The Rupee Ganesha Project

The Rupee Ganesha Project: A currency collage and social sculpture

By C. K. Wilde and M.T. Karthik

with the help of M. Devanathan, K. Kabali, K. Murthy, A. Navanidam, S. Sekar

Date made: Monday, December 18, 2006 to Sunday, February 18, 2007

Location made: Periya Mudaliar Chavady, Tamil Nadu, India

Materials used: Indian Rupees, PVA Glue, Vegam Teak Wood, Matte Varnish

Size: One meter rondo

Abstract for the project

The artists created an atelier in a Tamil coastal village in South India, and produced there a culturally syncretic image of the Hindu Lord Ganesha made entirely from pieces of Indian Rupees in circulation: a currency collage. Cultural commitments to the location and its regional calendar were made a priori, to achieve harmony with the people living in the Tamil village while producing the work. Specific regional cultural practices informed the sculpture as it was being created. Certainly villagers attitudes toward Ganesha were embodied from currency collected in their village. The project directly engaged local artists and laborers to create a carved wooden frame for the collage: a two-inch thick, one meter rondo, cut from a single trunk of vengam wood and handcrafted. 16 Tamil villagers were employed by the project. The artists brought or shipped special materials and financed the project themselves. The Rupee Ganesha was completed at 7:00pm, Saturday, February 17, 2007 in the village of Periya Mudaliar Chavady, Tamil Nadu, India

Statement 

The goal of the project is the creation of a currency collage of Ganesha, the Hindu God of the marketplace and compassion - an artwork emblematic of dialog between India and the west.The work was conceived jointly by artists M.T. Karthik and C.K. Wilde as an opportunity for, among other reasons, broadening cultural discourse between eastern and western practices of art.The artists created a new "development" model for this cross-cultural artifact establishing an atelier within an Indian village (the "heart" of India according to M.K.Gandhi) in which the services of local artists and craftspeople are engaged in the production of the artwork. Wrapped into the production of the artwork is the inherent mutual value of artistic exchange between cultures. The community has opportunity to cross-pollinate procedural dialects and methodologies in the "temporary autonomus zone" of the atelier.

Rather than a topdown development model, the model of the Rupee Ganesha Project is horizontal in nature, respectfully living within a South Indian community and engaging it through an egalitarian project. "It takes a village" to raise a child, so too this work of art required a community. The skein of relations that bind us and support us is generally overlooked in the western canon of art in service to the idea of singular authorship (like Karel Fabritius, known as Rembrandt's "assistant" rather than his collaborator). Antidotal to this perspective is the Hindu example of communal relations expressed over thousands of years in the villages of India.

The Hindu and Buddhist study of subject-object relations and causality have produced a philosophic substantiation of perspectives born from diligent observation and reflection of Indian village life. The perspective that life is a collaboration we all share responsibility for, that the self and mind are fluid and knowable, that our bodies are but a sleeve for the soul, that the energy we expend and produce is part of a closed system of relations, that "The Other" is in truth the same as the "Self", and that the differentiation of identity is a blessing or gift.

Freedom from this cycle of incarnation only happens through the discipline of personal responsibility for our actions or acts (karma). We engage and are engaged by this world of "maya" or illusion, and our acts have causal effect for oneself and the community at large.The creation of a sculpture of wood, paper, and glue therefore has another invisible sculpture hovering over it - in the skein of communal relations that produced it. So it is with the Rupee Ganesha. The person who cooks for the workers is as important as the artist in the production of the art.

- C.K.Wilde

Alternating Currency: The currency collages of C. K. Wilde

Alternating Currency: The currency collages of C. K. Wilde

Why cut up money? The original precedent for the idea of currency collage came from Marshall Weber’s seminal show in San Francisco “The United States of Americana” in 1990. In 1995 the concept of money collage was introduced to me in college in a class on non-static forms. Marshall Weber’s collages used real dollar bills as manifest socio-economic semiotic critiques. The elegant collages of Walter Hamaday inspired me to engage in collage as a serious artistic practice. The Progressive magazine commissioned me to illustrate a story on P.A.C.s in 1997; I made a collage of a pachyderm made from dollars bills in response. I made certain that the art director of the Progressive knew about Marshall Weber’s Dollar collages; Weber’s “Buckskin” (what is that?) was reproduced in the magazine as well. I was commissioned to make several more money collages for the magazine, including the collage “Alternating Currency.”

“Alternating Currency” was the first currency collage I made with currency from all over the world. The piece was a critical reconfiguration of the system of capitalism, and the cult of personality propaganda that banknotes represent. The material used and its handling necessitated deep reflection on the use of symbolic capitaol as a system of inter-human relations. More than a superficial use of money as the material for just any image, the money collages necessitated a problematization of banknotes as a semiotic detournemeant. Banknotes are (?)encoded into self-reflexive, critical, multi-valent images. The detournement (repetition?) of these symbols allows for the revelations of a hidden narrative through the reconfiguration of the symbolic tool of oppression. Revealed is the transcript of the powerless, the poor, the victims of the system of Global Capitalism. Thus Cutting up money is a disruption of the narrative of power. Collage as becomes a way to take an iconic critical stance through the reconfiguration of currency and its’ adjutant symbols of power.

Collage as a medium has a holographic transparency unlike any other medium: The process of the making of the image is present in the material handling dialectics of the object. The viewer “sees” how the collage was made in the very materials used. Materiality is the message as much as the image it represents; interlocked are the signs and symbols along with the physical manipulations necessary to create the image, the object, and the cognitive, philosophical constructions in collage. If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a picture made out of money is worth another thousand at least. Portmanteau like the money carries not only the associations of the maker, but the viewer as well. Jazz changed music, collage changed art. It is an art practice that presupposes a viewer, an “Other”. The viewers completes the work in their body and mind with the act of perception and cognition.

My collages have referenced subjects ranging from space exploration, to mythology, religion, slavery, ecology, the history of warfare, the history of money, and art history. For instance, the collage “Quixotic Ambition” referenced Picasso’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, petroleum production, and warfare. The windmills were replaced with oil derricks, and the figure of Don Quixote replaced with a mounted German soldier from WWI1 occupying Holland. A visual rebus of meanings, redolent with symbolic readings, this piece is about nationalism and the untenable nature of our human desire for control. A compression of historical references into the flat plane of collaged banknote images telescopes the viewer’s associations with the artist’s work.

The process of researching all these subjects has created a feedback loop: one idea begets a hundred more. I use banknotes from all eras and nationalities - from failed states and occupying army currencies, to our own ubiquitous and quotidian U.S. dollar bill. Currency collage can be seen as nostalgia for a time when the symbol of powers’ symbol (money) was still manifest in the physical world. My fetishization of paper money comes from my childhood. I traveled to Europe often to visit my relatives. When I returned, I often still had money from the places where I traveled. An attempt to buy candy with Deutsche Marks in the U.S. brought into sharp relief the inherent contradictions of nationalism and international travel. Are we not one people on our one planet? I thought. Why is this money powerful only in one context, useless in another? This probleamatization of value has had profound effects on me. [Seeing my mother work three jobs to pay the bills made me realize that the Good and Just don’t always find reward in Power.] Always of an entrepreneurial bent as a child, I began dog walking services, erected lemonade stands, and even harvested wild onions to sell to my neighbors - all invented values for services rendered, all an attempt to find parity with the complex world of the marketplace.[too personal]

The ironies of commodifying my dissent through collaged currency are legion. In order tTo live to make more of these collages, I need money, so I sell the collages. The fact that the very symbolic manifestation of power has been rendered “useless” as currency to create another form of currency is an alchemy of sorts.  That the wealthy use my visual critiques of the very system of power that supports our lives as decoration for their lavish homes; myth art as a political icon or talisman of their political awareness, is a wild thicket of ironies. To try to an articulate all this is very painful; I must confront my own willingness to forget my complicity to suffering in the world in order to maintain this esoteric practice of art making art. Is it ultimately untenable philosophically untenable to justify the production of art objects in a world so troubled? I convince myself that the world needs my work as much as I need it, that by making this work I am participating in the global dialectic of humanity. [The reality is, however, that I am involved in one of the last great cartels, the art world. A place for the wealthy to “hide” their assets, to dodge taxes, and to celebrate their influence.] Art in this context becomes another symbol of disconnection, of an all but hermetic world with it’s own rules and associations. I am a maker of luxury goods that critique the system, which allows for those goods to be consumed. The painstaking collage work that I do is my life’s blood manifest, and yet for some it is just like a car, or watch, or vacation home in that it is just another symbol of accrued wealth and power. Whither beauty and truth? Ask a poor man what truth is and he will say hunger, ask a rich man he will say power, I say Art: older than money or war.[ Externalities of commodity and value are merely expressive modalities of exchange.] In an alternating current of energy, we make our life manifest in our works: [our mind moving matter, our eye a prism for light. We change as we exchange, we are a DNA collage and record of our own making.] Humans are Art, not Money or War. There is a war on in the marketplace of ideas: Which side are you on?

Some thoughts on currency collage

Collage reveals the process in the product. When the material utilized in the construction of images carries portmanteau meanings through signifiers on the surface of the source material, the artifact reveals cultural codification in the image and the signs used to construct it. The material qualities of money for collage are phenomenal: great paper, the best printing, patina of use on the bills, variety of color and texture, and a plethora of icons and symbols to reconfigure and recontextualize. These icons are the symbols of power, of politics, of freedom or slavery, and of war. It is interesting to note the first coinage in the west was minted by Athens to pay the armada builders in preparation for war with Sparta.

It is not illegal to cut up money, as long as one does not try to pass it back into the system. Cutting up money is a transgressive act, a way of cutting up the contract with the system of capitalism. To use it to make art is a subversion of the tools of domination. This act is a symbolic rejection of an entire system of relations that makes enemies of neighbors, and sets up hierarchies of power based on creating artificial dependency on capital as a system of valuation. Soon cash as we know it will be obsolete, an archaic remnant of power made manifest. In this age of rootless multinational corporations, power increasingly has no address, and manifests itself only in systems of domination.

It is ironic that I must destroy currency to create beauty. What nautilus spiral shell lens bends our experience into beauty or suffering?  Max Ernst supposedly said “ Since I was a child I have had the sense that the world was disordered and that I had to intimately re-order it …” A sentiment that has deep resonance for me. I identify as well with Wilhelm Worringer's words "Creation in order to subdue the torment of perception." Between these thoughts I believe there is an answer to the question of beauty. In the torrent of information that we live in, beauty is the oasis of the senses: the place of focus, of silence, of emptiness, of mindfulness and of compassion.