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articles
Radioactive
spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature. Tania
Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions,
and computer generated sounds: an ode to music. Emily
Harvey: a life in
fluxus. Swept
off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome
Borel's Paris inspired paintings. America
it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine,
Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline. Fear
and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism. Jeremy
Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness. Strange
money: Peggy Preheim
makes a buck. The
lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina
Verde in Eindhoven. "This
coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment
and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina
Loi. [Warhol
Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson
that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture." Exacting
images of people in the celebrated and banal act
of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms. On
a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese
in Rome, romantic
minimalist Livia
Signorini unfurls
a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. Painting is either back, or, never left the building.
A discussion around the state of art today. Did
Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology
questions? MADE
IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS "What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs
from the throne to the unsitable. Michael
Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for
sale "...Images
of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion
of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven.
Fought to the death?" A
letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel
reviewed. Swiss
artist thomas hirschorn, in association with
the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty
is still controversial.
Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web
enabled art show reviewed.
part
1 Art, Paris, porn and the web. part
2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film. part
3
asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction? |
letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
  
peggy
preheim on money: an artist draws value from a personal wellWith
the launch of the Euro in January 2001, Europe's old and beautiful bills were
shoveled into the furnace along with billions of francs, Deutsche marks, guilders
and pesetas in a blazing ceremony of European unity. Those bills not turned in
to banks for shiny new Euro notes have ended up as collectibles from the 20th
century -- souvenirs of the recent past. Peggy Preheim, an American artist who
has lived in France since the turn of the century has turned her old bills into
something quite different--a support for a series of photorealistic drawings that
not only astonish the eye, but add significant value to the paper they're drawn
on. 
"Dead Giveaway,"
Preheim's exhibition at g-module gallery in the Marais neighborhood of Paris,
brings together 24 works on 20-, 50-, 100- and 500-franc notes and her singular
talent for miniature rendition with a No. 2 pencil. These bills,with their own
colorful celebrations of Cézanne, Debussy, and the creator of the Little
Prince, St. Exupery, are matched with delicate but exacting 1940ish images of
children, flags, and couples inspired from antique photographs. Preheim
peopled her tiny paperscapes in a way that they both interact with the French
artists on the French bills and fight for their own stage. The Little Prince has
a pal--a boy gone fishin', or a flag (like the American one that sits lonely and
undisturbed on the airless moon). The 20-franc note with Debussy features a "Gerber"
baby . Other bills are a bit more surreal and are adorned only with an eye or
an ear. They make one remember the days when you found a bill with a drawing,
or a telephone number or a personal note scribbled on it and start one thinking
about how strange money is after all, what with the millions of people who've
handled it. A collage element in motion: a trip taken. art
& money
Money has long been a source of inspiration for artists, either
in its social, political or physical form. Andy Warhol silk-screened dollar bills.
Mad Englishman Bill Drummond, who made a small fortune writing pop music tunes,
turned conceptual artist when he burned £1 million pounds in cash in a barn
fire-type ceremony. (He's gone on to play with value and exchange cutting up a
$25,000 Richard Long photograph into 25,000 pieces and attempting to sell the
units for $1 each. This story is chronicled in his How to Be an Artist). The late
American pre-pop master, Ray Johnson glued dollar bills to dozens of his collages,
and offered them, in a rebellious act, for $500,000 or more. British
artist J.S.G. Boggs spent a good amount of his talent reconstituting beautiful
fakes of Pound notes, $100 dollar bills, and other currencies, using the artworks
as payment for meals, hotel stays and other services. Law enforcement agents however,
didn't much care for his art, and yanked him in on more than one occasion on counterfeiting
charges. "Boggs was first arrested for counterfeiting, due to his drawings,
in England in 1986, finally being acquitted by a jury in 1987." Meanwhile
he still makes bills and still has problems with Treasury Departments across the
world (see:http://www.jsgboggs.com/whois.html). 
Paul
McMahon, an artist friend of Preheim's, changed the color of his bills, dying
them pink and other hot colors, and mailed them to art critics and artists. "One
of his bills found its way in to a John Baldessari collage," Preheim said.
"Paul gave them away as gifts, but never used them to buy things, or pay
his rent." Artist
stamps by Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson are small time counterfeits
(37 cents!), but acid social satire (www.badpressbooks.com).
But these artists only produce enough stamps to get one or two through the postal
system and accepted as "real." (Hernandez de Luna is currently under
investigation by the US Postal Service in Chicago.) inflation
buster
Preheim isn't interested in remaking the 50 franc note, however,
or even a 50-euro note. About 10 years ago she produced her first money drawings
on a series of $1 bills, inspired by a lone greenback that found its way into
her hands with its center image faded enough by time and handling so that George
Washington's face was obliterated. Preheim helped it along, erasing the entire
face and the letters "ar" in "dollar" turning it into an ode
to "doll." She then did more pictures of dolls. Some were broken and
others, she says were "affected," but each was delicately drawn, a process
that took up to a full month. While she never exhibited these works, she did show
them to Sebastian Thomas, an editor at the art and literary quarterly Grant Street.
Thomas bought five of the 15 drawings, for about $100 each, a real inflation buster
and not a bad return for a buck. Her
Paris art dealer thinks Preheim is from another, more wonderful universe. "She's
someone who has a sixth sense," said Jeff Gleich. Oddly
enough, her money drawings (which she made while they were still in use) sell
for the same price at the gallery regardless of the bill she used. "Yes that's
a little weird," she said. (The French franc last officially traded at about
6.56 to the euro; the euro is worth about $1.23 as of Christmas, 2003). 
Preheim,
who comes from Yankton, South Dakota, said that much of this work is about being
in a foreign country. She had to handle new (and strange) money for the very first
time and she fell in love with the open window that is the watermark--the counterfeit
protection technology that leaves a blank space on the bill. Reworking the bills
was a way for her to de-familiarize the familiar. And make her money personal.
"Looking at it these spaces on the bills, I imagined children there interacting
with Debussy, Cézanne, Gustave Eiffel, St. Exupery and, Madame and Pierre
Curie," she said. "I saw an infant crawling out of the sea, then a child
aging into an adolescent." While
her intentions have mythical and metaphysical designs, Preheim mechanically numbers
her money works using the bills' unique serial numbers. But she's not saying,
however, that time is money, nor is she saying, you can't buy love. In their smallness
and painstaking detail, these works are about heartbreak and have the necessary
obsession about them to make one consider and reconsider how foreign the heart
is in while it beats away within us. Notes
1.
In March 2004, Peggy Preheim's new pieces (about 15 she's produced in Paris) will
be on view at the Armory Show in New York City. (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery - http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/).
"Safari" will feature her relentlessly obsessive 2003 drawings such
as "Ring," and "Kid/Napping" with plenty of white space and
her people heading off the page. It's worth the trip.
2. g-module gallery:
http://www.g-module.com/ Matthew
Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. His surrealist collages and prints,
A Perfect Friend, will be at the Valparaiso University School of Law Gallery,
Valparaiso, Indiana and Calumet College of St. Joseph, Whiting, Indiana in Spring,
2004. e: mistahrose@yahoo.com
affiliates
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