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From a company founded on the merger of “art” and “life”, where time spent living is monitored by punch clocks, where grocery shopping becomes an exercise in fiscal responsibility, and where joining the Chamber of Commerce is a way to get a free meal, you should expect nothing less than poetry from that company’s quarterly financial reporting. While operating as Death & Taxes, Inc. we published four quarterly reports, a representation of the company’s financial data and simultaneously a collection of essays by internationally renowned artists, writers, and curators.
Each report is an edition of 100, signed, numbered and imprinted with the now defunct company’s official corporate seal. True to the generally accepted accounting principles for preparing a financial report, each report includes the company balance sheet, a written summary of their financial highlights, a letter from their board’s president Allen Spore and a management discussion featuring an unlikely counterpart to the corporate nature of the project.
There are only 100 copies of the quarterly report, which contain an essay by writer and curator, Marcia Tanner, ArtForum critic at large in Beijing, David Spalding, the company’s president and artist, Allen Spore, as well as four pages of full-color photographs documenting the company’s activities and their first quarterly board meeting (held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in April). The “management discussion,” a required element in most corporate financial reports, features an interview with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business professor Raymond Miles.
Continuing the saga to run their lives as a corporation this issue includes an interview with ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, articles by artist/writer Jordan Essoe, Artist and Critic Leah Modigliani, and a special reproduction of art by Jon Rubin.
“Turning the quarterly report into a limited edition journal of art and essays seemed to us a natural format for releasing our financial data,” says Fletcher, who was also the company’s CFO. The third quarterly report features articles and essays by nationally renowned authors, including writer/curator Berin Golonu, artist and writer Maria Porges, and artist and stretcher.org co-founder Cheryl Meeker. This quarter’s management discussion features a tarot reading by famed psychic to the business world, Gypse Jacquaar.
Interspersed with detailed financial data regarding the artists’ lives and their financial health are hard hitting articles and essays by nationally renowned writers, including Tamara Draut, author of the critically acclaimed book “Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead”. The journal also includes essays by critic and conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats, and writer/curator Jessica Brier.
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