One Dollar Social Experiment

I recently stumbled upon a video about the work of Mark Wagner, known to some as the “greatest living collage artist”. Although Wagner has pursued several different mediums of art such as drawing and bookmaking, he is most well known for his intricately cut and assembled currency collages composed entirely out of American one dollar bills, which can be seen with this link. I was incredibly intrigued.

Mark Wagner - Money is Material from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.

As much as I was in awe at the meticulousness with which he creates his pieces and the unfathomable complexity of detail he includes, I was also confused and uncomfortable when I first watched this video. Questions kept flowing into my mind. At first they were heavy political and economic ones: Is this even legal? Why would you waste so much money like that? Slowly, they became more abstract art and design-oriented ones: Are there really that many shapes and colors one one dollar bill? Who or what does George Washington represent in all these collages? I soon realized that there is a fascinating relationship between these two sets of questions. I would not have been able to ask the second set if Mark Wagner hadn’t taken the risk of leaving the first set unanswered. In other words, by breaking political and economic norms, Wagner allowed viewers to use a art/design/structure lens to analyze the currency in their pockets and the message he was creating out of them.

While I was scouring the web trying to find out the laws governing the destruction of money, I couldn’t help but notice how many times it was mentioned that people mostly do such a thing to send a message. That message is usually protesting capitalism or the United States government. However, Wagner’s message is not so clear. He is not simply burning dollar bills into oblivion… he is making them into something new. Considering this fact as well as the fact that even the legality of currency destruction is unbelievably ambiguous leaves the judgement of the ethicality and merit of Wagner’s artistic choice of medium almost entirely up to the viewer. Through his collages, Wagner is testing the very values Americans hold dear.

Reading Wagner’s artistic statement, I was suddenly reminded of our discussion of the role of museums in English class:

The one dollar bill is the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America. Collage asks the question: what might be done to make it something else? It is a ripe material: intaglio printed on sturdy linen stock, covered in decorative filigree, and steeped in symbolism and concept. Blade and glue transform it--reproducing the effects of tapestries, paints, engravings, mosaics, and computers--striving for something bizarre, beautiful, or unbelievable... the foreign in the familiar.

Wagner's design choice of using dollar bills in his collages is akin to him simply taking a dollar bill and sealing it in a display case for viewers to ponder. By breaking the connections we viewers have to that piece of money, he is allowing us to not only analyze the story his assemblages narrate, but also analyze the relationship we have with the most basic unit of wealth in the world. In a day and age where the Internet is the largest and most well-stocked museum ever, I hope more people will stop and take a look at the social experiments Mark Wagner has ingeniously cut and glued together.