Over the past several years, Joe Scanlan has read a lot of seminal economic texts and noticed that a strange thing kept happening: where the original authors were talking about absentee ownership, stagnating markets, colonialism and government subsidies, in the artist’s head he heard them talking about artists’ neighbourhoods, Chelsea galleries, taekwondo lessons, Jack Kerouac. Fascinated with these recurrent, uncontrollable synapses, the American artist rewrote the texts as he heard them in his head and colour-coded each alteration.

Produced for his exhibition at castillo/corrales in May 2009, Joe Scanlan’s Red Flags contains four essays that the artist has refracted from original texts by Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman and Edward Said, gathered in a slim, elegant book, beautifully designed by Francesca Grassi.