Boggs Bills: Contrast agents in the art market and in law, or, how to make money as an artist

Abstract

Much has been written on the intertwined histories of art and money, from trompe-l’œil depictions of banknotes to so-called money art to the elements of trust and authenticity undergirding these arenas. Yet, what happens when an artwork representing paper money is inserted into the financial system itself? What mechanisms of monetary production and regulation are activated and revealed? In the 1980s and 1990s, artist JSG Boggs realized Boggs Bills — representations of banknotes that pulled the financial system and the laws regulating money into art, and likewise, pulled art into the machinery of finance and its governance. Alongside the more widely discussed modes of creative engagement such as intervention, culture jamming, and semiotic disobedience, I propose the term contrast agent to discuss the operations of Boggs Bills within the systems of art and law. This conceptualisation allows for a consideration of the laboratory-like mapping of the vectors of exchange performed by Boggs Bills as they weave through various bureaucratic systems. These works of art were injected into and circulated through different arenas of exchange, animating the bureaucracy that both constructs and regulates money.