Arty Lucre

“This recession is worse than the ‘80s,” proffers the artist Frank Buckley with a sad, weary smile. Having grown up in Drimnagh during the ‘60s, promoted and tour managed the likes of A House and Kris Kristofferson, worked in varous guises with the disadvantaged and with drug addicts, as well as operating along the way as a taxi driver and an artist, Buckley has seen enough to know.

“I had the revenue coming after me this year over €6,000,” he says matter-of-factly. “Not even that. They don’t even know what it was over. I’d driven my wife’s car home and they were standing at the door. The sheriff’s bailiff was there saying, ‘We’ll have to take something, Francis’. I said, ‘Don’t take the furniture’, so he took the car keys. The next morning I had to ring up and ask could they give me my wife’s car back. And this was in the middle of me doing Expressions Of Recession. The bailiff came out the back, looking for my motorbike and I said, ‘Did you not see my paintings, are they not worth anything?’ I had all these paintings... there was literally several million quid cash in the shed!”
Pre-shredded cash, but cash all the same, gathered by Buckley for use in an ambitious new art exhibition. In the end, €3,000,333 worth of genuine shredded notes were used over 25 canvases. The aim? To show people that money should not rule our lives.
“To express that feeling of ‘not taking money so seriously’,” Buckley says. “Of course, it’s deadly serious, in a way. We’re in a recession, I’m trying to feed my kids. Whether you’re on the dole, struggling day-to-day, living on the streets… it’s tough.”
How on earth did he get his hands on the millions?
“My friend had used it as confetti for my wedding,” explains Buckley. “I asked him if he could get me some of it. I’d 12 paintings done and I wanted to do more, so the mint gave it to me as a one-off. They don’t really give it out anymore. Shops bring their takings into the bank and there’s someone there to test the texture of the notes. If there’s a certain texture, they won’t reissue them. So they shred them. They look like bales of briquettes. I had four million. I had people coming to me saying, ‘Would you not put it all back together?’ If you could manage it, you’d deserve four million! (laughs)’”
It does sound like the greatest jigsaw puzzle of all time, but Buckley had another idea in mind. The kernel came at a dark time for him.
“A friend of mine, who I dedicate this exhibition to, committed suicide. He had 14 hotels, lived in a nice area… his death wasn’t completely about money, but it was a catalyst for it. People were just losing themselves to capitalism.
“I never captured the Celtic Tiger. I had my good times but I grew up in the ‘80s. I remember telling my daughter that if I could get a job painting white lines down the middle of the road I’d be delighted. She laughed. When the recession hit, I just thought, ‘What is money? It’s paper. It’s art’. My two friends died through ‘the paper’ and they didn’t have to. If they had been rational… but you’re not rational when you put a rope around your neck.”
Buckley came to art by chance in the late ‘90s.
“I was very lucky. I was getting a portrait done and I was bored out of my tree. Just to kill time I got some of the colours and I was messing around with my fingers. It was a piece of a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box that I ripped off and painted on. When I was finished I threw it on the couch. Everyone that came in said, ‘Oh, who’s the artist? This is really good’ – so I sprayed it and framed it. I gave it to Kris Kristofferson and eventually got a phone call saying there was an envelope waiting for me in the Jury’s Hotel. There was a thousand bucks in it and a message saying, ‘Art is in the eye of the beholder’. Princess Haya of Jordan was my second collector, and then Brian Kerr!”
Frank’s works of ‘cash-art’ are all for sale.
“I’m doing it for the money. I want to turn that shredded money into real cash!” he laughs. “One of the objectives of the exhibition is to get people over to the drug addiction aftercare facility I’m working on in Thailand. Christy Dignam had gone to it and I was in it myself. Buddhism has a ‘do it yourself’ philosophy, but they were missing that aftercare that we have in the West.
“I went over to Thailand a few years ago. One of my friends that died was over there desperately trying to set up something. When he passed away I took it on and built a five-bedroom centre in the Thamkrabok monastery. I just finished it a few months ago.
“Now the idea is to get methadone addicts over, because there’s no way they can get off it in Ireland. Doctors are bringing people up on methadone, they’re getting funding for it. It’s not in their interest to get them off the stuff.
“Governments only care about numbers. Reduce the heroin numbers by getting them on methadone. What they did was substitute one drug for another. They didn’t give us more treatment centres, or deal with the epidemic. They kept people sedated. So I’ve identified 13 people that really want to come off it.”
If it takes 3 million quid to get them there, then so be it.

Expression Of Recession opens at the National Coin And Stamp Fair in the RDS, Dublin from October 21 to 23, before moving to the capital’s Radisson Blu Hotel between October 30 & November 13