Isn't that a pretty sight? All that green and beige is enough to make some people's mouths water. The design of the USDs is so powerful that it guarantees a reaction inside of every viewer who sees it. Isn't that genius? Or is it just simplistic and stupid to waste your time and resources wrapping up thousands of chopped pieces of wood in perfectly measured laser prints? I spent a lot of time surrounded by all that paper and at times the scope of the task was exhausting to think about. Just an endless stack of sheets to be cut and folded, over and over, 8 hours each week for a strange stern man in a jumpsuit. At other times I only had to take a look around surrounded by all those greenbacks to lift my spirits up. I know Ben Franklin's sly smile well now. We worked hard (shout out to my man David Merritt, TNASA prez and co-slave) in Srdj's studio which was really a former meat locker with a huge sliding door in a converted old warehouse under a bridge in a rundown industrial district, part of the Art Egg workspace in Mid-City. It looked and felt like the sweatshop of a drug cartel with the unfinished stacks of bills piled up in every corner and us interns bent over the table chopping and gluing, inhaling fumes, crafting the bundles. Every hour or so the boss man would barge in chain smoking his cigarettes to inspect the product, reprimand one of us while the other silently looked on, crack a joke (to show he was keeping his cool despite all the pressure of his impending deadline), and then disappear again to go work on another one of his other massive projects. The dude is intense. I really don't know if I would have stuck it all out if hadn't been for his extra chill artist wife, Adrian Price, who made more of that money it seemed than even Srdj did. She provided a saw-dusted boombox that kept bumping with Radiohead and Bob Dylan at all hours. That's how the work got done.
Location is everything and when it came time to show off the piece, Srdj couldn't have picked a better spot. The whole fat stack was installed front and center at the Old US Mint downtown off Frenchmen's street. The sculpture was divided up between two gated rooms that flank the main entrance when you first walk in. Back in the day when NOLA really made bank, they must have used those cells for the same reason, storing a wad of treasure. To the left the money was piled up (a la THE DARK KNIGHT) where people could get close enough to salivate and sniff at it. Those patrons with that certain glint in their eyes were directed to the connected room where they could PURCHASE(!) the money. A few folks must have regarded this as a ridiculous notion, equal parts modern-art blustering and old-fashioned hucksterism. But a larger percentage of the population considered 500 real USD for 1,000,000 fake ones to good of a steal to pass up. These people were directed to the first room on the right filled with a pyramid of golden briefcases (included in the deal) which they got to fill themselves, eyes aglow and hands atrembling.
Personally, I made the decision to stop collecting coins at the age of twelve when I began to feel like a chump for exchanging ten bucks for 5 cents in wheat pennies. But judging from the look on those people faces as they left the Mint, they knew exactly what they were paying for.
For a few weeks after the show opened I stopped coming by the studio, enjoying priceless hours of sacrificed Sunday sleep. But I was contractually bound by the internship class I'd signed up for at Newcomb to help Srdjan and Adrian. And so a slave to the grade, I slunk back to my master, Ben Franklin and his never ending pile of incomplete clones. Srdjan, fully aware of the hours I still owed him and unresting hustler that he is, was anxious for the re-up and resurgence of his cash flow. He dusted off my seat at the table, plugged in my hot glue gun, and disappeared again. Dave and I carried on just like we had been before (cutting, creasing, gluing, admiring, swaggering, exhausting) for a few more weeks until finals reared its head and we decided we'd made enough money for one semester.
But in the corner of Srdj's studio there still remained one pile of completed cash that Srdj never touched. A crate full of mishaps, cut-ups, half-glued and torn, that for some reason, obvious or not, never passed Srdj's standards. I fondled a few of them when Srdj was out of the room and I was still eying them as David tendered his resignation to the Man.
I casually put it out there:
"Look at these trash stacks, Srdj. Surely, you wouldn't mind if I took one of these worthless old bricks, wouldja?" He eyed me suspiciously, too proud to be hustled by one of his own. "Let me think about it, man. I might need'm for...something."
With David ready to be out of there, I still lingered around one more minute in the studio acting as if there was one last dust pile I needed to sweep up. Just long enough for him to change his mind in fact.
"Alright man, what do I care, you know? You can take some, sure" he said with the same suspicious look. "But what do you want that stuff for anyway?" All he could see was trash still, defects fit only for dogs to chew on. But having built the things for 4 months I knew exactly how to repair them and had already preselected a few bars with minor blemishes. Before he could adjust his eyes and realize what it was that I wanted, I snatched them up and headed for the door.
"Because its MONEY, man!"
I got a 100 Gs from him and its already appreciating.
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