MONEY & MAGIC... on GIFT, GRIFT, and GRAFT by Mark Wagner

Added on October 13, 2019 by Mark Wagner.

MONEY & MAGIC... on GIFT, GRIFT, and GRAFT
by Mark Wagner

THE GLUE THAT BINDS US

My friend Ryan Oaks is a magician... a performer on both stage and screen as well as in other more intimate settings. Ryan claims no mystical insights, nor preternatural abilities. Instead he is capable of discrete manual manipulations... capable of making relatively common objects behave... or, er, misbehave... in ways difficult for laypeople's eyes to follow or their minds to comprehend.

Ryan introduced himself because he saw the connection. We share a job description. We both use dollar bills in our act. We make them do weird things. For example, we can both make money disappear in ways besides spending it. We both aim to delight. We both use money to make an audience pause and reassess their perception of the physical world.

Ryan came for a studio visit and gave us a little show. We showed him some of what we do to do what we do. Turns out our jobs both involve esoteric equipment and material preparations. Ryan gave me a pair of trick scissors. I gave him a baggie of bill parts he'd otherwise be at pains to fake.

THE TRICK SCISSORS

Those scissors were a great addition to my scissors collection. The technical term is a "gaff"... a specialty prop, often appearing to be a common object, used to help a stage magician sell an illusion to the audience. In the trade the scissors Ryan gave me are referred to as cut-no-cut scissors. I'm not going to tell you how they work, because I might want to play the trick on you someday. A tiny hand-scratched inscription on them reads "Modified by WB in 1982." Digressively... I never identified with Batman, nor Robin, but with Alfred. I never wanted to go out on missions, but to work on useful gadgets in the basement and keep the house in order.

THE EXTRAORDINARY CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING ADHESIVE

There are ten... no eleven... important adhesives in my life. I'd lost track of one. I'd come to use it so sparingly that my one remaining can had lasted for several years past the date the original manufacturer had stopped making it.

I wrote in an email:

Dear Ryan,

A funny thing happened today. I was doing some online research looking for info on an old favorite adhesive of mine (3M ReMount Repositionable Adhesive to be exact) that stopped being manufactured in North America years ago. I was looking for a suitable replacement or wondering if any of 3M's other products might work for me. So, I googled the name and poked around at some of the hits looking for genuine information and not just wishful speculation.

So much product information can't be trusted out there. Company reps just want to sell you their product, so they'll claim it does whatever you're looking for. There are so many craft people and art people out there who are either mindlessly brand loyal, or not discerning enough that you can't trust them either. But I came across this one group discussion that was really really helpful... a conversation among sensitive craftsmen who appreciated somewhat nostalgically the specific qualities of the 3M ReMount adhesive that I too had appreciated and missed. This conversation successfully guided me away from a bunch of bad products and eventually toward one that behaves in exactly the same way: Krylon Easy Tack Repositionable Adhesive. I was reading for like fifteen minutes. I thought... "these are my people." The only weird thing was, I couldn't figure out why it was so important to the list's participants that the adhesive work silently.

Turns out it was a discussion group of magicians.

Hey, thanks for coming out the other night. And for performing! It was super fun telling people there would be a magician at my opening. I know my sister Mary, and my friend Kurt's daughter really loved your part in it! Maybe I can take you out to lunch or buy you some beers sometime as a further thank you!?

Best Wishes,

Mark

MARK'S MAGIC GLUE

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is “What kind of glue do you use?”

One curse of contemporary capitalism is the belief that there's a material solution to your problems. Pathologically speaking, adverse materialism manifests in a number of ways. There are those who suffer from "getting ready disease." Others who obsess about the archivality of their art. Still others who avoid using materials they've purchased because they don't want to spoil them. I myself am a highly functioning material addict. I've indulged for years and at considerable expense. I hold (I don't say hoard) materials pretty much only to assure myself that it’s never the lack of materials getting in my way. It's a heavy burden. I own a palette jack.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right... certainly. But the opposite is just as true... if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong. I hand my kids whatever materials they ask for... folly though it be. Then I laugh at them from across the room in their glorious mess, paper scraps stuck to foreheads, great pools of glue spreading overtaking project and tools alike.

For friends and colleagues, I never hesitate. I'm not a guildsman protecting secret knowledge. Why should Colin or Jon wade through the research into rigid panels, their varieties, preparations, and uses when I've sooo done that already and can save them time and expense. I have intentions to make a materials manual in one of these zines... a boring tell-all of mix-ratios, tool resources, and personal best-practices.

To one's own people, one's own students, one's own kids you can indulge or expound and eventually expect to indicate the crux. But to the casual attendee at a lecture what can you hope to convey in a 30-second response? It's not about the glue... hell it's not even about the dollar bills. It's like a Penn and Teller routine... I can tell you all my tricks and you still won't know how I do it.

Sometimes I just want to be a prima donna jerk.

"What kind of glue do you use?"

"A magic glue that only makes good art."

LIGHT OF HAND

I’ve never stopped being a remedial reader. Certainly, one of the reasons I gravitated toward visual art was because the reading load was light. The main reason I know anything about what's inside books is from incessant listening to audio books while I work. Many of my own keenest poetic insights are born from reading and listening confusion... misapprehension or misentendre.

I love love love the phrase "sleight of hand." Love the skill and subtlety implicit in it. Love the delicate, fractional, barely-effable degree imparted by the word "sleight." The particular preposition employed: not "...in the hand," not "...with the hand," but "...of the hand." A thing altogether more integral and attuned.

The phrase comes originally from the French "legé de main" meaning more literally "light of hand." Sometimes "light of hand" does appear in English, but more often it slurs or drifts to "sleight of hand" and gains by it. This is similar to the way that "card sharp"... one clever in the manual manipulation of cards... often transmutes to "card shark"... continuing to embrace the sharpness, while connoting also the predatory nature of gambling cheats.

LOOK SHARP... THE PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE OF COLLAGE By Mark Wagner

Added on September 14, 2019 by Mark Wagner.

WHY ALL THE FUSS ABOUT COLLAGE?

Modern mediation has made collage a primary player in the contemporary conscious.

We all collage directly in our brains by flipping through channels, by flipping through magazines, by glancing around as we walk down the street. We collage with every Internet search. Culture from one source is constantly interrupted and butted up against culture from another source. Collage is the language of modern life—or, more precisely, its syntax. It is the genius of the age...pervasive, subconscious, and irreversible. Of our children, only a few will sense the texture life may have had before it.

The following examination focuses mainly on collage in the rarified world of fine art. It does so for the purpose of offering artists, students, and art enthusiast a handful of tools for approaching and analyzing collage artworks. But it is an added hope that these same tools—and the knowledge, practice, and experience gained through examining collage on this small-scale—will aid the reader in unraveling the net of feral collage going on in the world about them.

THE REAL HISTORY OF THE COLLAGE IMPULSE

Some years ago, while kicking around the shelves of the school art library, I stumbled on a book titled "European Surrealism of the 12th and 13th Centuries." This struck me as odd because in art class, I'd just learned that Andre' Breton invented Surrealism in the 1920s. But here was page after page of evidence to the contrary: sculptures and manuscript illuminations indulging unmistakable flights of fancy. All this hundreds of years before Breton.

Similarly so, let us now be done with the myth that Picasso and Braque invented collage. To grab just a few diverse predecessors: There's Arcimboldo, who, though painting, shows an unmistakable collage mentality. Sandwiches are a practical and tasty form of collage. Portmanteau words, which create a new word by running together existing words, have probably been around since the beginning of language.

Collage is evident since the prehistory of our species. The marrying of two givens to make a new thing, at once familiar, yet strange and new. Ancient mythology is riddled with examples: Minotaur, mermaid, gorgon, winged horse, sphinx…all are parts of one beast collaged onto parts of another. You take the serious part of a human—the features that give our species power and potential, arms that manipulate and a head that senses—and you add the business end of a horse—its legs and speed—and the centaur is born. What nameless storyteller first authored this image? What countless viewers and listeners have thrilled in it? Screw Picasso!

This collage-ish remixing of ideas, forms, and experience seems to be a hardwired part of the human condition. It is so integral to our makeup, we can do it in our sleep...hence all the personalized delights and terrors of the dream world.

THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY COLLAGE

Collage is not a medium...it is a method. It is more of a verb than a noun. Collage does not imply any specific material but an activity. One can collage with text, sound, moving images, or architecture...as well as with cut-up paper and recycled objects.

It is one of the simpler creative impulses tipping the domino here. Simpler than the impulse to generate a fully new thing is the impulse to alter what exists. The world can be different, and I will make it so like this and like this.

Collage includes a large family of activities called by other names. And it shares features and philosophies with a handful of other cultural strategies: appropriation, assemblage, bricolage, combine, compilation, computer graphic imaging, cut up, decollage, decoupage, erasure, mixing, montage, sampling, mosaic, l'objecte trouve, and ready made. Don't get flustered by the multitude of aliases. And don't let anyone tell you these other activities aren't actually collage.

Generally put, collage is the attaching of one thing to any other disparate thing. A bicycle wheel attached to a stool is a collage. A piece of tape changing "Driving with Care" to "Driving with Carl" is collage. A human ear growing on the back of a mouse is definitely collage. And, in one sense, every change of camera angle in every movie ever made is an act of collage.

For clarity and brevity, this investigation focuses on the concerns of two-dimensional collage. Though it is my intent that the principles described here apply universally to all manner of collage and think it only a matter of specifics to apply similar analytics to collage in other media. What's more, I take collage in the realm of the fine art world as a kind of laboratory study for collage in the context of culture at large. It is better understanding collage in this larger context that is the ultimate goal of this analysis.

1,2,3 THE VERY ESSENCE OF COLLAGE

I have heard many collage artists described in terms of other fields...so and so says they are painting with scissors and glue...someone else is drawing with paper. Certainly, all of the analytical tools one may employ to critique a drawing or a painting can also be directed at a collage. Discussion of composition, line work, texture, mood...all those qualities you learned about in two-dimensional design. But how about we get at the actual collage-y part of the collage?

In the same way that one inquires about a person's background and history to help judge their character, let us look to the making of collage to provide keys to interpretation.

At a level of extreme abstraction, every collage is born through the processes of three stages, executed in turn. First, an artist must select a source material to use: printed matter, object, photograph, etc. Second, an artist must deconstruct this material: destroy it a little, digest it for reuse, break it down, take it apart. And third, and artist must recontextualize these things that have been taken apart, forming them into a new whole.

The phases mimic in number and mood those of the Hegelian dialectic: "Thesis, Antithesis, Syntheses." With thesis, a premise is proposed; with antithesis, the premise is attacked or argued against; and with synthesis, the original and its refutation are combined into a new and more correct statement. With Hegel, the cycle is circular, and a synthesized statement becomes the new thesis to face new refutation, growing ever more refined. So too a collage artist may cycle through steps in a "lather, rinse, repeat" manner.

Concisely put, the phases are “Selection, Dissection, and Connection.” We examine each now in turn.

1. SELECTION...THE CHOOSING OF SOURCE MATERIALS

There is a mushy, undifferentiated nature to painting and drawing materials which allow them to directly step into the roll of becoming art. A tube of paint is nothing in itself...a blob...it is a proto-thing and has no identity to lose before taking on that which an artist may impart to it. By contrast, collage relies on the pre-made...things which themselves already have a degree of character. In a finished collage, source materials usually retain some of their original integrity, bringing with them their own heritage...their own time, place, style, and story.

Collage is like speaking, only in quotes, with the artist using someone else's words, idioms, and vernacular to express their thoughts. A thing must already exist in order for it to be collaged, and so collage is a reinterpretation, or redigestion, of what went before, hence it is often quick to irony, sarcasm, and critical thought.

The array of source materials used is as varied as the entire material culture of this world. Both the represented world of paper culture and the for-realsy world of objects themselves. If something's been made, be assured that someone has used it in collage. From candy wrappers to human cadavers and diamonds to dung balls. With the whole world of items to choose from, the fact that an artist has selected certain materials over all others proves telling.

There are collages that use valuable items...antiques, cash money, and factory-new automobiles spring to mind...but more often than not, collage materials are of a more common, less precious variety. Often, selection of materials is simply a function of what is available, thus an undertaker is more likely to build their house from formaldehyde bottles and an alcoholic from whiskey bottles.

A wasteful industrial culture was a necessary precondition for the flowering of collage. Collage is couched in the world of paper ephemera and publishing. The print revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries led to collage's real first flush. Its technical innovation offered a steady proliferation of material...first of words and then of images...in one format then another...in a parade of print process...in a plethora of changing styles...in such quantities that materials quickly became disposable. Enter collage, the cheapest and greenest of art world genera.

Collage is essentially popular, or "pop," in nature. It deals in the stuff of life...documents meant to serve some other purpose: advertising, packaging, news-providing, et cetera. Often low-brow or no-brow at its source, collage boasts a mobility of cultural stratification not accounted for by Walter Benjamin in his "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Elevating the forgotten or vulgar, enshrining it, up-cycling it into high culture.

Though the root of printing lay in the printed word, it has in the past century thoroughly embraced the image, leaving the collage artist with a full range of styles and subjects of image to work with...black and white to color, illustrative to photographic, in any subject matter. Nineteenth century medical engravings or 1970s porn...take your pick. An artist may pluck materials from another time or another part of the globe...from deep within the visual jargon of a specialized profession or from the front page of this morning's tabloid.

There is a veneer of authority to all of these mass-produced pieces of paper, similar to the latent believability bestowed to words simply by putting them in print. They have an air of mass approval and industrial backing. These materials of mass culture appeal subconsciously as a given quantum, passed to us as a constant from the other side of some veil. These qualities are available for the collage artist to adopt, exploit, undermine, or subvert.

Part of the appeal offered by these cultural artifacts is a technical polish they've received...a crafted aura imbued there by professional writers, designers, illustrators, printers, and the like. In this way, collage is a sort of unauthorized collaboration with those who created the source material.

Collage is an affirmation that culture feeds on culture. But also calls into question the notion of original authorship and the legal extent of copyright, fair use, and appropriation.

2. DISSECTION...THE DECONSTRUCTION OF MATERIALS

If step one is "boy meets girl," then step two is "boy loses girl." Collage is an art rooted in the act of destruction. It is named for the sticking—colle is French for glue—but before anyone gets around to gluing anything down, something must be destroyed, broken, chopped, sawed, sliced, or smashed. The specific manner of deconstruction and material handling can add a great deal of emotional tenor to a finished collage.

A cut edge can be every bit as lively as a drawn line. It can carry just as much information and expression. Mathematically speaking, the edge of a cut shape is a line with no width, making it imminently more precise and supple than any drawn line. Thus every collage—in addition to whatever else it may be—can be seen as a drawing of cut edges. Silhouette work, Chinese paper cuts, or the Matisse cut outs, made from plain or flat colored paper, are tantamount to collage without source material...being only the act of dissection: their cutlines, carving negative space from a positive field.

Cut or torn. Precise or loose. Methodical or gestural. In a manner that corresponds with the subject matter of the source material or seems to ignore it. With the tedium of an obsessive or the grand gesture of Zorro.

Metaphors of violence are close at hand...slash and stab, the thought of butchers carving up carcasses. Frankenstein. But metaphors of surgery are fitting as well...a promise of skill and the sense that the thing is being taken apart in order to correct a thing and make it better. Decay is a common theme as well...as wear leads to discard, and discard a necessary precursor to use in collage.

Using a material for collage inevitably leads to a certain ambiguity about it. In a way, the collage artist is saying that they like a material by using it: they willingly engage with the source material, they spend time with it, they adopt the material's voice as their own. But in another way, they are saying they don't like it, that it is not good enough the way it is and requires the help of the artist in order to right it. They cut it up, efface it, deface it.

The act of destruction can be titillating, which is to say, it can seem at once both naughty and thrilling. Like breaking dishes after a meal instead of washing them...it is not quite the thing one's grandmother would approve of. Best not to mention to the bibliophile that you'll be cutting up the books as soon as you get them to the studio. It can be an act of protest. Or a way for an artist to assert themselves in the streams of cultural deluge.

To what extent is the material transfigured? Is it to be circumcised...or neutered? Collage can gently adjust or fully transform. Collage can enshrine a thing fully intact...elevating an object, framing and presenting it as a reliquary. Or it can put a material on trial, violate or destroy it, mince a thing into its molecular simplicities.

Collage is an editor's art. It is an exercise of control to cut something up. It is a way to refine through subtraction and concision...to further select from an already select material. It is an exercise in exploration and curiosity too, like taking apart a machine to see its inner workings... like frog dissection in biology class.

3. CONNECTION...THE RECOMBINATION OF MATERIALS

Placing things in proximity enables them to interact. No chemical reaction—be it simmer or explosion—occurs unless reagents first come into contact. All love stories start in this manner. As do all border disputes.

What happens between materials? Mind the gap. Side-by-side on the page, matched images mingle. Some attract, some repel. Pick your metaphors for harmony and dissonance: fair skies and stormy, love and enmity, peace and war—collage is ultimately about interaction, and these metaphors will serve us well. Do things go together smoothly or not? Do they lead to seamlessness or seemliness?

The most overt and attention grabbing strategy for collage is juxtaposition. The flower stuck in the gun barrel. Mona Lisa with a mustache. These are strong images because they embody the meeting of two such opposite things. Contrast images, contrast eras, contrast print qualities...all make for engagement. Juxtaposition is so familiar and facile to collage, it is almost a cliché. Closure is the opposite strategy. Mental closure is the process for which glue is only the metaphor.

The mind is hungry for the task of optical interpretation. Trained thousands of years ago to pick out a predator's silhouette amid a forest's undergrowth, the brain will match up contours and form wholes from scant or disparate parts. This leads to a reflexive suspension of disbelief...a magnetization in which there ceases to be a partial photo of a cat atop a partial photo of a man, and instead, there is simply a cat-man.

Like a stage magician, an attentive artist can strengthen the illusion with just the right diversions or visual cues...matching line work, perspectives, or lighting from source materials.

The most cohesive work is perhaps "single-source" collage. Utilizing materials from a single origin can jumpstart the mind's closure. Max Ernst's canonical picture book, "Une Semain de Bonte," uses only engraved book illustrations as source material, giving the work a unity in texture and style uncanny for its surreal subject matter. Similar effect could be achieved with, say, all black and white xeroxes, all reproductions of Van Gogh paintings, or all text and dissected letter forms.

But to close or to juxtapose is not always an either-or decision. Distinctly different realities can still make use of mental closure by, say, matching contour lines or textures. Sometimes allowing viewers to mentally flip back and forth between individual pieces, and orchestrated whole...between the thing it had been and the thing it has become.

Technical excellence is not necessarily artistic excellence. Chinks in a façade are not necessarily negative. A less-than-rigorous matching of materials can read as exuberance, honesty, or guilelessness, as well as clumsiness. A ransom note pasted together from mixed typographies conveys a strong message.

Are there visible glue stains? The connective material may even take part in the very subject matter of the work, serving not just as stage hands but as performers in their own right. Consider briefly, if you would, the aesthetic and emotional effects of the entire world of mechanical fasteners: staples, pushpins, drywall screws, c-clamps, and the bolt in Frankenstein's neck. Also the less-used but still potent connective tissues of hand stitching, string, epoxy pour, or chewing gum.

So many fruitful strategies exist for the connective process within collage that it pains me to cut the discussion short. To mention just a few more, there are: The grotesque. Randomness and chance encounter. Repetition of elements possible from mass-produced items. The voodoo-like synecdoche of signifiers. The use of text relative to poetry. The unnatural marriage between just two pieces of paper. Or the everything-and-the-kitchen sink, horror vacui riot and wallow in mass culture.

NOW BACK TO THE GLUE POT

Selection, dissection, connection... I certainly don't mean to imply that practicing artists have these three stages consciously in mind while they are in the throes of making art, any more than rabbits in the field have natural selection in mind while copulating. But together, they form a functional sketch of a diverse field. And begin to indicate some of the dichotomies and spectra one is likely to encounter with collage.

I hope this will serve as useful grounds upon which collage can be examined, judged, and better appreciated...kickstarting a critical viewing. Let me know your thoughts.

Best wishes, Mark.

THE SMELL OF MONEY

Added on April 30, 2018 by Mark Wagner.

THE SMELL OF MONEY
by Mark Wagner

WHAT'S THAT SMELL? THE SMELL OF SUCCESS!

WHAT'S THAT SMELL? THE SMELL OF DEMOCRACY!

MY MYSTERIOUS SOCK DRAWER
   As soon as my sock drawer opens, you can tell something is amiss because of the smell. A not-so-faint, volatile, chemical smell issues. A smell that might alarm the clean-living, the chemically sensitive, or the organically minded. But to the rest of us, it is not a strictly negative odor.
   It is a manufacturing smell. The smell of newly configured materials still off-gassing. The smell is a cousin to the smell of fresh paint... of new or newly renovated interiors. The smell brings with it the promise of productivity... an olfactory reassurance that man manufactures. It is the smell from just underneath the cellophane.
   I know it’s dumb. That burglars always check your undergarment drawers right after the family bible for hidden booty. But here is where I hide the crispy ones. As ubiquitous as the one dollar bill is, crisp uncirculated ones not so much... so when I get some, I get a bunch. There's usually a grand or two in there. I dig to the bottom to remove a couple hundred at a time to the studio. I know it's laundry day when--sock level at low tide-- banded stacks peek out and I've got to throw a few undies over them.

THE PRESS ROOM
   That smell is the smell of the pressroom. The exciting smell of new ink on paper.
   For those of us initiate in the "black arts," it hints at the alchemy which has taken place. In which an undifferentiated blob of dark and dirtying matter (aka ink) has seized into a precise matrix of tiny lines and the spaces between them in a transubstantiation of rude material into meaning.
   At the paper conservation lab, we learned the poor-mans test for archivality: sniff it. If it smells, it’s changing... if it’s changing, it’s unstable. These bills are still new... barely made. The oil in the ink is still in the process of curing. One could argue that they are not...that the ink is still becoming. Sometimes the final press run--the relief-printed black of the Federal Reserve seal--is still "loose." You have to be careful not to smear it. It dries with exposure to the atmosphere, but these leaflets have been stacked tight.

AN EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF MONEY
   What is there in that familiar, welcome smell? Sniff.
   There are many intoxicants consumed through the act of inhaling. Probably the compounds emanating from a stack of new money contain no directly psycho-active compounds. But neuroscience shows that aroma has a tricky way of shortcutting the brain's more analytical functions... to impress smell deep within your emotional self.
   Now listen up. Our beliefs and behaviors regarding money are more emotionally driven than economists would have us believe. As individuals, we are more emoters of finance than calculators of finance. Our subconscious is crowded and clouded by murky beliefs, misconceptions, and contradictions about money. So, in the interest of our emotional understanding, lets smell again. Sniff... sniff...
   The sharp tang of linseed oil and the gasoline-pine of turpentine. That linseed oil, perhaps pressed from the seeds of the very plant that gave its flax fibers to the paper... oh non-Kosher world! Gum arabic, a slight, almost strawberry note. And a hint of talc puffed between the sheets as they stacked at the end of the press... this a slight astringency in the nose rather than an outright smell.

THE SMELL OF SUCCESS
   Poking around on the Internet to see what others thought about "the smell of money," I was excited to learn of a perfume called "Money." Someone had done it! A fragrance to finally sucker-punch our second-most-cherished desire. A logical follow-up to "new-car interior"-flavored air freshener. We thought Phillip K. Dick was only joking when he wrote about stuff like this 30 years ago, but the future is finally here, and see now what it brings!
   I traveled to the website of this perfume called "Money," hoping... I don't know... that I could help them out with images or advertising or something. That I could saturate the gallery with that smell during my next exhibition.
   The bottle comes in a box filled with shredded money... that's a nice touch. Though its probably not money... probably the never-monetized printing mistakes one can buy in bulk form the bureau of printing and engraving. Not that distinctions like that make a difference to anyone else.
   Then I saw there were "his" and "hers" flavor and my excitement began to wane. Its not like money in my wife's sock drawer would smell any different then money in my own. Then I read the fragrance description "precious woods, fresh ocean, bright citrus, rosemary, grass." That's not it at all.
   "Money" the perfume isn't some awesome meta olfactory recreation of currency; its just another perfume with a random identity pasted on top. It's just another incident of band-name-ism, in which something one is interested in has its name usurped by something one is not. Thus hampering the clarity of all future conversations and Google searches on the subject.
   People talk about the smell of money. I fall into the habit too... thinking mostly of my sock drawer and the cubbies of cut up bits at the studio. But money, in fact, does have two smells... though not "his" and "hers".

NON-FUNGIBLE
   I'm always up against the limited color-value offered by the dollar bill. The "white" of the blank paper upon which US money is printed is actually cream color, and the "black" of the darkest crosshatched lines is really just dark grey. Compare a bill to, say, white typing paper and glossy black paint and you'll see.
   So early on, I developed a preference for newer, less-circulated bills. These had the highest contrast because their whites hadn't started to get dingy and their darks hadn't started wearing away. I'd cut up only the clearest, cleanest bills in my wallet.
Sometimes I'd get a hundred dollars in ones from the bank and separate it into four piles: best, good, ok, and "to spend," with most bills ending up in the "to spend" pile. Sometimes there would be a fickle fifth pile... the bills limp from use, sometimes even tattered at the edge, you could hardly believe they were still circulating.
   Here is a point where the whole point of money breaks down. Money is supposed to be a substance where only quantity matters. As a unit of exchange, it is supposed to be completely fungible, with any specimen capable of replacing any other specimen. Each an unassailable platonic agent in a system void of individual characteristics.
   But all bureaucracies are composed of individual personalities. Just visit the local post office a handful of times and you will realize its better to deal with that one friendly guy than "the scrutinizer." Similarly, all dollars are not created equal.
   Even in their freshly printed, uncirculated state, some stacks are cut off center, some printed lighter, others over-inking. Indeed each bill is given a separate name-of-sorts by way of a unique serial number. And because there is connoisseurship possible in all things, among numismatists, this dollar or that may have a higher market value simply because of notable confluence of digits... a low serial number, an odd serial number, or the appearance of a small typographic star within the number.

THE SMELL OF DEMOCRACY
   The banking system regularly removes old, spent bills from circulation, but some bills eluded retirement. Whenever one of these really, really worn bills crops up, I save it. Can't tell if they are a collection or if they are material to some day use, but they are certainly compelling.
   I've stress-tested new bills... sending them repeatedly through the wash to see how they'd fare. They are surprisingly resilient. After even twenty-five wash-and-dry cycles, a bill only barely shows wear to the ink. The paper too remains barely changed.
   How many thousands of hands have these bills passed through to get so soft? Like a baton in an endless relay, leaving behind some minute particles of themselves with every runner. Their paper now more akin to paper towel than cotton bond.
   Each bill is a single red blood cell riding every capillary, servicing now the brain and now the pinky-toe. One day it is in the hands of a Rockefeller, and days later, those of a migrant laborer. Now it is used to buy drugs, now it is in the collection plate at church.
   And everywhere it goes, it carries away some microns from the hands that pass it along. A bit of oil, a few skin cells, some particles of food, some pomade from the barber's hand, the juice from a cashier moistening her fingers on a half lemon in a cup by her register.
   Whatever nobility of experience one might project upon these venerable bills, there is also an air (literally) of ignobility... because they stink. For all the world like feet and armpit and sour gym locker. But then all circulated bills have this aroma to some extent. This is the second smell of money... the democratic smell of money... added to by every one of a hundred thousand hands.

SOILED MONEY IS NOT SPOILED MONEY
   People say "filthy lucre" and "dirty money" to describe ill-gotten wealth, but the terms work in a strictly literal manner too. Money is gross. In the interest of public health, I might suggest that the Federal Reserve start "laundering money."
   In the studio, for one reason or another, parts of bills occasionally find their way into my mouth. Here too is another reason to prefer the new bills. Think of the bacteria, the virus, the fungus.
   Think of all the unsavory "transactions" you'd ever witnessed a bill perform. Bills pressed into a sweat-soaked wallet between buttock and pickup seat. Bills stuffed into g-strings as close to "the money" as possible. Bills rolled for cocaine... folded to pick teeth and toenail... falling in a roll from Charles Bukowski's back pocket into the toilet at the race track. There was a bum on the street who would eat any money given to him as a trick, only to regurgitate it later for spending.
   Dwell on it long enough, and you'll find yourself reaching for your debit card instead of cash.

FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SUBLIMATION OF GOLD
   There seems to be something incompatible here, like the mind-body problem in philosophy. For us humans, it is often difficult to reconcile the divinity of thought, love, blah, blah, blah, and all the complexities of the erstwhile soul with these pooping, sneezing, tired, aging, wrinkly bodies from which they emanate. And money--a clean counting concept of balance sheets and precision unto decimal places beyond the penny--is embodied here in a filthy, flaccid piece of paper.
   In a way, electronic currency seems to be what currency was meant to be: a pure, incorporeal, calculatory promised land... like heaven to the soul.
   As fintech replaces our physical understanding of money with a conceptual one. As more and more we pay for things with less and less physicality... transferring no physical anything... not even a signed slip of paper... sloughing off even our plastic cards. We will start to think of money in the bank more like electricity in a battery than as gold in a vault. That is, money as an energy capable of performing work rather than as a tangible commodity exchangeable for other commodities.
   There will be casualties in our understanding. There will be subconscious, atavistic beliefs about money, which no longer apply to this new form. We will fetishize new aspects of our new money. Perhaps the chirp or bleep of the "transaction completed" prompt will take on new nuance and significance... as the resonant ring of true gold and silver had in previous centuries.
   As money continues its ascension to pure spirit, leaving the corporeal world behind, smell will be among the lesser cousins of missed qualities. The imagery on bills and the familiar faces of world leaders... these will become things of the past too. What will our eyes do then? What subconscious roll has that iconography played within us? Images on money have advertised central governments for millennia... since the very first coins were struck.
   I miss them already.

F.A.Q.

Added on March 30, 2017 by Mark Wagner.

F. A. Q. by MARK WAGNER
CURRENCY COLLAGE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Read this essay in print in the “Money, Power, Sex, and Mark Wagner” exhibition catalog available in the WEB SHOP.
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1. Is that real money?
2. Isn't that illegal?
3. How much money went into that?
4. How long did that take?
5. Why money?
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1. IS THAT REAL MONEY?
Yes. Eating a cow and eating a picture of a cow are two very different things. And this is not a vegetarian meal.

Banknotes are just ink on paper... but only in the way that a Vermeer is just pigment and varnish on wood. You can’t simply decide to make some for yourself.

All the qualities that make banknotes difficult to counterfeit make them a great material to work with. Bills are the last example of engraved printing in practical use. The process provides a fineness and quality of line unmatched by other print processes.

The paper that bills are printed on—milled by the same company that produces Crane stationery—is also quite specific. Blue and red silk fibers are added to deter forgery. It is designed to be handled by thousands of people without deteriorating. With its high flax content, and a hardness imparted by the pressure of the printing process, it can take abuse that would turn lesser papers back into the mush from which they’re made. In the studio, thin ribbons can stand contortion without tearing. They can be glued, peeled up, and glued again; they can be soaked, scraped, sanded, and burnished.

People seeing the work in print or online often assume the images are digitally produced. Sure, images like these could be made in the digital environment. But I don't think they would be. The medium steers the result. There is an analog, slow-thinking creativity at work here that the facility and speed of the computer would undermine. A letter written longhand has a different tone and quality than an email.

Real money is a necessary component of the magic spell. The material has to be the thing of value, because the transgression, the naughtiness, and the sacrifice are all part of the emotional appeal. Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t have made his monster out of color Xeroxes.
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2. ISN'T THAT ILLEGAL?
Everyone asks this question. Most Americans believe that destroying money is illegal. But why? None of us can remember where we first learned that it is against the law. It is not a lesson taught in the classroom. It is not one of the Ten Commandments. It is not a matter of common sense.

The belief that destroying money is illegal—whether or not it actually is—is transmitted as urban legend, not fact. We either have playground rumors or puppet-masters to thank for it. We never learned our multiplication tables properly, but we all know it’s illegal to cut up money—and that you should never consume Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola at the same time.
In general, laws are created to curb natural temptations. We are tempted by easy gain, so there are laws against stealing. We are tempted to act with aggression, so there are laws against assault.

Why would we need a law against destroying our own wealth? Who is the perpetrator such a law is meant to deter? Who is the victim such a law is meant to protect? There’s no law against hitting yourself in the face.

The object in question is essentially just a piece of paper. Why should it, more than any other piece of paper, deserve protection?

Maybe there’s some next-level macroeconomic reason to not cut up money. If money is the blood of our economy, could I damage the nation’s blood pressure by taking it out of circulation? There’s no practical difference between destroying money and collecting it; both practices end its movement. Should it be illegal to collect state quarters? To lose money? To save it?

Our actions betray an ingrained affection for money. We keep close track of it. We guard it. We are happy when we have it and sad when we don't. But we are also skittish about money. Though we handle it daily, we don’t know exactly what it is. Money is kind of spooky. Through repetitive use we’ve become familiar with it—but that is not the same as understanding it.
Instinctively, subconsciously, we know that money is merely a collective myth. As with a dragon or a mermaid, we can agree on its form, but it has never existed outside our imaginations.
It is a house of cards and we fear the wind.
There is an unspoken social contract that we all must value money. We must protect the construct in which we are so heavily invested. So we build a taboo around its destruction.
Yes, by the way, it is illegal to cut up money. Statute number whatever of the US Penal code states blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please don't tell anyone that I'm doing it.

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3. HOW MUCH MONEY WENT INTO THAT?
Not as much as you might think. The finished work is deceptive. In a crowd scene you might see 300 Washington heads, so you might think that collage took 300 dollars; but it’s not like I’m throwing away the rest of those bills.

Don’t count individual elements. Think of a dollar in terms of acreage: a bill’s worth of paper. Sixteen square inches.

The notion has precedent in the minting of coins, where weight and not unit was once key. When coins were made of silver, ten dimes, four quarters, and a silver dollar all weighed the same. There were times and places, even in the early US, where lacking small coins, larger coins were simply cut into pieces to make change.

Most of the collage work here is alla prima: once glued down, it is not reworked. If you look at any of the physical collages in a raking light you can easily see the areas of overlap. There are areas of indecision where paper piles up, but about 80 percent of each surface is covered with a single layer.

If you imagine laying intact bills neatly across the surface of a collage and then tossing a couple more on top to account for overlapping, you’d have a rough estimate of how many bills each piece took. Maybe thirty bucks for a two-by-two-foot collage. Fifteen for a portrait. Two hundred for something the size of a door.

Very little goes to waste. Some smaller-than-confetti-size pieces are hoarded jealously. Bill scraps that lack a compelling character individually can, en masse, create an interesting texture. “Ugly” pieces that have been piling up for years have new uses invented for them.
Half-a-dozen Ziploc bags marked “almost useless” are filled with even smaller bags of minute slivers of money. But even these might get put into circulation again someday—sprinkled on top of a layer of glue like flocking, or added to the pulp of handmade paper.

A dozen years of cutting up money at up to a thousand dollars a year has generated only a couple pint jars of true refuse. In a way these jars of minced, mangled, and tangled oddments are more compelling than the collages themselves. Any day I might point the art wand at them, declare them a sculpture, and effectively reduce wasted currency to zero.

Art materials are expensive. A single sheet of Fabriano Roma paper lists for $17.65, a one-ounce tube of cadmium red oil paint for $28.39. A favorite irony is that dollar bills end up being an inexpensive material—and possibly the only one that effectively gets cheaper through the action of inflation.

The value of the materials is eclipsed by the amount of labor required to animate them. I pay my studio assistants more than a dollar just to cut up a dollar.

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4. HOW LONG DID THAT TAKE?
I never know what exactly people mean by this question. Do they want to be impressed by patience, or by speed? To an extent, people equate work taking a long time with its being good. But track and field events reward the quickest competitors.

People like a good statistic; a number can really make it feel like you’ve got a handle on something. In a way practical concerns and statistics belong with the material: money... therefore accounting... therefore counting. Some of the pieces are accompanied by timesheets. Some of the pieces have tallies of the total number of scraps of paper glued down.
It’s pretty obvious that the work is labor-intensive.

People always say, “You must really be obsessive.” Obsession implies compulsion: an uncontrollable and irrational urge to do something. One cannot stop oneself. I’m sure many artists work in response to their own clinical obsession, but I am not one of them. I do it because I like doing it and because other people like seeing it. It points to a particular poverty of our age that the chief way people have to relate to patients is through mental illness.
I once overheard my gallerist tell a viewer, "Rather than think of him as obsessive, think of him as generous with his time."

Done is the loveliest number. But the art will exist so much longer than it took to make. What’s another day or two to get it right?

I always give an answer because I don't want to be rude. “It took two weeks.” “It took a year.” But the question of time is more open to interpretation than you might think.
Do you count the time spent sweeping the floor after I’ve finished? Do you count the time I spent eating or sleeping—both activities undeniably necessary to making art? What about filing my taxes at the end of the year? Do you count the years I spent in art school? Do you count my countless failed attempts at making art? How long did it take? It’s taken my whole life.

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5. WHY MONEY?
I came to the dollar bill through a desire to transform something familiar, like a magician turning your pocket watch into a petunia. But the staying power is in the loaded nature of the material.

Money is a universal medium of exchange—therefore, it’s a universal concern. It strikes some chord in all of us... the wealthy and the poor... the thrifty and the profligate... the dog people and the cat people. Anarchists are certain I’m an anarchist because I cut up a favorite tool of the oppressor. Capitalists think I'm a capitalist because I revel in it.

Money is arrogant. The way it tends to control the conversation, and monopolizes words like worth and value. Like Einstein’s equation relating mass to energy, money seeks to measure everything. Measuring time in terms of an hourly rate or a yearly salary. Measuring mass in terms of an ounce of gold or a pound of flesh.

Though omnipresent, money is becoming increasingly ephemeral. Once it was fully tangible—weighty, even—stamped metal disks. Then it was a piece of paper that stood for an amount of metal held somewhere else. Then the piece of paper was divorced from the metal and valued only in faith. And now paper has given way to electronic currency. The closer you look, the harder it is to see.

One day some years ago... back when I was broke and each dollar came dear to me... my studio-mate and I were heading to the corner restaurant for linner, our only meal of the day. I checked my wallet and it was empty. Shit. I sat at my workstation for probably a whole minute... hungry, annoyed, and complaining... before my friend pointed out that there were 40 or so spendable dollar bills sitting on the table right in front of me.
In my mind they had already become something else.