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DESCRIPTION
In response to the Treasury Department's announcement that the United States currency would be redesigned to foil counterfeiters, The New York Times commissioned seven artists, designers and architects to reconceive America's most potent symbol of its dynamism, freedom and opportunity: its money. The results, which sought to reverse the paradox that the world's strongest economy was fueled by the world's blandest money, were published in the October 30, 1994 issue of The New York Times Magazine under the title "Strengthening the Dollar." They were also the subject of an exhibition at Artists Space, an art gallery in New York City.
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Seed Money is a graphic representation of the theosophical idea that true wealth springs from the soil, as well as a narrative on America's economic history. Its three denominations - one, five and ten dollars - are multilayered yet translucent collages that serve the practical function of rendering the bills impossible to counterfeit, while pictorially embodying the interdependent catalysts of the country's wealth.
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The one-dollar bill is composed of interleaved horizontal strips of paper, some bearing engraved images of cash crops from 18th century botanical prints and others sliced from a current dollar bill, with George Washington's stoic gaze peering out from a breach in the center. The overlapping bands of green, white and amber paper evoke geological strata - the soil from which true wealth springs - while the engravings of peanuts, soybeans, tea, corn, cotton and tobacco recall the agrarian origins of the U.S. economy. George Washington's presence, which signals the inception of the country's independence and its legacy of freedom of opportunity, is treated ironically, as cut-up strips of a discarded currency design. These buried greenbacks may be a representation of seed money, i.e., the capital needed to launch a financial enterprise, or they may be a reference to America's regrettable willingness to discard its history in the interest of economic progress.
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The depth of imagery on the one-dollar bill is replaced in the five by a lyrical spareness. On one side, a botanical engraving is framed by a patterned border resembling rows of seeds. The engraving itself is overlaid with translucent leaf forms and interrupted by bits of striped paper that may be fabric from the Northeast's mills or corrugated steel from the Midwest's factories. The schema is reversed on the other side, with the botanical print bordering the seed pattern. Laid across the patterned background are tobacco leaves, more striped paper and the image of an unfinished highway ramp from David Plowden's photograph, "Interstate 84 Expressway at Hartford, Connecticut, September 1964." The empty stretches across the design and its amber coloration seem to evoke the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, a time of disconnect between the country's methods of production and distribution. The nearly obscured agricultural images on one side of the bill are clearly separated from the unfinished highway on the other.
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The ten-dollar bill, by contrast, offers a depth of botanical imagery, overlaid with Matisse-like abstract contours. The agricultural products are clearly united to the system of distribution, since the highway ramp on the other side of the bill is visible through the translucent paper. Conversely, the plants can be easily seen on the ramp's side, and the complexly layered imagery gives the impression of incomparable richness. The design's amber coloration in the context of such teeming abundance underscores the sense of buoyant optimism possible in a land of limitless prosperity. The highway ramp, rather than feeling unfinished, now seems to extend forward to unite the far-flung regions of the country into the world's leading economic power. It evokes the constant state of building and rebuilding that characterizes the nation's physical system of distribution - highway, rail, water and air - as well as the seemingly infinite expansion possible on the World Wide Web.
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The concepts behind Seed Money form the basis of Performance Theater 1999, which restates the ideas of collage, cultivation and distribution in a metaphorical and compressed form. Its plan was developed by tracing projected images of flowers on black paper. The paper, representing an underused and undervalued stretch of asphalt, was then cut and collaged into a series of ramps and floral forms. Like shoots from a seed, the ramps, which refer to the nearby freeways and traffic interchanges, spiral upward from an underground parking lot toward the macadam surface, where the flower petals burst forth to create a garden-like space for communal recreation and social interaction.
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