The 500 euro man | Frankfurt
Georg Joachim Schmitt creates puzzles from shredded money
Downtown – The fact that money alone does not make you happy is not new. But money also arouses curiosity in an artist who has studied philosophy, art history, classical philology and art history. Georg Joachim Schmitt (58) currently has 500 small golden, silver and black boxes with transparent windows with “99 percent pure” purple, shiny, wafer-thin strips of 500 euro bills. “Money puzzles made up of around 12,347 pieces,” he says with a smile. “You need a lot of patience.”
He actually only wanted to have a purple diamond pressed out of it, but his hairdresser Rita gave him the idea of making puzzles as well. “The prototype for the diamond is ready, the matching briquette part is put back,” he says. It all started 20 years ago. “I wanted to find out the nutritional value of D-Marks and dollars. Sending 5-D-Mark bills and 1-Dollar bills to a grocery store was easy, but the euro was not yet in circulation. So I got 2001 I wrote to the management of the ECB and asked if they would provide me with euro bills for the purpose and they said yes have more fat than the dollar than the euro, but the euro contains more fat than the dollar. The D-Mark had more fiber than the dollar, but there was no evidence of starch in the dollar. ” Schmitt graphics were created from the laboratory results. The Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who was honored with the Max Beckmann Prize of the City of Frankfurt in 2001, contacted Schmitt and presented the graphics together with works by Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp in the exhibition “Money and Value – The Last Tabu” at the Expo.02 exhibited at the Arteplage in Biel, Switzerland.
15 kilos of shredded banknotes
In the summer, Schmitt came up with the idea of making a diamond out of the 500 euro bills that had been withdrawn from circulation. “I also wrote to the Bundesbank and told them about the action from back then and reported about my plan with the diamond. The answer was again positive,” says Schmitt with a beaming smile. “I was allowed to pick up 15 kilos of shredded and pressed single-variety banknotes in briquette form.” For six hours, Schmitt untangled some of the briquettes and filled four 20 liter buckets. “That’s 80 liters of money worth five million euros,” he says, still incredulous. In Wiesbaden, together with two female artists, he completed a “money storm” in which the two women were enveloped by snippets of money. Then he mixed purple snippets of money with Vaseline and designed a completely authentic-looking and feeling sausage that he pulls out of a kitchen towel. If you don’t know what it is filled with, you just want to cut off a piece and bite into it.
Schmitt stands in front of the Bundesbank building on the Taunusanlage. “Next up is the purple diamond,” he says, looking playfully at his money puzzle boxes. There is also a postcard for the puzzle. A hand with tweezers moves a few gossamer snippets on a 500 euro template on a wooden table. “Buy your luck!” it says. “With a little patience, the money puzzle will make you rich and happy!” On the back is the red note “Attention! Art!” to read. Schmitt smiles. “If you have the patience to put the 12,347 parts together, you definitely have variety and do long mindfulness exercises.” Sabine Schramek
Contact
Information on money puzzles and other works of art is available by email at [email protected].