By Mark Swartz
“It’s real art,” Boggs replies. The bill is cheerfully rejected, so he takes out some of the green stuff. He doesn’t mind. He’s already had some successes today. Flow, the Chicago Avenue diner owned by painter Rodney Carswell, took Boggs’s Bills enthusiastically–he even got $40 back in change. Earlier at Navy Pier, during Art 1999 Chicago, the New Art Examiner accepted Boggs’s Bills as payment for a subscription. He produces plastic sleeves from his briefcase; each contains receipts and change received to document his various transactions.
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“They’re pretty,” she says, “but I don’t have any use for them.”
His studio has been raided by the Secret Service three times–in 1990, 1991, and 1992. He says agents confiscated more than 1,300 paintings, drawings, and prints, determining 800 of them to be illegal. He sued the government in 1993, seeking the return of artwork and protection from future prosecution. U.S. District Court judge Royce Lamberth threw out the lawsuit, and a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal. For Boggs, the case has yet to be resolved. “They’ve said my work is like drugs. Judge Royce Lamberth compared it to kiddie porn and on that basis ruled against a jury trial.”
He appears somewhat baffled by the attention, both negative and positive. “This is going to sound perverse,” Boggs says, “but the money isn’t that important to me.”
