The title of the piece, "AB42908610B", is the US Mint serial number of
the one-hundred dollar bill. If a green back's serial number is its
unique identification code much like a finger print or retina pattern,
then it can be seen as the element that separates the object
culturally from its genetic partners. In this way, the serial number
is the green back's personality or soul. As an artist, I aimed to
modify the bill - and not completely obliterate it. The title of the
piece was decided early on in the thinking process, to ensure that
whatever happened to the dollar bill physically, its soul would live
on - inherited by the art object.
I chose to
do the one hundred dollar bill firstly in order to be bold in
destroying an amount of money that would actually mean something to
someone, and secondly because the back of it shows Independence Hall,
where the US nation was born. The Declaration of Independence was
signed, Articles of Confederation ratified, and The Constitution was
written in that building. To split this image up into ten pieces and
ask the viewer to join in has obvious symbolic meaning. The pieces
self-animate, creating a paper rustling noise. Through time, the paper
will rub up against itself enough that the bill will destroy ITSELF,
and I have delegated the alteration of the bill to the entire audience
body. I am asking everyone to feel a piece of authorship in the
scrambling of the bill. That idea of delegation or collaboration with
the viewer is the only reason I incorporated robotics into the work. I
used a light sensor so that the interaction with the money could be
indirect - someone's presence is all it takes to kill the bill
slightly. The piece also responds to ambient light changes, giving the
robotically scrambled bill a life of its own - engaged in a noisy
dialog with the household life.
I do not see
my project as government subversive. If anything, it questions ideas
of value in general. Destroying US fiat currency is not illegal, nor
is there a body of law preventing it. In fact, one can walk into
Disneyland and pay fifty cents to have their penny squashed into a
Main Street Commemorative token, complete with keychain hole
punch. Companies sell collectable coins colorized with pictures of
soaring eagles and the world trade center. If those are sound
businesses, then where is the sneaky bit in all this? It turns out
according to Crimes and Criminal Procedure - 18 USC Section 331 that
the only way you can go to jail is to alter the money in such a way as
to trick the next receiver into trading more for it. Apart from that
law, there are also intellectual copyright issues with the graphics on
some of the bills. This absence of defacement law makes sense to
me. Money is whatever a society can agree it is; that is money's basic
truth. If the government issues green backs, it's not that they are
allowing you to borrow their property. It is your property - you
traded for it fairly, and you can do what you please with it. The area
that the government is concerned with is how much value the monetary
instrument symbolizes to its users.
I have
explored the idea of incorporating money in earlier works, but it was
never the main focus of the piece until now. I had also never joined
the money play with my main artistic focuses on interactivity and
movement in the physical space. In 1996, I was a drawing and painting
student in Palos Verdes Peninsula High school. My teacher, Linda Jo
Russell [1], assigned a standard drawing exercise in which students
were asked to sketch objects from the environment and try to join the
objects to one another through imagined fictitious conjoining
methods. The assignment was entitled "Morph" by Ms. Russell. Among the
contents I scavenged from around the classroom and from inside my
backpack was a one dollar bill - which I conjoined to a rotting ivy
leaf [2]. I recall from then that the reason I joined the leaf with
the dollar bill was wishful thinking - I wanted money to grow on
trees. I also remember thinking that the level of detail on the bill
was so intricate that I would not possibly be able to reproduce it
with my meticulous realism. I later realized that there was a
functional reason for such visual intricacy.
In 2003 in New York, I was doing a drawing exercise guided by Billy
Sullivan [3] in which I would do a self portrait in a "drawing"
medium. Because it was that time and place, I had a very expanded
opinion on what "drawing" was, and ended up attaching all kinds of
materials to a piece of acrylic plexiglass that I found on the upper
East side of Manhattan. Among the materials were my old retainer from
adolescence, used bars of soap from my toilet, and the pocket change
lying around in my flat [4]. Because it was a self portrait, I was
really trying to do a meaningful job and put valued pieces of my life
into the work. When asked by Billy later on to explain why I had taped
money to the drawing, I responded with the unfortunate one-liner,
"because I want to give my work some VALUE." The actual value of that
statement was probably akin to the scene in the 1971 "Willy Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory" in which Gene Wilder's character picks up a
pair of sneakers and throws them into a pot of boiling confectionery
research, saying "gives it a little kick." [5]
I have always found money to have a troubled relationship with the
arts. My parents, worried for my financial future, wanted my art
training to be more industry applicable. This rational finally rubbed
off onto me from within when I decided to change undergraduate major
from art to design at UCLA. Then, the design department was more
"design" and less "media art." I saw that I was joining a particular
movement or genre that had experience being industry-integrated, hence
securing my financial future. Of course I was wrong about that (aside
the department switching emphasis to theory-driven media art), but the
principal remained. I find that the arts in America have an
anti-capitalist tint. I don't know if that's escapist, anti-corporate,
or just left-over counter-culture zeitguists from the 1960s. Movements
seem to try and resist what is being called "Disnification" ie. the
industrialization or monetization of an art genre - much like
cartooning in hollywood, or industrial arts in early 20th century
Germany. I personally find no shame in creating art for money or about
money. I still consider it artful. I also hold no bars on "money-free"
art practices because I think there is experiential value to
that. When an artist tells me that he or she is anti-capitalist, the
first thing I ask the person is whether he or she has had a good
experience in selling work or in employment. People I've met prefer to
keep the money talk out of the art talk. But what if the piece, itself
is interpretting the idea of money as the very subject matter? The
conversation suddenly changes. A threshold is crossed, and perhaps a
boundary of safety is violated.
FOOTNOTES
[1] - Linda Jo
Russell, MFA, California State University, Long Beach. Trained to
teach perceptual drawing techniques by Betty Edwards [Drawing on the
Right Side of the Brain], Ms. Russell now teaches workshops on drawing
and creativity throughout the United States. She is part of the
continuing education faculty at Otis College or Art+Design
[2] - image of drawing held by private
collector
[3] Billy Sullivan, New York painter
- best known for faux naive painting style - similar to Hockney in
aesthetic and subject matter.
[4] - image of
this drawing held by private collector
[5] -
see line 2163 of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY as transcribed
by Aaron Villa in 1998.