Source: www.speakup.com.br
Language level: Advanced
Speaker: Chuck Rolando
Standard: American accent
They say that there’s a lot o f Money in the New York art world. This is certainly true in the case of Mark Wagner who makes colleges out of dollar bills. He talked to Speak Up about his work.
Mark Wagner
(Standard American Accent)
I use almost completely the US one dollar bill. I take the dollar and break it down into sort of its constituent parts. So there’s line work from the outside that i…I separate into sort of thin ribbons, I take George Washington’s head from the middle, I separate out the lights and the darks, and separate out the little leaf patterns and separate out the greens from the blacks. So I have sort of materials that are sort of the basic parts that make up the dollar bill, and then, from those pieces. I put together new images, and a variety of subject matter, sometimes it’s someone’s portrait, sometimes it’s… a scene that involves a little figure of George Washington that has…his head is his head and I make up the rest of his body. Sometimes the little leaves that are along the border of the one-dollar bill, you know, sort of grow into full trees and sort of touch on subject matter that has something to do with currency itself, or American identity, or trying to make tangible something about finance, something about the way money works, or the way accounting works. A lot of those concepts, you know, behind money are so intangible.
THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
He then talked about his most recent protect:
I just finished a college that l took me an entire year, and that’s an entire year of me working and two entire year of me working and two studio assistants. It’s a…17-foot-tall Statue of Liberty that’s made out of 1.121 dollar bills, cut into, I think the total was 81.695 pieces or something, something like that:
INTEPRETATION
And, in conclusion, we asked him whether his work had a particular meaning:
Mark Wagner
Probably a bunch of different meanings. It’s really…I think different people think about the material in different ways, and I want them to think about it in different ways. I’m not trying to hand them, you know, like a single meaning about money, you so, depending on the eyes of the viewer; you know, like an anarchist will look at the work and think that I’m trying to like storm the castle and tear down the government, but, at the same time, a capitalist can look at the work and see it as a celebration of the materials. Money creeps into so many people’s live in so many different ways. I kind of want my viewers to like fill in the meanings. I’m curious that everyone is so interested in money whether they’re worried about not having enough, or whether they have a lot of money, and they’re worried about losing it. It’s this very pervasive thing that finds its way into all of our lives.
