Mark Wagner: Ravel Zoubok

Art in America, Dec, 2008 by Elaine Sexton

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Mark Wagner's "currency collages" and mixed-medium constructions, composed of actual one-dollar bills, are as prescient as they are audacious. Given the unprecedented (and still unfolding) losses on Wall Street and around the world, Wagner's anarchic gesture of cutting up this powerful icon, sometimes shredding it into tens of thousands of little bits, feels stunning. It prompts one to ask if destroying U.S. currency is against the law, right up there with American-flag-burning. The answer is: yes.

For "My Portfolio," his recent show of works from the past two years, Wagner reconfigured the dollar bills as sardonic tableaux ranging in size from 6 by 4 to 80 by 36 inches. In 13 of the 51 pieces, Wagner cast George Washington as the recurring protagonist in various roles, from salaryman, sailor, navigator and pioneer to a farmer with halo and pitchfork. In Bout, Wagner skillfully constructs a tiny muscular body for the first U.S. president, posed in the ring as a boxer facing a phantom figure five times his size. Row upon row of easily 300 Washingtons, a mute stadium of faces, look on as if the match were a session of Congress.

Wagner squanders the dollar's commodity value while, at the same time, not one scrap of the actual bill seems to go to waste. He draws pattern and whimsy from engraved filigree on linen paper, in shades of green that daily go unnoticed. The 3-D assemblages in particular, with their countless shredded bills--composing the grass in Window Box and the bristles in Very Expensive Push Broom--make the viewer uncommonly curious about the cost of materials. (The Federal Reserve tells us each U.S. banknote costs 2.6 cents to produce; depending on the size of the collage, Wagner uses from 40 to 300 dollar bills each.) Unfortunately, when too often repeated, as in the multiple examples of Washington as a pioneer, Wagner's ideas wear a bit thin and begin to read as gimmicks.

Using a substance of tangible value is rare for collage artists; their medium traditionally consists of found objects, often detritus, of little or no intrinsic worth. Wagner shares with collagists before him the tendency to compulsively repeat a signature symbol: bunnies (Ray Johnson), for example, or birds, movie stars and constellations (Joseph Cornell, the master). For John Evans, Wagner's contemporary at Zoubok, the obsession is ducks (what Evans calls his "Ursuline" ducks).

Wagner's smallest collages are taut compositions, with visual puns, politics and economics embedded in image and title: a collaged barcode, in Cigarettes; a gas pump, in Mileage; a portrait of Groucho, in Marxism. In this, his second show in two years at the gallery, Wagner's "portfolio" of reconstituted greenbacks reverberated with humor and guile, never more timely than now.