Hans-Peter Feldmann has decorated the Guggenheim’s Tower Gallery with one hundred thousand one-dollar bills, the exact value of the Hugo Boss Prize (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through November 2, $18 includes audioguide (pay what you wish Saturdays 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3500
www.guggenheim.org
What would you do if someone came up to you and gave you a cool hundred grand? German visual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann was faced with just that troubling dilemma when he was awarded a $100,000 honorarium as the latest winner of the Guggenheim’s biennial Hugo Boss Prize. The seventy-year-old conceptualist, known for works that involve collecting found objects and photographs and sequencing them in unique and unusual installations, converted the six-figure check into one hundred thousand one-dollar bills that had been in circulation, then had his assistants pin them in overlapping rows across every inch of wall space as well as the two poles in the Guggenheim’s Tower Gallery. The exhibition, on view through November 2, can be taken on many levels, from a commentary on the intrinsic commercial value of art to the Warholian conceit of the physical act of creation, which in this case is the U.S. Treasury and Feldmann’s assistants. To complicate things even further, museumgoers are generally not allowed to touch art, and that is the case here; however, since each of the bills has been in circulation, it is quite possible that some visitors have at one time or another actually “owned” one or more of the bills and contributed to their evolution from crisp and firm to raggedy and well worn. In addition, the financial display is a playful tease to a public suffering from one of the nation’s worst economic crises since its founding, with the visage of the Father of Our Country, George Washington, repeated around the gallery, reminding visitors of the responsibility of its political leaders. But no matter what Feldmann’s specific intentions are, his Hugo Boss Prize installation is a breathtaking wonderland of excess — as well as a splendid complement to the Guggenheim’s main current exhibition, Lee Ufan’s deeply philosophical and very personal “Marking Infinity.”