Artist Statement

Matthew W. Litteken
mwlitteken@nni.com

As a tangible item, currency is one of the most ephemeral things in the external, practical world, constantly defined and redefined in relationship to its fluctuating value. Money has become such an integral part of our consumer-based existence that the motif of currency is commonly used as a symbol of value or purchasing power. We are bombarded with its imagery, especially within televised advertising, printed coupons, and journalistic illustrations. Even with the rising technological substitutes for money, paper currency—actual, physical money—is still plainly capable of evoking delight and mystification. It is this mystification with value and money with which I am concerned in my work. Since value and its correlation to money are so transient, I am interested in questions such as: What do we value? Why? By what standards do we assign value? This question is particularly apt in light of the popular and easily-accessible means to purchase “manufactured” art and décor in such venues as the “big box” merchandise chains. My work investigates this aspect of consumerism through the exploitation of currency and value in a two-fold series of introspective paintings. The two projects, completed in tandem with one another, call for the personal inventory of spending practices and value assignments, predominantly in relation to art as commodity.

The first approach involves providing pictorial experiences in value-manipulated color as an integral part of the visual decoding and expression of my paintings. This occurs particularly through exploiting the tonal ranges and psychological associations with color. I find this extremely relevant, in that I seek to provide a “value experience” within my work, by representing the certain areas on the denominations in very similar tonal ranges, nearly devoid of contrast. One aspect of this project that intrigues me is the play on the meaning of the word “value”. Value, as it alludes to formal art issues, is the relative lightness or darkness of a color, and cannot be associated with the estimation of “more” or “less”. This assessment of value is a matter of relativity, which may be described only in terms of a color’s tint, tone, or shade. I relate this enigmatic definition to the fluctuation of both monetary and artistic value assignments within society: What is a good value? What makes x more valuable than y? But, more importantly, these works, as paintings, propound: what is the value that American society places upon the visual arts?

The second series revolves around the notion of aesthetics, or lack thereof, in American currency. With the totality of colorful figures and events of American history, why is U.S. currency so aesthetically dull? I have based this series largely upon the eighteenth and nineteenth century ideals of the sublime and the “awe-inspiring”, where art objects came to be equated with, but distinct from, the transformative, contemplative power of religious relics. One of the visual tools these artists employed to evoke the “awe-some” is the imitative depictions of natural landscapes, particularly through the fundamental use of clouds, or “sky-scapes”. My tactic involves the appropriation and reconfiguration of the decorative elements of U.S. currency situated within these “scapes” to provide the viewer with the ironic sense of the sublime as it relates to the dry motif of money, while raising aforementioned issues of artistry, value, and pictorial worth. Is aesthetic beauty valued, or even relevant? What do we value (monetarily or aesthetically) in art? By what standards are these judgments made? In context of the critical assessment, and consequent taste, of the viewer I regard my work, not so much as the answers to these questions, but rather, as the inquisitors.