Legal tender
By Nicholas Laughlin
First published —
translated into Spanish as “Moneda de curso legal”, by
David Puig — in ONTO
#2: Arte y Capital, 2021
$120,000
5
December, 2019: a new work by the Italian artist Maurizio
Catalan debuts at Art Basel Miami Beach, and the
international art press have found their pleasingly
outrageous story of the season. Comedian is a
banana — purchased at a Miami supermarket, we’re told, and
carefully selected for its size and shape — duct-taped to
a bare wall, and priced at US$120,000. Within hours, two
editions of the work are sold, both to private collectors
based in France. There is talk of artist’s proofs, a
further edition to be sold to a museum. Fairgoers flock to
see the piece in such numbers that special arrangements
must be made to manage the crowd. Then a performance
artist turns up, removes the banana from the wall, and
eats it (despite later claiming to actually dislike
bananas). No one stops him, and there is a spare banana at
the ready, so Comedian
is soon restored. As Catalan’s gallerist explains, it is
the artist’s certificate of authenticity that makes the
work. The specific banana is both necessary and
inessential. (No one seems to have asked about the brand
of duct tape.) The gallerist goes on to say: “A work like that, if you don’t
sell the work, it’s not a work of art” — thereby
confirming that if Comedian
is nothing without banana, tape, and wall, it’s also
nothing without its price tag.
$0
7 December, 2019: a Saturday morning two and a half weeks to Christmas, and citizens busy with their errands find themselves stuck in gridlocked traffic across Port of Spain. It’s not the usual seasonal traffic. The streets around the Central Bank towers downtown have been closed off, blocked by military vehicles and uniformed men with guns, while army helicopters circle overhead. Alarmist rumours about the reason for this military exercise are quickly overtaken by the actual explanation: a very large shipment of new banknotes is being delivered to the Central Bank vaults, and security is at maximum. A very large shipment, specifically, of $100 bills.
Two days before, at a post-Cabinet press conference, Trinidad and Tobago’s minister of national security had made an unexpected announcement: the TT$100 bill — the country’s highest-denomination banknote, often called a blue note for its distinctive palette — was to be abruptly withdrawn and replaced with a new polymer banknote. And whereas in the past superseded banknote designs had remained legal tender, to be gradually removed from circulation, the government intended to pass special legislation to demonetise the current paper $100 bill, with a deadline of barely three weeks for the public to exchange old bills for new.
The new banknotes were a
surprise for everyone but a few officials of high rank.
The press office staff at the Central Bank had not even
been briefed. The minister of national security explained
the rationale: the new polymer notes would stymie a recent
wave of counterfeiting, and the required exchange of
banknotes would flush cash out of the “black economy” of
money laundering and tax evasion. With eighty million $100
bills in circulation, and the demonetisation deadline
falling a week after Christmas, a degree of chaos was
guaranteed. Soon the press was full of reports of
hours-long queues at bank branches, inoperable ATMs,
persons attempting to change hundreds of thousands of
dollars in cash — the figure who truly tickled the public
imagination was the (unnamed) barber who apparently turned
up at a bank with a million dollars in $100 bills — while
off- and online conversations tended towards conspiracy
theories.
$100
21 August, 2019: this block of Pembroke Street in downtown Port of Spain is usually all but deserted after dark, the various lawyers’ offices closed at the end of the workday. But tonight there is a steelband procession heading from Woodford Square to the Queen’s Park Savannah, and thousands of revellers are streaming past, dancing and chipping to the music.
Many of them pause for a moment at the glass doors propped open at 27 Pembroke Street, to peer into this mostly unremarkable office building. Some, curiosity piqued, step inside. They find a popup art installation underway, with works by eight young artists scattered through a series of rooms and spilling out into a small backyard — from sculpture to photography to a mural drawing, plus a performance with models in couture. But to explore the other works, visitors must first walk past a simple pedestal where at chest height there lies, unprotected, a single $100 bill.
A label pasted on a nearby wall reads: “Money is a man-made concept to determine value. There is no argument that a physical one-hundred-dollar bill is worth more than the prints on its faces…. However, A One Hundred Dollar Bill is not a one-hundred-dollar bill.” With this fiat, artist Cass’Mosha A. Centeno has declared the banknote — unpristine, with a crease down the centre, and “64” scribbled on the obverse in red ballpoint ink — a work of art.
“What happens when the value of the artwork itself is a value? … There is no ambiguity or mystification — the value is printed on its faces. Taken out of its original purpose and context, I have re-established this one-hundred-dollar bill as a readymade art object, and I have determined the price at $200.”
Some of my favourite artworks
have a punchline, and some jokes require no elaboration.
But if A One
Hundred Dollar Bill nudges us to ponder the
arbitrariness of an art object’s exchange value, it also
raises the more vexing question of its idea value, which
in this instance can be quite clearly quantified. As a
$100 bill, A One
Hundred Dollar Bill is worth $100. Its declaration
as an artwork, says the artist, is worth exactly an
additional $100. (If your bent is theological rather than
economic, consider this an example of transubstantiation:
the physical senses say the banknote is only money, but
faith — in the artist’s conceptual powers — says no, it’s
art.)
There’s a longish history of artists designating unlikely objects and substances as artworks, from a piece of tropical fruit taped to a wall to the artist’s own excrement (what is it with these Italians?). Centeno’s rubric for A One Hundred Dollar Bill cites Duchamp — who, of course, coined the term readymade, even if he didn’t actually create his reputed first example of the genre. We’ve had over a century to reflect that sometimes a banana is just a banana, and sometimes it’s something else. In the case of A One Hundred Dollar Bill, the artist’s medium is, ostensibly, money, but the medium is also and actually our sense of what money is worth. Object is inextricable from idea. (And let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge the efficiency, which is also to say the wit, of the gesture. Catalan had to go to a supermarket and exchange money for his banana. Centeno went straight for the pure manifestation of value in our capitalist reality: cold, hard cash.)
I’m reminded of another artwork
with a monetary basis. Proyecto Capital was a collaboration among
Trinidadian Michelle Isava and Colombians Alejandro Mina
and Mar Molano. Visiting Port of Spain in 2009, the
Colombians were astonished to see numerous
small-denomination coins dropped in the streets of the
city: money thrown away, as it were, of insufficient value
to justify the brief labour of stooping to pick it up. The
three artists began collecting discarded coins, eventually
amassing almost two thousand, which they assiduously
catalogued —
500 5-cent coins
987 25-cent coins
498 10-cent coins
7 50-cent coins
— with a total value of $325.05. These were presented to the public in an installation at the art space Alice Yard, where visitors were invited to take as many coins as they chose, thereby returning them to circulation. Most people politely pocketed a coin or two, until the late artist Richard Bolai, a known provocateur, burst in with an empty briefcase to snatch the entire hoard, while bystanders snapped photos. Later the backyard larcenist would boast online of having disrupted the artwork, when in fact he had brought it to an unanticipated but perfectly apt culmination.
Don’t forget that while a
banknote is money, a banknote is also always a work of
art, literally: defined by images engraved upon a special
medium, requiring the mastery of complicated techniques
and design conventions, almost always bearing a signature,
and subject to tests of authenticity as stringent as those
applied to Old Master paintings. Banknotes are prints of
unlimited edition which we carry in our pockets and
purses, so familiar that although we scrutinise them daily
we only infrequently interrogate their visual imagery (the
TT$100 bill includes depictions of the Central Bank
headquarters, an oil rig, and a greater bird-of-paradise,
Paradisaea apoda,
a species indigenous to Papua New Guinea and associated
with Tobago thanks to a historical misapprehension).
Unlike almost every other kind of artwork, banknotes enjoy
legal protection of their physical integrity. Trinidad and
Tobago’s Central Bank Act makes it a summary offence to
mutilate, cut, tear, perforate, or write, print, draw, or
stamp upon any currency note, with a mandated six-month
prison term. But as far as I can make out, the Act has no
opinion about a private citizen assigning an unauthorised
value to a banknote, whether the motive is art or
something less insidious.
$200
Reader, I bought it.
I didn’t rationalise it like this at the time, but in retrospect I think I was intrigued enough by the artwork that I wanted it to be — for want of a better word — complete, and I felt that completion depended on the artist’s gesture of offering the banknote for sale being met by a buyer’s gesture of handing over payment. Perhaps when I say complete what I mean is that the transaction transformed A One Hundred Dollar Bill from a kind of prank to a serious kind of prank, which may be one way of defining a conceptual artwork.
Besides which, $200 seemed an eminently affordable investment in the very early work of a young artist with a presumably long career ahead — an investment, too, with a guaranteed minimal value. Because at worst, should I fall on hard times, I could always spend A One Hundred Dollar Bill at face value.
As it turns out, that particular
security was short-lived. A third party entered the
collaboration between artist and buyer: the Central Bank
of Trinidad and Tobago, declaring that as of 1 January,
2020, the $100 bill in A One Hundred Dollar
Bill would cease to be, in legal terms, a $100 bill
(and thus revealing the work as unexpectedly durational).
A One Hundred Dollar
Bill would then be — the punchline to the punchline
— merely a work of art, and worth only as much as anyone
might value its artist’s idea.
•••
Proyecto Capital, a collaboration among Michelle
Isava, Alejandro Mina, and Mar Molano, was presented in a
one-night event at Alice Yard, 80 Roberts Street,
Woodbrook, Port of Spain, on 6 November, 2009. The project
is documented at proyectocapital09.blogspot.com.
Cass’Mosha A. Centeno’s A One Hundred Dollar
Bill was shown as part of the popup exhibition #ayardexchange,
co-curated by Christopher Cozier, at the temporary art
space 27 Pembroke Street, Port of Spain, on 21 and 23
August, 2019. For a broader account of #ayardexchange,
see the review by Kaneesha Cherelle Parsad published
online at aliceyard.blogspot.com/2019/09/squatting-review-of-yard-exchange.html.