Book People | May 2012 | Rebecca Rego Barry

Minsky's House of Cards

Book artist Richard Minsky has just announced his latest work, Pop Delusions, a house made out of his own credit cards, Chinese and American paper money, and gold leaf. Look inside and find two editions of Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, bound in credit cards. Yes, credit cards, which sounds like quite an impossible task. Minsky used eighty of his own cards, collected over twenty-five years. "It's certainly the least replaceable material I've ever used," he told me. "It was the right material for the book, so I had to."

He added, "All the materials for this work add to the layers of meaning...some of them nobody will see. The Chinese money that backs the credit cards isn't visible when the house is assembled and the back door is shut. You can see the engravings of the U.S. Treasury on the $10 bills that border the base, but the flip side of them is pasted down, so nobody sees Alexander Hamilton's portrait, the torch of Liberty, and 'We the People' in pink....In an earlier state the portrait side was face up, but in the end I decided it looked better with the greenbacks up, and the treasury building relating to the house of cards."

Minsky began construction on March 1, when he posted this image of his materials on his Facebook page. There you can click on each of the photos and read along as the house takes shape and also peek 'inside' the back door, where, Minsky points out, you can see that the building on the back of the 100 Yuan note is similar to the treasury building on our bills.

Pop Delusions makes its institutional debut in an exhibit titled Beaten & Bound at the Lubeznick Center for the Arts in Michigan City, IN, on May 26. A reception will be held on June 1, and the exhibit will run through August 26.

Photos courtesy of Richard Minsky.