The Dow: Volume 1 — 1928 ibook

In 1928, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was expanded to thirty companies, establishing the basic numerical form it retains today.

This first volume of THE DOW, LG Williams’s seven-volume conceptual artwork, takes that moment of institutional definition as its subject: the companies selected to represent American industrial power, the economic world they embodied, and the peculiar authority acquired by an index presented each day as a measure of national prosperity.

In THE DOW, the artist does not select the corporations represented in the work. The index does. The constituent list determines the names, the names determine the abbreviations, and the historical composition of the Dow determines the form the work takes at a particular moment. Admission, removal, and substitution therefore become compositional acts supplied by an external economic system rather than by artistic preference.

Constructed through financial history, institutional selection, and the changing symbolic language of American capitalism, THE DOW: VOLUME 1 — 1928 examines the formation of an American economic canon—and the transformation of thirty corporations into an authorized portrait of the nation. The work accepts the Dow’s own system of representation and gives that system form.

The corporate abbreviations reproduced in this volume also exist as limited-edition artworks rendered on engineer-grade reflective sheeting mounted to heavy-duty aluminum. Borrowing the material language of road signs, regulation, direction, and public instruction, these works give physical form to corporate abbreviations already invested with authority elsewhere. Selected works from THE DOW series are available separately.

THE DOW was first conceived by LG Williams in 1999 as an ongoing conceptual artwork in which the ancient language of the Way encounters the modern authority of the market. Ideas of alignment, invisible order, change, continuity, and non-interference are recast through corporate selection, financial value, prosperity, and the changing composition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The artist establishes the conditions; history supplies the revisions.

LG Williams is a Los Angeles-based artist. He has served as Endowed University Instructor at the Academy of Art University, Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, California, and Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia, and has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.

PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in San Francisco in 1990, PCP Press publishes books, special editions, and rare publications by artists, writers, and cultural institutions, including Raymond Pettibon, Dave Hickey, Wayne Thiebaud, Bryan Reynolds, David Hawkes, Shepard Fairey, LG Williams, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and Lucerne Kunstpanorama.

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