Can you tell us a little about your background as an
artist?
I started
drawing cartoons from a very early age. Then beginning of the nineties I got
involved in the upcoming electronic dance music movement, designing hundreds of
record covers and flyers and doing live-paintings etc. I started making
paintings and over time these paintings evolved into large scale sculptures and
installations, which provide a surreal mirror for our society. Creating
dystopian Utopias, such as for instance Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia - a border
control checkpoint to enter your own dreams. For years I used to destroy
my big projects. I feel that when a project, or art, a new youth movement or a
new piece of music comes into the world it has a certain kind of power, or
magic. Eventually that magic fades, and it turns into a business, and starts
earning money. In order to preserve that magic, I blew up projects, set them on
fire, or smashed them to pieces, preserving that energy, and turning it into a
kind of Urban Myth. These installations are turning more and more into
interactive performances, and this year I am working on my first theater play.
What’s the Exchanghibition Bank project all about?
A few years
ago as an artist I started my own bank - the Exchanghibition Bank. This seemed
a pretty good idea in times when governments had no money for Art anymore, but
billions to bail out banks...I started the Project from my artist background; it
somehow puzzled me that art seemed to be mostly valued because of its financial
worth in our society. I mean, when do you ever read about art on the front page
of a newspaper? When a Picasso gets sold for a hundred million bucks, or a
Warhol for forty million, or the Lehman Brothers Bank goes bankrupt and their
art collection gets auctioned for millions. But what does that say about their
spiritual, artistic or social value? So it started by looking at the value of
art. I wasn't that interested - yet - in money, because, as so many artists, I
come from an anti-money background. But a lot has changed since: as a true bank
director I became fascinated and even obsessed by money!
As an artist you need to
study your material: when I use acrylic paint, I have to learn how it works,
when I use explosives, I have to learn about them, and now that I was using
money, I needed to study money. And that's when I quickly became fascinated by
this abstract material, not backed by any tangible asset, existing in a purely
virtual way, and created as debt with one click of a button by banks. So, in a
way, there was very little to be against, or anti-money. It's just an
agreement, a form of energy, which, when it is exchanged, has value. But we
don't want to exchange it, we want to hoard it on our bank accounts, and treat
it as something special. And at the same time it influences all our perceptions
of value.
I sometimes half-jokingly
say that this Project made me go from hating money to seeing money as Love. One
of the latest banknotes released by the bank has “Love” as its value - We are
involved in exchange each and every day in our society. But instead of loving
our exchange and each other, we started loving the material means of exchange:
Money.
And instead of using those
Exchanges to make beautiful things happen around the world, we use them to earn
more money. And we hoard that money, not backed by any tangible asset, created
as debt by just a click of a button, on our bank accounts. Instead, we could
use it to make the things we love happen, and the places and people we love
thrive.
In the process of spending
money, and buying things we think we need, we tend to forget that buying is
actually an exchange, and not just a one-way transaction. We don’t just obtain
something material, but we give something in return: money. Money does still
have value as an agreement between people. Moreover it also has its energy,
propelling its future use. And by giving money back with love to the people,
and initiatives we love, and of whom we know that they use that same energy
with love as well, we change the world.
Money (still) has more users than Facebook. So I
think money would unite, if we would realize that whenever we use money, it's
not a one-way transaction. We do not just buy something from someone, we give
something back as well - money. And when we realize that money is just an
agreement, and can be used as energy to make things happen, we should realize
that the act of giving the money is as important as receiving what we bought.
And we should only give it to those we love, and do things we love. Also using
money as a means of exchange instead of this magical thing, which seems to have
taken control of our lives.
What is the name of its official currencies and how
the banknotes are used within this system?
The currency
has no name. I like that. That way it’s not defined by words, but by its image.
And it also focuses the attention of the user on its meaning. For instance one
of the banknotes has Million as its denomination. This means you can be a
Millionaire. A millionaire of what? Who cares? Most important is just to be a
millionaire after all, isn’t it?
I am using
currency as a way to make people think and deliver a message. The medium is the
message. And money is a very powerful medium. I am surprised governments have
not started printing advertisements on money yet.
All the
denominations, such as Million, Zero, Infinite, etc are created to make people
think and question value. But after a while I noticed, that no matter how
absurd or thought-provoking these values are, they were still numbers. And one
of the problems in my opinion of money is that it has quantified everything,
and is turning all qualities of life into quantities. Isn’t what we value most
after all, as we say “priceless”?
So I decided
to stop creating denomination with numbers and start focusing on real values.
The first one was a banknote with value “Love”. I explained its meaning in the
question above. And now there’s also a banknote with value “Like”. Those
banknotes can be added to your payments to show that money can have more than
financial value.
The notes have an expiration date. Why’s that?
Only the 2012
banknote has an expiration date. Its expiration date was the 21st of
December 2012. Back then some people thought because of the Mayan calendar that
the world would end. So it seemed a nice touch. And also, as in all other
details, it provokes thought. Because after it’s expiration date it lost its
financial value, but it would still be art. So would it not have more value
then?
What are the Ideas for Change and how are they related
to the Exchanghibition Bank?
Because of the quantifying
nature of money it seems that we are losing the ability to value that which
can’t be expressed by numbers. But not all values and qualities can be
converted that easily into a pile of banknotes. And financial value is only one
of many important values. Spiritual, moral, artistic, and social values, to
name a few, are also important.
So the 2012 banknote could not
be ordered for money alone. In order for the 2012 banknote to have more than
just a financial value we people to think about the way they’d like to change
the World and describe that idea to us. Thus, their specific idea for change
became an inseparable part of their uniquely numbered banknote, and they would
get the banknote home together with a special certificate with had their Idea
written on it. That way the banknote would also get an extra personal value. A
value, which could not be expressed in digits.
What places have you guys been to with the Exhanghibition
Bank booths?
We went to the Stedelijk-
and Boijmans Museum in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The Burning Man festival in the
Nevada desert, BoomFestival (Portugal) and Glastonbury (England), but also to
real Banks, such as ASN Bank and ABN AMRO, and Amsterdam Central Station. I
like the combination of cultural places, such as museums, but also reaching the
'real' world. After all, money is something that all of us are using every day,
so it's important to reach a lot of different people: we also operated the bank
at Occupy and in shopping centers. I also think that art is a great way of
raising questions about aspects of our society, and only operating in the white
cube environment of the Art World can make raising those questions a bit too
harmless, too safe. The context of the placement of a piece is important, and
adds to its meaning.
We have also heard about a Project called
Transformoney Tree, what can you tell us about it?
I also started another Art
as Money project: the Transformoney Tree. The Transformoney Tree is a
tree, which has the Exchanghibition banknotes hanging as leaves from its
branches. Participants can glue real money onto the tree itself. By gluing
real banknotes onto the tree itself, and drawing on them, these banknotes
become financially worthless, but get turned into art. This interaction
transforms the tree, but also our own perceptions of value, art, and money.
It’s an exchange of value in a world, where only financial values seem to get
valued. But isn’t what we value most “priceless”? Interaction with the tree
could help us with the shift from a fragile mono-money-culture to a diversified
world of many alternative currencies, providing tools for exchange of various
forms of value as a necessary alternative for our current debt-based-system,
which focuses on infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Are the roots of
this tree the roots of all evil or the roots of all happiness? Hopefully,
they’ll become the roots of a new consciousness. It's amazing and beautiful to
see how much impact it has on people's life when they draw on a banknote. Even
though everybody uses money every single day, rarely do people think about what
it is, how it may be refined or redefined and changed. It's just a tool, and
tools can change in an ever evolving society, but money has always been
presented to us as an absolute given fact. By drawing on money, people regain
power, and look in a total different way at what it is and represents. That
alone I think is a big accomplishment.
What’s behind the idea of Karma Laundering?
When we took
the bank to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert we needed a different
approach. Burning Man is based on a gift-economy and money does not exist
there. But it sometimes feels more like a vacation of money. People maxing
their credit card to rent expensive RV’s, buy costumes, food etc and then not
use money for one week. But still it’s special. I often give talks about money
nowadays, and almost ask the question if someone in the audience did not use
money for an entire week? Hardly anyone ever has. And that is kind of weird;
almost everybody in this world uses money every single day, but hardly anyone
thinks about what it is, how it works, and how it might maybe work in another
way.
But to get
back to the question. This money-less desert seemed fertile thinking ground to
look differently at how we use money. So we asked people how they used money
the other 51 weeks of the year. And if they ever did anything bad for their
Karma, bad for the planet, for their relations etc in order to earn money. Then
they could sign a Spiritual Karma Laundering Contract, thus bringing their
Spiritual Karma Debt back to Zero. And after that they would get a symbolic
Zero banknote.
What are your new projects as an artist?
I keep
developing the Exchanghibition Bank project. I am currently working together
with the ABN AMRO bank on their crowdfunding platform Seeds, and will become
the artist-in-residence at the BE performance festival in Birmingham, which has
money as its theme. And I am also working on a new Art as Money project, where
I want to combine two illusions, which we tend to view as real. Two human
constructs; Time and Money. Is Time really Money?
Besides
becoming a banker, I also now started my own religion: Like 4 Real. We are guiding
people on their path to Spiritual Enlikement. A project which looks at the
value of social media. Can Social Media strengthen our human relations, or will
we turn into a bunch of autistic Like-clicking zombies? We built an altar with
a Big Golden Like at the Burning Man festival last September, and this year it
will turn into a theater play in cooperation with cross over dance company ISH.
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