Hans-Peter Feldmann
100,000 $ Bills
2011
THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010
Guggenheim Museum, New York

—

Hans-Peter Feldmann has spent over four decades conducting a profound investigation into the influence of the visual environment on our subjective reality. Composing images and objects into serial archives, uncanny combinations, and other illuminating new contexts, his work unearths the latent associations and sentiments contained within the landscape of daily life. As the winner of the 2010 HUGO BOSS PRIZE, a biennial award recognizing significant achievement in contemporary art, Feldmann received an honorarium of $100,000. For his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, he has chosen to pin this exact amount to the gallery walls in a grid of overlapping one-dollar bills.

The installation, which uses money that has previously been in circulation, extends the artist’s lifelong obsession with collecting familiar material into simple groupings that reveal a nuanced play of similarity and difference. Throughout his practice, Feldmann has frequently divided an apparent whole into separate components; he has photographed every item in a woman’s wardrobe (All the clothes of a woman, 1973), presented individual images of the strawberries that make up a pound of fruit (One Pound Strawberries, 2005), and created a sequence of 100 portraits showing individuals of every age in a collective lifespan of a century (100 Years, 2001).

Feldmann also has a history of resisting the art world’s commercial structures, issuing his work in unsigned, unlimited editions and retiring from art making altogether for nearly a decade in the 1980s, at which point he gave away or destroyed the works remaining in his possession. Bank notes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest them with, and in using them as his medium, Feldmann raises questions about notions of value in art. But his primary interest in the serial display of currency lies less in its status as a symbol of capitalist excess than in its ubiquity as a mass-produced image and a material with which we come into contact every day. At its core, this formal experiment presents an opportunity to experience an abstract concept—a numerical figure and the economic possibilities it entails—as a visual object and an immersive physical environment.

—Katherine Brinson, Assistant Curator
(Biennal Hugo Boss Prize)

“I’m 70 years old, and I began making art in the ’50s,” Mr. Feldmann
said in a telephone interview from his studio in Düsseldorf. “At that time
there was no money in the art world. Money and art didn’t exist. So for
me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to
show the quantity of it.”
(Via)

He has instructed the museum to tack the bills up vertically, not
horizontally, and they will have to overlap to get the entire $100,000 on
the walls. Why vertically? Mr. Feldmann said it was an entirely
pragmatic decision: “It’s easier because they only will need one pin.”

Since the money is there for the taking, officials at the Guggenheim are
planning to have extra guards on duty and security cameras keeping a
close watch on visitors. “In the next room you find $10 million paintings,
and nobody is stealing them,” Mr. Feldmann said. “If they pocket $1,
O.K. But I’m sure that won’t happen.”

And although the intent may be different, even Mr. Feldmann
acknowledged that his installation had its roots in the Pop Art of the
1960s and ’70s. One obvious image that comes to mind is Warhol’s
1962 silk-screen painting “200 One Dollar Bills,” which sold for $43.7 
million at Sotheby’s two years ago.

But Mr. Feldmann’s installation is ephemeral. Once the show is over,
the money will be his for the spending.

“It can only be seen now, in this museum,” he said. “It’s a one shot.
That’s all.”
(Via the NY Times)