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Atlanta artist Pam Longobardi has recently been making collages of tiny images cut from the world’s devalued currency notes, which can be had in great quantity on eBay.
The notes themselves, as Pam has noted, connote and denote much; global flows of value, governments undone by fiscal policies that make the deliberate inflation of Germany 1923 seem conservative by comparison, and sometimes occurring for much the same structural reasons: insurmountable commitments to external debt-holders, imposed by those powers in some cases arbitrarily, in some cases justifiably. We are just short of the days of the mid-nineteenth-century when the bondholders collected their due by sending in the marines (not the U.S. marines, at that point). Under such circumstances, the local banknotes spiral to seven and eight digits, until their exchange value is renounced completely.
In the midst of all this, it is the gaudy gorgeousness of the notes that Pam has remarked upon. Although even historically grounded currencies seem able to put reasonably interesting images on their financial instruments (the British bill featuring Charles Darwin being an in-your-face favorite of mine), the world’s new monetary entities seem given to exotica.
This is, on one level, remarkable. I have remarked before on the puzzled confusions of an eleven-year-old stamp collector in the late 1950s, when so many countries devoted themselves entirely to events and heroes of completely local concern, all of them unlisted in the history books available in smalltown Florida. The anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo? The Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands? The world was a great set of obscurities encoded in the unhelpful annotations in Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.
The stamps of Europe’s colonies, by contrast, were a child’s garden of recognizable exotica. Lions and elephants, lines of half-clad men carrying cargo, thatched huts in the Pacific and imposing architecture in India and the Fertile Crescent: these were the stereotypes of boys’ literature, and they were right there on the postage-paying instruments of the imperial powers. When the countries became independent, they lapsed back into honoring events and entities unknown in America, in designs that were often as lackluster as the ones found on American stamps of the day.
My point, and it isn’t particularly new, is that these places were as unfamiliar to the far-off designers of colonial stamps and currency as they were to an eleven-year-old American, so the tendency was to rhyme off the same hackneyed set of available photographs. This extended all the way to coats of arms; the designer of one Caribbean colonial crest mistook a conical salt pile for some kind of igloo and put a doorway in it, and it remains thus on the island’s emblem unto this day.
Do today’s currencies fall into the same tendency because they are still being designed by engravers in London and Paris? A large part of the world’s currency and postage stamps is still produced by a handful of security printing houses in Europe, and most nations don’t seem to have in-country designers sending the wished-for subject matter. They have other concerns than the image their banknotes project to the world; what matters is that the notes be distinguishable, and hard enough to counterfeit. What pictures appear amid the standard faker-defeating swirls and curlicues would seem to be almost incidental.
So we get swarms of flamingoes and such (actually, the flamingoes would be on one of the world’s more rock-solid currencies, I think, but that image is what comes to mind).
And that fact stirs the imagination of one Atlanta artist. Joseph Cornell incorporated such things into purely dreamy assemblages (I am recalling the butterfly stamp of Dutch New Guinea in one of his boxes in, I think, the Hirshhorn Museum); Pam Longobardi thinks both of their imaginative potential and the global economic forces that have turned these notes into incredibly lovely scrap paper.
The notes themselves, as Pam has noted, connote and denote much; global flows of value, governments undone by fiscal policies that make the deliberate inflation of Germany 1923 seem conservative by comparison, and sometimes occurring for much the same structural reasons: insurmountable commitments to external debt-holders, imposed by those powers in some cases arbitrarily, in some cases justifiably. We are just short of the days of the mid-nineteenth-century when the bondholders collected their due by sending in the marines (not the U.S. marines, at that point). Under such circumstances, the local banknotes spiral to seven and eight digits, until their exchange value is renounced completely.
In the midst of all this, it is the gaudy gorgeousness of the notes that Pam has remarked upon. Although even historically grounded currencies seem able to put reasonably interesting images on their financial instruments (the British bill featuring Charles Darwin being an in-your-face favorite of mine), the world’s new monetary entities seem given to exotica.
This is, on one level, remarkable. I have remarked before on the puzzled confusions of an eleven-year-old stamp collector in the late 1950s, when so many countries devoted themselves entirely to events and heroes of completely local concern, all of them unlisted in the history books available in smalltown Florida. The anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo? The Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands? The world was a great set of obscurities encoded in the unhelpful annotations in Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.
The stamps of Europe’s colonies, by contrast, were a child’s garden of recognizable exotica. Lions and elephants, lines of half-clad men carrying cargo, thatched huts in the Pacific and imposing architecture in India and the Fertile Crescent: these were the stereotypes of boys’ literature, and they were right there on the postage-paying instruments of the imperial powers. When the countries became independent, they lapsed back into honoring events and entities unknown in America, in designs that were often as lackluster as the ones found on American stamps of the day.
My point, and it isn’t particularly new, is that these places were as unfamiliar to the far-off designers of colonial stamps and currency as they were to an eleven-year-old American, so the tendency was to rhyme off the same hackneyed set of available photographs. This extended all the way to coats of arms; the designer of one Caribbean colonial crest mistook a conical salt pile for some kind of igloo and put a doorway in it, and it remains thus on the island’s emblem unto this day.
Do today’s currencies fall into the same tendency because they are still being designed by engravers in London and Paris? A large part of the world’s currency and postage stamps is still produced by a handful of security printing houses in Europe, and most nations don’t seem to have in-country designers sending the wished-for subject matter. They have other concerns than the image their banknotes project to the world; what matters is that the notes be distinguishable, and hard enough to counterfeit. What pictures appear amid the standard faker-defeating swirls and curlicues would seem to be almost incidental.
So we get swarms of flamingoes and such (actually, the flamingoes would be on one of the world’s more rock-solid currencies, I think, but that image is what comes to mind).
And that fact stirs the imagination of one Atlanta artist. Joseph Cornell incorporated such things into purely dreamy assemblages (I am recalling the butterfly stamp of Dutch New Guinea in one of his boxes in, I think, the Hirshhorn Museum); Pam Longobardi thinks both of their imaginative potential and the global economic forces that have turned these notes into incredibly lovely scrap paper.
