RESUME :: BIOGRAPHY

BELDNER SHOWS US THE MONEY
San Francisco Chronicle (May 11, 2002)
By Kenneth Baker

For Fifteen Minutes of Money (2000), on view at Catherine Clark Gallery, Bay Area artist Ray Beldner sewed together dollar bills to replicate an Andy Warhol painting from the early '80s.

In new work at Catharine Clark, Bay Area conceptualist Ray Beldner takes on a blinding fact of postmodern culture: the power of money to blot out art experiences.

Beldner has replicated modern art chestnuts -- Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space," Robert Motherwell's "Elegy for the Spanish Republic" and others -- using sewn and pulverized dollar bills as his medium. "Fifteen Minutes of Money" (2000) reprises in cash assemblage an Andy Warhol dollar-sign painting from the early '80s. "Trickle Down Composition" (2000) retraces a Jackson Pollock abstraction using powdered greenbacks on a canvas ground covered with digitally printed paper-money serial numbers.

The prices on Beldner's works appear to be many times the face value of their materials, a blunt expression of the artist's power to make economic magic -- setting the cash value of his own labor -- so long as an audience of believers can be found. The best way to cope with art's conversion to currency, Beldner suggests, is not to resist, at least if you're an artist.

Beldner's use of money as a medium of artistic homage might even be liberating: having at last seen the modernist canon literally converted to cash, maybe we can set about unseeing it that way.

COUNTERFEIT: Objects made of money. Through June 1. Catharine Clark Gallery, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 399-1439,