign Correspondent (22/09/2009). The program looked at the fate of Iceland in the wake of the global economic crisis, the first country to be hit by the credit crunch, and one of the hardest: in the first week of October, 2008, its entire banking sector collapsed.

Wade, who predicted the outcome two years earlier (and warned the government, who couldn't have cared less), said of the event on Foreign Correspondent:

"Very little has been done to address the deeper causes of the crisis in Iceland. And I think unfortunately, that is a microcosm of what's happening elsewhere. We are moving back quite rapidly in the United States and Britain, Wall Street and the city of London towards something like business as usual."

Bastard TV/Got Milk?/Fucking in Norway

In 2004, Taiwanese-born artist Shu Lea Cheang was asked by the Swiss-based 56kTV - bastard channel (www.56k-bastard.tv) to create a channel for its “station”.

Sounds simple enough. But before I discuss Shu Lea Cheang and the history of the MILK project, it’s worth taking a look at the station itself. They describe themselves as “a cross between a television and a web project, a platform in the Internet that tells the story of itself as a television channel.” This channel has collaborators on three continents. Its programme can be received all over the world. The participants include artists from Bangalore, Basel, Berlin, Geneva, Los Angeles, Mexico, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Zurich, as well as collaborating text writers, translators, programmers and graphic artists.

According to the website, “It will not be possible to receive all the bastard channel programmes at all times, for our online project operates according to the television programme structure. Trailers will provide information about the times of day and night when you will be able to receive the next programmes in your part of the world.” So the station itself operates as a giant, ever-changing picture of the planet. What can you watch?

Tv-Bot: Striking News

This production, by Marc Lee (www. 1go1.net/doku/tvbot.mov), automatically searches the most recent news items from the Internet and compiles whatever radio, television, newspaper, and website news it finds—which are never older than an hour—to make the world’s possibly most up to date TV program. Live TV streams, live radio stream, live videocams, live imagecams, breaking newspaper headlines: it's all here. Regardless of which part of the world or what language it's in, via programming code transmission sources from five continents are delivered to the station audience and put together to form a permanently self-regenerating news event from across the globe, supplied with an infinite renewability of topicalities (complete with local times and headlines).

The channel’s “programme guide” states:

“TV Bot reports the happy return home of alleged tsunami casualties, added to it live Webcam images of peaceful American landscapes, in between snow storms in Chicago, snow-covered Arizone landscapes, the island Madeira's harbour, a harbour in Alaska. Original sound advertising clips from Saudi Television showing Saudi-Arabian businessmen clad in national costume buying mobile telephones. Then the latest search enquiries—just come in on fireball.de—are being played in per computer voice: 'playpen, rims, nylon, satellite TV installation, cabbage soup diet, D2 contracts, paste jewellery, Germany, floor lamps, Alicante flight, depressions, riddles, fuel cell construction kits, muscle build-up, soft toy animals, packing cases, air dehumidifying, class reunion, computer parts'. Al Jazeera reports 'Suicide Bomber kills 15', added to it Foxnews reports 'England heads towards defeat', added to it Webcam images of a lighthouse on a grey beach. Telegraph.co.uk reports 'Pinochet under House Arrest' accompanying a picture of a Christmas market somewhere in Germany, there are live TV streams along with the latest numbers of Indian Ocean casualties, a basketball game in American Daytona Beach, and finally Radio Japan broadcasts the latest news from Japan—in Russian.”

For my part, I found reports of a Swiss election campaign, a wife harassed in the UK, reports of Will Smith winning apologies and damages over a Hitler remark, Australian cricketer Brett Lee saying India were tough to beat superimposed over a picture of jellybeans taken in Japan, dozens dying in a Turkish invasion over a picture of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, a headline in French news magazine L’Express concerning President Obama with a stunning picture of outer space taken from Mt Wilson observatory in the US…all received at 8 pm at my home in West Australia. Links to the articles and how many minutes ago they were published are provided, as well as a URL for the images.

ZZZZZZapp: Commercial Break

Japanese artists’ group exonemo have turned the concept of those flashes of sound and image that intersperse the white noise you get when tuning a TV set and turned it into its own program. Their channel is a musical representation of commercial imagery, converting advertising images from spam mail into sounds.

Sphinx: The Adviser Program

In which the audience can ask “the sphinx” questions and get an answer minutes, hours or days later:

“Our listeners get into contact with the tele-oracle and are personally being given advice…viewers receive personal answers to existential problems from the Television Sphinx—without, however, knowing whether they will receive a written or spoken answer from the Sphinx herself or her intelligent robot within two to three days…one never knows in advance if the Sphinx itself or her machine will answer us. Since, here, two answering-instances are acting: on the one hand the Sphinx, the medium with a human voice, and on the other hand the machine, the advice of which is written in lissom sextain metre and being read by varying voices. Already dozens of people from Asia, Europe, and America have sought advice with the Sphinx—one can read up on her answers on bastard channel.”

And if you’re wondering what “lissome sextain metre” is, type it into google and see what happens…

View and Plan of Seoul. A Transpacific Intrigue. Espionage thriller in 13 parts

The artists’ group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries from Seoul contributes this “soap opera”, in which a roboticised woman’s voice narrates the reports of a fictional Korean agent over free-jazz music, the words appearing on the screen at varying speeds and in different sizes as they are spoken.

The twist in the tale? Our Korean agent is also a critical theorist: while talking about her missions she digresses into all sorts of topics, including “matters of a globalized world…graffiti in men’s rooms or the comparison between concrete architecture in Tokyo and Seoul.”

MILK

Shu Lea Cheang’s project, MILK, is the one channel on the station branded “Adults Only”, and originally intended as an “after midnight” channel (according to which time zone I’m not sure). It begins with a numeric counter which measures how many “Africans have died of AIDS since you loaded this web page”. After about five seconds 1 appears inside the counter, a few moments later, 2…the barest glimpse of a full-screen picture appears at the top of the screen. Suddenly, one by one, pornographic images appear. These images are called up live through a data-mining search engine, hence the other images that appear, all culled from the vast field of the Web—news photos, advertisements, family snapshots, celebrity pictures—and ensuring that the photos are different with every visit (or “rerun”?) Although the program uses “porn” as the search engine keyword, these other images are inevitably captured in the process, producing a numbing effect akin to rapid channel surfing.

The repetitive stasis and similarity of the pornographic images is placed in contrast to the rapid and inexorable movement of time represented by the African AIDS pandemic. Her work explores the limitations of the idealised webscape, that place of endless potential, by showing up its controlled, commodified and privatised nature. One realises parallels between the limited/endless free choice that the Web presents and the similarly configured excitements and frustrations of pornography. It takes about a half hour for the background picture to finally load and the images to disappear.

Such frustratingly slow speed is suggestive of an outdated dial-up connection, which also makes MILK something of a historical work, a reminder of how the Web has managed to both undergo immense change and stay exactly the same.

The idea, perhaps, is to move viewers’ physical responses away from the desire and frustration of a commodified sexual landscape, toward a politicised awareness of the relationship between time, capital, and visual imagery. It puts the global AIDS crisis in sharp relief, using the particularities of viewers’ isolated and commodified relationships to pornography within cyberculture. An academic journal in the University of Western Australia’s library that I found talks about the piece’s attempt to move its audience “toward an ideal of collectivity, connection, and ultimately postcapitalist economics.” The Web promised us the first two (and perhaps the last one, if the global financial crisis and its effect on the world’s perception of capitalism and possibilities of a refined version of late twentieth-century capitalist economics can be said to have been partly facilitated by all those Blackberries and laptops allowing such a rapid collapse in the markets), but its ability to deliver them has been ambivalent and varying.

As for the significance of that final image—“MILK is the white fluid for the 21^st century what the white powder was for the 20^th century high”—it’s a reference to a movie project Cheang was developing and had to abandon called Fluid. According to those who’ve seen it, it’s about a genetically engineered cure against AIDS:

“The movie is set in 2030, when a certain breed of people has started to produce a sexual fluid, called milk, containing a potent mix of endorphins. The government wants to control the drug traffic. The people who can produce milk are also declared illegal and hunted down by state/corporation. Milk is the white fluid for the 21st century, just like the white powder dominated the 20th century high. The film never saw the light but instead became a conceptual art project.”

Which brings us to one of the artist’s most daring pieces. In 2004, Shu Lea Cheang created an installation inspired by the aborted film for the Detox music festival in Norway.

One website, paraphrasing an “Art in America” report, wrote of the installation:

“In a darkened space, seven urinals lined one wall, each lit by miniature projectors aimed so that videos appeared over the drains. The center urinal showcased goldfish swimming in a bowl. The videos in the flanking urinals showed a tight shot of a contracting and distending anus that seemed to be squirming. Roped into the drains, were condoms that looked heavy with jism.”

Leading from this installation was another piece (at least in one of “Art in America”'s reports, referring to a (perhaps subtly different?) 2001 exhibition in Harlem), called Tub I.K.U.

“The miniature bathtub on a narrow perch was transformed by a scaled-down video projection—again, from above—of a woman reclining in utter relaxation, her arms draped over the tub's edges. As her right arm dropped into the water to caress her body, tiny splashes resonated in the tub as she masturbated. This small sound drew viewers closer as the woman quietly reached orgasm and was satiated. Her arms returned to the sides of the tub, and the tape loop replayed this scene of exquisite intimacy.”

Cheang would later make a film entitled I.K.U. (the word is a play on the Japanese 行く, iku, which means both "coming” and "going", but in slang terms refers to orgasm, in the same way that “coming” is used as sexual shorthand in English).

I.K.U. was a “Japanese sci-fi porn feature” conceived as a sequel to Blade Runner (and causing many problems with the actors and crew: the lead role had to be divided between seven actresses because no one of them was able to both act convincingly and willing to play out all of the sexual encounters. One of the editors stated “if it becomes a real porno film, I stop working on it”, demonstrating the project’s blurring of genre boundaries.

As for her installation in Norway, the Aftenposten, Norway’s largest subscription newspaper, reported that her idea to organise a casting session for Fluid inside the tent at the Quart Festival in Kristiansand resulted in the authorities intervening,causing a debate about the censorship of art projects. The idea was to film couples volunteering to have sex in the tent, the aim of the project being to focus public attention on the public sector's AIDS policies. The tent was set up in a restricted area on the festival grounds:

“Organizers say that will limit visibility from the general public at the festival, which has attracted thousands of fans and top name musicians this year such as Alicia Keys, Sean Paul and Morrisey.

Reaction to the sex tent is decidedly mixed. While some young festival goers say they'd gladly ‘perform’ for Cheang in the tent, others dismiss the project as a ‘PR stunt’ from festival organisers.

Some local politicians go much further in their criticism, saying the sex tent art project is a good argument for shutting down the festival.

Acting Mayor Bjarne Ugland called festival chief Toffen Gunnufsen in to answer questions about the sex tent. Gunnufsen told newspaperAftenposten that the project actually is part of a larger project called Club Detox, which even the city government supports.

‘That makes it good enough for Quart,’ Gunnufsen said.

Artist Shu-Lea Cheang expressed surprise that the project has sparked so much controversy. ‘Those who participate sign a contract before going into the tent,’ Shu-Lea Cheang told local newspaper Fædrelandsvennen.”

ABC news in the U.S. also reported on the story, helpfully informing its readers within the first sentence that the project was organised by a “Korean artist”! They added to the story that she:

“had intended to start filming couples who volunteered to have sex inside it in a fictive search for people to star in an imaginary pornographic movie called Fluid, Staale Stenslie, the head of Norway's National Touring Exhibitions told AFP.

Cheang's film of the search was to be shown at the Soerlandet Kunstmuseum, an art museum in the southern Norwegian town of Kristiansand.

The National Touring Exhibitions forced Cheang to cancel it at the last minute amid concerns that the shoot could violate Norwegian decency laws.

Stenslie had earlier said the project was ‘far from pornography’.

‘It's about humanity, nakedness and intimacy. Shu Lea is a very serious and respected artist,’ he insisted.

‘This is a society-critical exhibit. It's commentary on how we have handled the AIDS epidemic, and it's a bridge between popular culture and art,’ Stenslie said.

The music festival did however feature sex on stage.

A young couple attending a Cumshots concert was called up by the lead singer in the middle of the concert, where they had sex on stage to the crowd's applause, as the band played on.”

Which goes to show that artists may never be rock stars, but rock stars at least can become artists.