Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 11, 1993 TAG: 9301090231
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. RUANE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: PITTSBURGH LENGTH: Long
ARTIST NOTES HIS SEVEREST CRITICS ARE THE FEDS
J.S.G. Boggs remembers the moment clearly: It is May 1984. He is having coffee and a doughnut in a hole-in-the-wall cafe in Chicago. Lost, as usual, he is doodling with a blue Bic pen on a folded white napkin.An artist, Boggs was then into painting numbers, intrigued by their abstractness. So on this napkin he is doodling 1's in the corners and a random face in the middle.
Then, as he tells it, the waitress says, "That's the most beautiful $1 bill I've ever seen. Can I have it?"
Surprised, Boggs says no.
"I'll give you $20," she says.
No, says Boggs.
"How about $40?"
Wait, says Boggs. Could he just use the drawing in place of a dollar and pay his 90-cent bill? Sure, says the waitress, and brings him a dime change.
Eight years after the napkin encounter, his "money" art is now famous, his legal troubles are ongoing, and J.S.G. Boggs sits in a worn upholstered chair recalling the seed of inspiration, and the source of his problems.
The light of the chilly gray afternoon slants in the fourth-floor windows of the old brick South Side brewery here, where he lives and paints. Behind him, his sleeping area that the Secret Service agents searched is still askew.
He tells about that, too: He had been outside in his light-blue pickup, ready to go downtown to promote his latest work - the scheduled "spending" of $1 million in his so-called Boggs Bills. He looked down to put the keys in the ignition. When he looked up, there were flashing lights everywhere and men pulling him out of the truck.
In the chaos, the men spouted incomprehensible words. "I was so discombobulated at the moment, it sounded like `argle, bargle, gargle,' " he said. One word, though, popped out clearly: "counterfeiting."
It is a word Boggs, 37, has heard many times before - in England, where he was tried and acquitted on counterfeiting charges in 1987. In Australia, where he was tried and acquitted in 1989 and where the judge ordered that he be paid $20,000 for his trouble. And last year in Wyoming, where U.S. Attorney Richard Stacy declined to prosecute. "I didn't feel it was warranted to charge him," Stacy said recently. "For one thing, I didn't want to play his publicity game."
The problem is that ever since the fateful day in Chicago, Boggs has explored through art a facet of human existence that governments have traditionally, and often harshly, reserved to themselves: the printing and valuing of money.
What is money, anyhow? Boggs has asked. Is it not an abstraction? "What's a dollar worth?" he wonders. "There is no such thing as a dollar. . . . It's just an abstract measure."
Why do people place value on money, which is physically only pictures on paper? And might people also place value on similar drawings, but for artistic reasons?
All this, and more, Boggs has examined, with exhilarating and distressing results.
From Europe to the United States to Australia, Boggs has "spent" thousands of dollars in Boggs Bills, always making clear that what he offers is art and not fake money. He has "bought" everything from luxury hotel lodgings to window fans.
In some countries, most notably Switzerland, he could not draw his bills fast enough. "I was doing quick sketches of thousand Swiss franc notes, which are equivalent to 700 American dollars," he said in a recent interview. "And they were just taking them, like that," he said, snapping his fingers.
Later, experimentally, he moved into limited-edition prints, thinking of testing the art's boundaries. "To my surprise, people were still way ahead of me," he said. He recently used five prints of $1,000-Boggs Bills to pay for an expensive motorcycle. "They took them. And they knew what they were."
Many people have called him crazy - the London barkeep, for example, who years ago accepted a five-pound Boggs Bill in exchange for two beers and a sandwich. Clearly, said the barkeep, the Boggs Bill was worth much more than five pounds.
"It is a kind of magic," the award-winning art critic Arthur Danto wrote in a 1990 catalog accompanying a Boggs exhibit, with the artist as "seducer . . . tempter . . . provocateur . . . conjurer."
But not, insists Boggs, counterfeiter. Boggs Bills may look a little like regular money. He draws the bills in dark pen or pencil on light-colored art paper. In general the bills take after whatever nation's currency he is mimicking - an American dollar, a British pound, a Swiss franc.
But a closer look reveals the difference. The front of one $10-Boggs Bill, for example, states: "This note is a piece of paper with meaning + messages!!" It is signed: "J.S.G. Boggs . . . Secretary of Relationships." The back of the bill is blank except for Boggs' green thumb print, a serial number and his signature.
Another Boggs Bill, a 1,000-note drawn in 1990, says: "This note is legal art for all those who agree, see?" It is signed, "J.S.G. Boggs . . . Secret of the Treasury." But there is a second signature on the bill: "W. Michael Harnett, Treasurer of Art" - a name unknown to most people, but well-known to Boggs and artists like him.
Harnett was an Irish painter who lived in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, who, like Boggs, painted money, and who, like Boggs, got in trouble with the Secret Service.
Best known for protecting presidents, the agency actually was founded in 1865 during the last days of the Lincoln administration to combat counterfeiters, said Curtis Eldridge, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington.
He said that the Secret Service now investigated many kinds of financial fraud and added that the agency would have no comment on Boggs because of the ongoing investigation.
But Boggs recounted that despite years of open contact with the agency, Secret Service men descended on him just before noon Dec. 2, armed with search warrants for his home and his "person." Assisted by two Pittsburgh policemen, four agents searched Boggs' studio/living quarters. Later, six agents searched his office at Carnegie Mellon University, where Boggs is a fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics.
During the searches, Boggs said, the agents seized various art and papers, and, with talk of fines and jail terms, he believes, they tried mightily to intimidate him.
Boggs said he was not charged with anything and doubts that he would be. The Secret Service's action, he believes, is nothing less than harassment and censorship.
Joined by his cat, Jack, amid the turquoise-colored girders that support the ceiling of his studio, Boggs recently stood in paint-splattered cargo pants and water-stained cowboy boots and defended his work.
"I know it's not me that violated their territory," he said of the Secret Service. "They're the ones that have crossed the line. I didn't cross the line and become a counterfeiter. They crossed the line and extended the realm of their authority into the fine-art world, which they have no business being in."