NECROLOG

This month, we bid adieu to two notable chancers: the failed painter who made an art of drawing money and a self-proclaimed inventor who conned the Beatles.

JSG BOGGS

Boggs was born Stephen Litzner and adopted by Jim Boggs and his wife Marlene, who renamed him James Stephen George, and he found fame as “JSG Boggs”. Marlene (born Marlene Dietrich Hildebrandt) was a carnival performer who toured as “Margo Queen of the Jungle”, and when not growing up in the middle class safety of Florida, young Boggs often accompanied her on tour. He started as an abstract painter but no one seemed interested and for several years he struggled, even taking parttime work in a blood bank, before hitting on the idea of drawing money. From the day in 1984 when he offered a $1 bill drawn on a napkin for a cup of coffee and a doughnut in a Chicago diner, Boggs’s transactions were designed (he claimed) to stimulate debate about how we value art – and why something as insubstantial as paper money is credited with having value at all.

Refusing to sell his drawings to collectors, Boggs sought to find hoteliers, restaurateurs, shopkeepers and the like who would accept his drawings in lieu of cash, as part of choreographed transactions which began with his announcing that he was an artist, and inviting his creditor to “enjoin with me to make an artistic transaction – to accept my notes for their face value to pay this bill”. If the recipient proved willing, they would be asked to complete the process by issuing a receipt and proper change.

Boggs never claimed that his “notes” were the real thing. One note could take 10 hours to create, using the finest-tip green and black pens. His detailed renderings were only ever drawn on one side of paper and close scrutiny would reveal tiny inscriptions such as “JSG Boggs, Secretary of the Measury”; “I promise to promise to promise”; “The Bank of Boggs”; “In Fun We Trust”; and “This is legal art for all those who agree, see?” The bank name might be “Federal Reserve Not” or “Kunstbank of Bohemia”. The plate serial number might be “EMC2” or “LSD”.

Boggs would then sell the change, the receipt, and sometimes the goods he had purchased as his “artwork”, and if the collector wanted the “note” as well, Boggs would tell him where he had spent it – usually to the financial benefit of its original recipient. The resulting “transaction” pieces – framed compilations of drawing, receipt, change and so on – could fetch many thousands of dollars and his work was acquired by institutions from the British Museum to the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One Boggs note was reportedly resold for $420,000.

Boggs reckoned he was successful in persuading people to accept his drawings about 60 per cent of the time and he always had most success in Europe. In Britain, where he lived for about 10 years, he used his drawings to pay the rent on a bedsit in Hampstead. In 1987, when he had his first exhibition at the Young Unknowns gallery in south London, Boggs was arrested and tried at the Old Bailey on four counts of “unauthorised reproduction” of banknotes under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act. For four days, The Bank of England v Boggs was frontpage news and Boggs took full advantage of the publicity. The bank, he protested, was “a threat to the freedom of artistic expression... it’s like having the KGB on your butt.”

During the trial, in which he was represented by Geoffrey Robertson QC, his defence was simple: When Renoir painted a nude, he did not reproduce a woman. When Boggs painted British money, he had not reproduced a pound note. “These are reproductions,” Boggs claimed, waving a fistful of real pound notes into the air; “These, by contrast,” he continued, brandishing his own drawings, “are original”. The jury found him not guilty on all counts and he paid his legal team in drawings. In his book The Justice Game (1998), Geoffrey Robertson observed that, as a result of the Boggs case, all Bank of England notes now carry a copyright message, the idea being that if they cannot secure a counterfeiting charge, then they can at least secure a copyright violation.

In 1989, Boggs was arrested while on holiday in Australia and thrown to jail. Not only was he found not guilty, but the courts awarded him $20,000 in real money in compensation. The US Secret Service raided Boggs’s studio in Pittsburgh three times between 1990 and 1992 and confiscated 1,300 items (which they never returned). Despite several hearings in the courts and what Boggs described as a “full-blown, analyse-you-downto-your-hair-follicles audit” in 1995, he was never charged.

As he became famous Boggs found himself plagued by artists who had taken to forging his work; there was even a collector in Chicago who had started specialising in bogus Boggs notes, prompting Boggs to wonder if he might get in on the act by counterfeiting his own work. Following Boggs’s death, Lawrence Weschler, author of Boggs: A Comedy of Values (Univ. Of Chicago Press, 1999), said the artist was “just short of being a con man – but no more so than anyone else in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance – which, of course, is the whole point.” Stephen Litzner, aka JSG Boggs, conceptual artist, born Woodbury, NJ 16 Jan 1955; died Tampa, FL 22 Jan 2017, aged 62.

MAGIC ALEX

Alexis Mardas, a selfproclaimed electronic genius known to fans as ‘Magic Alex’, moved to London from Greece in 1965 and worked as a TV repair man. He exhibited ‘kinetic light sculptures’ at the Indica Gallery, one of which was bought by the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones introduced Magic Alex to John Lennon, who was dazzled by his patter. Mardas produced a ‘Nothing Box’ (containing flashing coloured lights), which Lennon would stare at for hours while tripping on acid.

In 1968 Mardas was appointed head of Apple Electronics at Apple Corps. The Beatles bankrolled a lab in which he installed an array of pulsating, bleeping electronic gadgetry. He promised to construct a force field round Lennon’s house and planned to build a flying saucer using the engines from Lennon’s Rolls and Harrison’s Ferrari. He promised X-ray cameras, houses that floated on air and a hovering electronic sun. The sun never shone, and of the 100 odd patents applied for, none was accepted and nothing was ever produced.

The Beatles commissioned him to build a 72-track studio in the basement of Apple’s Savile Row offices, but when they turned up to record Let

It Be, they found – in George Harrison’s words – “the biggest disaster of all time”. The mixing desk looked like it had been built with a hammer and chisel, there was no soundproofing, no intercom and no proper wiring between the control room and the 16 speakers fixed randomly to the walls. Mardas vanished from the scene and the following year the Beatles’ new manager Allen Klein closed Apple Electronics. Yanni Alexis Mardas, aka ‘Magic Alex’, self-styled inventor, born Athens 2 May 1942; died 13 Jan 2017, aged 74.