Omni Daily Crush: "Boggs: A Comedy of Values"
Do you believe in money? Do you ever think about the belief that the money system requires? Perhaps in uncertain financial times like these you do. But there's a reason that economics and finance are full of psychological terms like "trust," "confidence," "depression"--even "tender" and "treasure" are almost mawkish when looked at in the right light. In a money system like ours, we have to believe that the piece of paper (or electronic payment) that someone gives us will be accepted by the next person we turn around and try to give it to. No wonder, especially in these times, that some people still look to gold as providing some sort of authentic support to money (although why is a soft yellow metal any less arbitrary than those crisp and pretty green pieces of paper?).
If I ever went back to teach, the syllabus I'd want to put together would be on two means of exchange: money and art. I love the parallels between them, and I love how those two strange and vastly complicated systems--so often treated as diametrically opposed--together express so much of what it means to be human. There are some great and evocative books on the subject--The Philosophy of Money, The Gift, McTeague, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, JR--but the centerpiece of the whole project (really the reason for the class in the first place) would be Lawrence Weschler's little book, Boggs: A Comedy of Values. Weschler is absolutely one of my favorite writers, for his endlessly curious (could we say omnivoracious?) interest in the widest and least familiar of subjects. I love his profiles of Robert Irwin and David Hockney and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, as well as his political books like Calamities of Exile.
But my favorite is Boggs. Who is Boggs? J.S.G. Boggs is an artist, and in some minds, particularly those of the Bank of England and the U.S. Secret Service, a criminal. His crime is the reproduction of national currency. He draws money. But he doesn't just draw dollar bills and put them up in frames on gallery walls as a conceptual joke. He actually goes out and uses his drawings as money. When presented with a bill at a restaurant, say, he'll offer instead to pay with a Boggs bill (he prefers to make his exchanges with people who don't know his art already). Given a $57 charge, he'd pay with a $100 Boggs bill, and get $43 in the usual money in change. His bills are not counterfeit--they are clearly not government money (and that's why, despite long legal battles in the UK and the US, he's never been convicted). They are usually only drawn on one side of the paper, and with other idiosyncratic elements that make it clear that they are not legal tender. But yet they have value, at least when he can convince a restaurant owner, or a hotel manager, or someone else he owes money to, that they do. (And of course as he's become better known his bills are now worth much more than their face value. He won't sell them directly, though--he only sells the receipts for his exchanges to collectors, who then have the responsibility to track down the other elements of his art.)
This is all fine, and fun, but what makes his story an even deeper tale is the reactions he gets. I'm usually skeptical of claims about art that "if it gets a reaction, then it must be good." Mein Kampf, after all, gets a reaction. But in this case, the absolute, blustering fury of the authorities is fascinating (and infuriating). He's never been arrested, much less convicted, in the U.S., but in the 1990s the Secret Service confiscated seven years of work from his offices, and, as far as I know, has yet to return it after years of legal battles. It's as if they think his playful provocations are going to bring down the whole system. And then there's Boggs himself, who may have begun this on a lark, but can't shake it himself, and seems (at least to the end of Weschler's book) as locked into combat as the currency agents are. Late in the book, he laments, "Believe me, I've tried to kick this habit. I'll resolutely start out on some new tangent--a series of abstract canvases, for example, but then somebody always comes along and asks something like 'Well, what do you think that painting's worth?' and I find myself drawn back in." And drawn back in he is--as the book closes, he impishly reveals that he plans to pay for his $800,000 legal bill with eight one-hundred-thousand-dollar drawings based on an engraving of his own face, made by none other than the chief master engraver at the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving (the same illustration on the cover of the book).
What's happened to Boggs since? My Google searches didn't come up with much more beyond the time covered by the book, which was published in 1999. Is he still going? I don't know, but I know Weschler is: there's a description he borrows from his book on Irwin to describe Boggs as well, and it's one that he could have used for himself too: "He is an artist who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it." --Tom
Recommended for fans of Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme and Air Guitar by Dave Hickey
Greg Gutierrez on February 12, 2010 at 05:56 PM
It so happens that in his youth Boggs was a surfer at Malibu. In fact, legend has it that he was part in a prank which hosted an ugly baby contest. Four different fathers showed up with their entries (for obvious reasons mothers were not invited). In the end
Boggs made off with the entry fees and was seen heading south with a blonde haired woman in a black 57 Chevy convertible.
Greg Gutierrez
Zen and the Art of Surfing