In 1978 Jan Henderikse (Delft, 1937) took part in the international group exhibition Museum des Geldes in the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, travelling on to the Centre Pompidou in Paris a few months later. In line with his interest in kitsch, trash and multiplicity, Henderikse showed showcases with all kinds of paraphernalia such as wallets, plastic jewellery and ashtrays printed with dollars. Part of the exhibition was also a Plexiglas sculpture in the shape of a dollar sign, filled with shredded American banknotes.
It is one of Henderikse's earliest works with this revalued material, which was made available to him in 1979 by the American Federal Reserve Bank in the form of two one-and-a-half metre high money scraps pressed into bales.
In Jan Henderikse's po tica, the tension between valuable and worthless has played a key role since his contribution to the international ZERO movement in the early 1960s. The 'precious' materiality of academic bronze and oil paint made way for corks, litter and empty packaging materials, for the expressiveness and visual qualities, in short, of industrial, non-artistic materials and ready-mades. With Shredded Value, Jan Henderikse already gave an extra - conceptual - dimension to his visual programme at the end of the 1970s: an estimated ten million dollars has been devalued by fragmentation, but with Henderikse's intervention it has been brought back into the area of the precious and rare.
Shredded Value questions the status of the work of art as a precious relic, is a symbol of 'what makes the world go round', but fits equally well within Henderikse's approach to the world as an inexhaustible arsenal of visual means.
This dollar bale is the only one that has remained intact. It dates from 1979. In 2014, the last loose dollar shreds were given a final destination in a series of plexi-boxes.