According to Benjamin Franklin, wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it. Collage artist Mark Wagner might have taken this saying too literally, putting his money where his mouth is. His paper collages are made entirely from deconstructed U.S. dollar bills, which he cuts and pieces together, forming intricate pieces that highlight the intrinsic relationship between wealth and American identity.
According to Wagner, the cutting-and-gluing technique that forms the basis of his practice is one of the simpler creative impulses that exists: “Simpler than the impulse to generate a fully new thing is the impulse to alter what exists,” he writes on his website. “The world can be different, and I will make it so like this and like this.”
This creative impulse—to deconstruct and reconstruct—was what attracted him early on to collage art. Wagner’s practice didn’t begin with money, but evolved organically as he experimented with different materials. After first experimenting with cigarette packets, he decided to look for other familiar imagery.
“I hit on the dollar bill,” Wagner shared in an interview with Topic. “It’s the most common piece of paper, literally, in the world. When I started using it, I was just using it because it was common. And then I realized that I could bend the subject matter of the work to address what it held for people.”
The work itself involves a lot of altering, and Wagner estimates he destroys thousands of bills yearly. But though working with money comes at a price (literally), it isn’t as expensive as other art materials. Wagner estimates that a 30×40-inch piece costs less than $100.
“People always think that it’s expensive, but it’s not in the long run,” he remarked. “I use up most of the bill. A piece might look like it has a whole lot of dollars gone into it, because it has 300 heads on it, or 1,000 heads on it, but that’s just that one little piece of paper from the middle, and the rest of those bills are being used in other works.”
The finished result is worth every penny.
