Who Is the Guy That Uses Counterfeit Money for Art
J.South.K. Boggs, Artist, Dies at 62; He Made Money. Literally.
Sitting in a Chicago diner in 1984, the artist Stephen Boggs began doodling on a paper napkin as he consumed a coffee and a doughnut. He started with the numeral 1, then transformed it into the prototype of a dollar bill.
His waitress, impressed, offered to purchase it. Mr. Boggs refused, just presented information technology in payment for his xc-cent tab. The waitress handed him 10 cents in change.
An idea was built-in.
For the adjacent iii decades, Mr. Boggs, better known by his creative signature, J. S. Yard. Boggs, kept money on his mind. Extending the logic of the diner transaction, he painstakingly reproduced British pounds, Swiss francs and American dollars, with quirky deviations.
On American currency, for example, he might use the signature "J. Due south. Chiliad. Boggs, Secret of the Treasury," or inscribe "Kunstbank of Bohemia" on a $5,000 bill, or suspend the motto "In Fun Nosotros Trust." At first he created the notes 1 by one, a time-consuming process. Later he ran off limited-edition prints.
He presented his currency to merchants as payment for goods and services. If the bills were accustomed, he asked for a receipt and, when appropriate, change. He noted the details of each transaction on the backs of his "Boggs bills," which were bare, and sold the receipts to collectors. It was upward to them to track down the merchant — for a fee, Mr. Boggs would assist — and negotiate purchase of the note.
Mr. Boggs never sold his bills. He only spent them.
The assembled elements were, in the stance of Mr. Boggs and his admirers, artworks, exhibited as such in galleries effectually the world and included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.
"I create images that say things and ask things," Mr. Boggs said in the 2013 Discovery Channel documentary "Surreptitious Life of Coin." "I take them out into the existent world and try to spend them, not every bit counterfeits, but as works of art that ask us nearly the nature of money."
Law enforcement agencies in several countries took a different view. They regarded Mr. Boggs every bit a forger. They expressed this opinion, on several occasions, by seizing the notes or putting Mr. Boggs on trial.
"They said I was a counterfeiter," an indignant Mr. Boggs told The Associated Press in 1992, when agents in the counterfeiting sectionalisation of the Secret Service raided his apartment most Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he was an artist in residence, and took possession of more than 100 of his artworks. "They don't understand the difference between art and crime."
The Tampa police discovered Mr. Boggs's body on Sun in a cabin near the Tampa airport. He was 62. Robert Salmon, director of operations for the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office, said the cause of decease had not been determined.
He was built-in Stephen Litzner in Woodbury, Due north.J., on Jan. 16, 1955. (He afterward added the names James and George.) His mother, the one-time Marlene Dietrich Hildebrandt, divorced his father when Stephen was an infant, and nothing is known most him.
She joined a carnival, performed equally "Margo, Queen of the Jungle," and in 1961 married a Tampa man of affairs, Jim Boggs, with whom she ran the Brahman Lounge, a bar and package store. She later wrote a neighborhood column for The Tampa Tribune, reporting on the doings in Brandon, the Tampa suburb where she lived.
Mr. Boggs attended Brandon High Schoolhouse but was expelled in his junior year. "I was defendant of starting a anarchism in the auditorium, just it was somebody else who threw the book at the principal," he told the journalist Lawrence Weschler, who wrote a profile of Mr. Boggs for The New Yorker in 1988 that evolved into a book, "Boggs: A Comedy of Values," published in 1999.
He took courses at Miami University in Ohio, Hillsborough Community Higher in Tampa and Columbia University, pursuing, vaguely, a career in accountancy. In the late 1970s, he decided to report fine art and moved to London.
He enrolled in the Camden Arts Middle there and began producing conceptual paintings — some consisting of repeated versions of his signature, others filled with elaborately embellished numbers.
Subsequently his fateful visit to Chicago, for the International Art Exposition at Navy Pier, he returned to London and pursued the money trail with piffling success until he exhibited "Pined Newt," an oversize pound note, at the International Gimmicky Art Fair in London in 1986. It sold for ane,500 times its face value and attracted the attention of Rudy Demenga, a Swiss fine art dealer, who invited him to Art Basel.
The Swiss turned out to be ideal customers. Wherever he went, Mr. Boggs found that his handcrafted bank notes, executed with a fine pen on expensive paper, were, so to speak, legal tender. He began dining in fine restaurants and moved into a v-star hotel.
"All money is fine art," Mr. Boggs told The Orlando Sentinel in 1997. "If you expect at a dollar, it's portraiture, it's landscape art, it'due south abstruse designs.
"I call back people need to think more virtually money. If they did, they'd call back more about what they practise to make information technology and what they do with information technology once it is made."
The British were less accommodating. As he was preparing to exhibit four depository financial institution notes at the Young Unknowns Gallery in London in 1986, 3 constables raided the gallery and hauled Mr. Boggs off to jail. He was charged with iv counts of violating the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.
The civil-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson mounted a successful defense. Mr. Boggs paid him in Boggs notes. In his book "The Justice Game" (1998), Mr. Robertson wrote that the Bank of England, in response to the Boggs case, added a copyright notice to its paper currency.
Iii years afterwards, Mr. Boggs was arrested in Sydney, Commonwealth of australia. This time the approximate dismissed the case and awarded him $20,000 in amercement.
While in residence at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Boggs planned to photocopy $1 meg in Boggs bills and release them into the local economy, relying on others to keep them in apportionment.
"I've been spending this money for 8 years," he told The Associated Press. "I've learned so much. I wanted to share the experience."
Secret Service agents fabricated it clear to local merchants that anyone using the bills equally currency would face prosecution, and the chiliad experiment ended.
Mr. Boggs filed suit to regain possession of his notes — he had lost more than 1,300 artworks in raids between 1990 and 1992 — and to win legal recognition of his work as art. In 1993, Federal District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the adjust.
"This court accepts Mr. Boggs's belief that money is valued, in office, because of our trust in political institutions," Gauge Lamberth wrote in his ruling. "To that terminate, these political institutions should exist given the means by which to found and maintain the value of Usa currency."
He added: "Information technology is oftentimes said that 'a picture show is worth a thousand words.' Unfortunately, Mr. Boggs's works are oftentimes worth a thousand dollars." Further appeals were unavailing.
"It's all an act of religion," Mr. Boggs told Mr. Weschler for his New Yorker profile. "Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for. And that's what my work is about. Look at these things, I try to say. They're beautiful. But what the hell are they? What do they practice? How do they practise it?"
Over the years, Mr. Boggs, who leaves no firsthand survivors, traded his bills for goods and services, from candy confined to motorcycles, whose worth he estimated at several 1000000 dollars.
In the mid-1990s, when Worth magazine asked him to design a note using the Treasury Department'due south new guidelines, Mr. Boggs produced a $100 bill with the image of Harriet Tubman as a young girl, anticipating by 20 years the announcement that Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson as the new face of the $20 nib. In 2001, he ran off a series of 100,000 plastic Sacagawea dollars, stamped with his own mint marks and paid for with a $5,000 Boggs bill.
Speaking to ARTnews afterwards Mr. Boggs'south death, Mr. Weschler said, "He was just short of beingness a con man, but no more than anyone in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance — which, of course, was his whole point."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/arts/design/jsg-boggs-dead.html
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