You Are …Gold!

Gold – a yellow metal which the Incas called the ‘sweat of the sun.’ Gold is both a chemical element and a symbolic colour, conjuring ideas of wealth, luxury and power and bound up with a darker side – corruption, excess and greed. King Midas ended up dying of starvation, partial to a little too much of it. Tolkien’s golden ‘One Ring to rule them all,’ by the same card, did not have the best effect on those who came into contact with it (despite stimulating neat side effects like the ability to understand spiders… shudder). We rely on this metal and are obsessed with it – bullion lies in bank vaults to shore up economies, we aspire to win Olympic Gold, wear it as jewellery, decorate cards and fancy chocolates with gold leaf and drink it in Goldschläger. We are reminded of the stuff every day walking down our high streets, seeing Cash for Gold stores and the trampled fast-food bags bearing the golden arches.

Gold is a playground, both as subject matter and material, for artists throughout history and never more so than today. To understand why, it is useful to go back through time, to the beginnings of our relationship with this metal. Two exhibitions this year provide the opportunity to examine the past and then zoom forward to the present – Scottish Gold at The Hunterian, Glasgow, and, over the pond, GOLD, at the Bass Museum in Florida.

Charting the history of gold usage, production and mining with a focus on Scotland, Scottish Gold runs until June this year. The first survey of its kind, the exhibition draws on the museum's rich mineralogical collection and maps both a social and natural history from the Bronze Age to the present. There is a lot to see – jewellery, weapons, medals and nuggets are displayed in lit cases against sexy darkened walls. Some of the information it reveals is surprising – it seems hard to believe that Scotland had its own gold rush in the 19^th Century. One of the earliest pieces of gold ever to be located in Scotland is, in fact, one of the most recent finds – a rather sagging Bronze Age hunting dagger with a bright, intact, handle made from gold. Found in a cist grave (a small stone coffin-like box), the body of the hunter who owned this weapon has long since disintegrated but the band of gold remains; polished up it is amazingly pretty much untarnished.

There are a lot of  facts and global contexts to what’s on display: 75% of all the gold currently ever extracted has been mined since 1910. The largest gold nugget, nicknamed ‘the welcome stranger,’ ever mined (in Australia) weighed approximately 90kg. In 2013 the consumption of gold produced in the world was about 50% for jewellery, 40% for investments and 10% for industry. The world’s largest gold bar has a mass of 250kg and is owned by the ToiGold Museum in Japan.

A piece of thread and cloth relating to Robert the Bruce is a highlight. Seven hundred years ago Robert I (the Bruce) defeated Edward II in battle and established Scottish independence. Ruling until 1329, when he died he was buried wrapped in a cloth of gold and inside a coffin with a white marble tomb gilded in gold. On display is a tiny piece of gold thread and a specimen of late medieval cloth sewn with gold – the items introduce you to the history and story which is pertinent to current affairs today. It is unlikely Alex Salmond, if successful, will get the same treatment.

Fast forwarding now through history. Skipping through craft, its relationship to making, multiple art movements and the birth of what we view as the modern-day artist we arrive into the last 100-ish years.  At the turn of the century, the famous gold-leafer artist Gustav Klimt, he of kissing couples and romantic ladies, discovered gold through his father's work as a gold engraver. In the 1950s, Salvador Dali used gold for quite a number of Surrealist works and in his Surrealist jewellery making. The most striking and thoroughly mad is The Royal Heart brooch. Made for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, gold encases a heart made of rubies which is constructed so it can pump like a real heart. Head to YouTube for an unsettling video of the brooch pumping in action. The 60s brought Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, and Yves Klein sold his immaterial work, colours and empty spaces, for quantities of gold leaf which he then threw into the River Seine in Paris.

In the 80s and 90s things got a little more extravagant. Jeff Koons constructed the 12 foot high Gold Balloon Dog and gold leaf-plated Michael Jackson with Bubbles. Christo and Jeanne Claude wrapped the oldest bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, with golden sand-coloured cloth. Lit at night, the bridge glowed with a glitzy seductive glamour.

Last year Chris Burden, the artist who had himself shot in the arm in 1971 as a comment on the Vietnam War, was the subject of a major retrospective at The New Museum, New York. A much publicised work was Tower of Power, a stack of 100 one-kilo gold bullion ingots (chocolate bar shaped and worth over $4 million) stacked in a low tower and surrounded by little matchstick figures. A security guard must be stationed with the artwork at all times which is both for security and part of the artwork itself. Burden has said “The guard was a trick in mind-thought. People would think, it’s fake gold, and he has the armed guard there to fool us into thinking it’s real gold; but it would be real gold.”

Burden is just one of the artists featured in the upcoming survey show, GOLD, charting contemporary artists' preoccupation and referencing of gold both physically and conceptually, at the Bass Museum, Florida, due to open this summer. The line-up of work includes Darío Escobar’s Untitled (McDonalds Cup) – a disposable soda cup gilded and touching on the differences and similarities between the throw-away product and the ceremonial receptacle; Olga de Amaral’s large gold-leafed tapestries referencing pre-Colombian archaeology and Eric Baudart’s Concave (2013) which mounts layer upon layer of gold foil atop each other; when hung on the wall they sag and separate at the edges creating a look of sad, damaged books or pasted gig posters. Elsewhere, John Millar's gilded assemblages collect together found objects in circular panels, like spinning vortices they seem to have sucked in everything in their paths. Although the objects that can be seen, shells or shoes for example, are completely ordinary –  there is a strange unnatural alien quality, albeit a pretty lo-fi one – like using kitchen foil to build a home-made spaceship.

This otherness, strangeness is hardly surprising for gold, at least the stuff we use, is in fact not from our Earth at all. Due to its weight, most of the gold that occurs naturally on our planet has sunk to the centre of the earth, near the core. This means that the gold we mine and use comes from the farthest reaches of space, falling on Earth during meteorite showers. This metal is an intergalactic hitchhiker. No wonder it is an endless source of fascination for artists. GOLD!... always believe in.