mark_wagner

Mark Wagner has some pretty sweet money collages take a look at his site
Interesting interview too:

How did you start working with money, specifically dollar bills?
I was making a lot of collage and artists books using Camel Cigarette packages. To a large extent it was the familiarity of the pack for people that made the work effective. That led me to the familiarity of the dollar bill. I started small with the bills. Bending strips of the bills became white noise so I started doing color separation. I like old, dirty crumpled bills, but I only use newer ones so the contrast between light and dark is more pronounced. Though I mostly use ones, I did cut up a $100 bill once because I needed Franklin’s portrait. I’ve been working with currency now for eight years and I’m still discovering new ways to approach the material. It takes a lot of patience. When I first started making portraits I thought, “Oh, this is it.” But then I saw a show of tapestries at The Met and realized I should go bigger.

How much money will go into one of your collages?
Most of any given piece has only a single layer of paper on it, so you can tell about how many bills go in by imagining the surface covered once by whole bills, plus a few extra for what overlap there is. In the studio we keep hoppers of bills separated into parts to use piece by piece as well as binders of prepared texture swatches and collaged passages to add wholesale. I love all the process. For some of the collages we track how many scraps of paper are glued down. I see that sort of accounting as an interesting extension of the material. When “Liberty” is complete, for example, we’ll be able give statistics on each of her 13 panels individually, and also say that the whole thing took 1234 bills cut into 54,234 pieces, or whatever, and here’s all the scraps we didn’t use.

I remember hearing when I was a kid that it’s illegal to throw away or tear up money. Do you know if this is true? Do people ask you about it?
I think, by the current letter of the law, yes, it is illegal. Whether it should be illegal is the question that follows. The language in existing laws is convoluted and a bit confusing. Most related laws punish offenders only “for fraudulent intent.” And many of the pertinent laws seem a bit vestigial. A hundred and fifty years ago, bank notes weren’t issued from the Federal Reserve but from individual banks. They were easier to mess with and altering scams abounded so maybe they needed stricter policing. Me—I’m not trying to fool anyone. There’s no scam here. I’m not hurting anyone by making my art. Through it I keep a couple of assistants employed, generate a bunch of tax revenue, and give people something to look at and think about. I find it curious that so many people assume it should be illegal—that our culture has this reverence for little pieces of paper.
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