Tactical Media (Electronic Mediations)

Excerpt from page 174 / Notes to Chapter 3

9. Wattenberg, Map of the Market,
   
   http://smartmoney.com/marketmap.
   
   What is the relation, further, between visualizations of financial information and the projects that make art out of banknotes and coins, Warhol, Beuys, Paolo Monti, and Otis Kaye? What are the abstractions in each? How would the issue of reference and the content of the reference differ? To start, Otis Kaye’s early-twentieth-century trompe l’oeil paintings of U.S. currency are representational rather than simulational. Unlike the earlier trompe l’oeil paintings of William Harnett and John Haberle, which were confiscated by the Secret Service on the basis of their violation of counterfeit laws, and unlike the notorious transactional performances of J. S. G. Boggs in the 1980s and early 1990s, Kaye’s work foregrounds composition instead of reproduction. Though Kaye’s technique also produces a hyperrealism, his paintings maintain a collage effect through the superimposition of coins, bank notes, and text over fragments of replicated “masters” paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Dürer, Picasso, and Whistler. See the catalog from the Federal Reserve Board exhibition, by Otis Kaye (New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2002); as well as Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also see Warhol’s Eighty Two-Dollar-Bills (1962); Monti’s Dollar Image (1989) and Cash (1991), at Vierdimensional²