May 2013 Archives

Here's a shot I took today of the scaffolding around the Washington Monument for its post-earthquake restoration.

Every time I go by I think how awesome it would be, and until I hear or see otherwise, I'll just keep hoping and assuming it's the case that, instead of Michael Graves' tired, pomo cartoon scrim, the National Park Service is actually encasing it Budweiser cans, installing a massive adaptation of the 1989 work, This Piece Has No Title Yet, by DC's own Cady Noland.

What? I'm sure Don and Mera could totally make it happen!

This Piece Has No Title Yet, 1989, Dimensions variable, you guys! [rfc.museum]

The artist blew up the passages by a factor of at least twenty; the paintings' materiality comes into focus as the surface images lose resolution, further abstracting already cropped and isolated images. That is to say, we can hardly tell what these paintings are "of."

This diffusion into abstraction seems to operate as a metaphor for the materiality of the photograph, the way that photographic images reveal either grain, in straight photography, or pixels, in digital photography, when sufficiently enlarged.

Seeing Brent's tweet of a Taylor Swift photo yesterday made me finally move on an idea that's been percolating for several years: the Ghetto Gursky.

The new Gursky. RT @taylorswift13: Dallas. Thank you for a memory I'll replay in my mind on rainy days. twitter.com/taylorswift13/...

— Brent Burket (@HeartAsArena) May 27, 2013

The Swift-as-Gursky image is key, in a way. I had kind of a falling out with Gursky's work in November 2001, when he was shooting Madonna's concert tour (in LA, on Sept. 13) instead of what I felt he should be shooting: the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

Madonna I, 2001, ed. of 2

I'd been morally invested in Gursky's work [I was not alone at the time] and its presentation as a critique of the globalizing forces and systems in the world, and I'd wanted to see his take on what seemed like the most pressing reality of the moment:

From the first week after the bombings, when I was in full CNN burnout, I wanted writers' and artists' perspectives, not Paula Zahn's. The scale of the debris, the nature of the target, even in wire service photographs, it called for Gursky's perspective to make some sense of it, perhaps.

The last gallery of that exhibition featured ever more massive prints, with ever less subtle Photoshop manipulations, culminating in a collage of disembodied CEOs and boards of directors floating against an abstract background. I remember thinking at the time how awful it was, and wondering where Gursky was heading--and whether Galassi had any qualms about showing the stuff.

Gursky has certainly made much better work since, but it stuck with me then how closely linked the impact of his work is to the state of the technological art and the means of production at any given moment. He was a Becher alum interested in exploring the latest developments in large-format photo printing and digital manipulation. The effect and experience of this can be stunning, but it can also be a trap. When you're selling spectacle and production and wall presence, you have to keep up with the Struths, as well as the dozens of other artists who figure out where the 5-foot wide printers are. And the 8-foot. So there's that.

99 Cent "Like Warhol, Gursky has succeeded in seducing his viewers with his product." -Phillips de Pury, Nov. 2006

And then a few years later, while working on a story for the Times, a collector offhandedly mentioned a market for Gursky exhibition prints. Which kind of surprised me. Because now there was a tension between the arbitrariness and fiction of the photographic work's edition size, and the physical reality of these giant, expensively produced, museum-grade [obviously] objects. And the tension played itself out in, or was really only a problem for, the market, where at that moment, Gurskys at auction were the most expensive photos in the world.

Which is right when I was chatting with another collector in Miami, as we toured the family's house during an ancillary Art Basel event. Introduced to her as a fellow collector with an interest in photography, she asked, "Do you collect Gursky?" And suddenly Gursky was stripped bare, transformed into [or revealed as, depending on your cynicism] a pure commodity, the apparently socially acceptable way of straight up asking someone their net worth. And of demonstrating your own.

Untitled (300x404), 2009, published in 2010 by 20x200

In 2009, when I printed up copies of Untitled (300x404) using a small JPG of a Richard Prince Cowboy photo, I was interested to see what the difference was between his real, appropriated artwork and the digital image we were "allowed" to access by copyright [and gallery/institutional exercise of control].

The 20x200 editions of Untitled (300x404) got me thinking about how art discourse and the market handle [or don't] issues of authenticity and copying, where the value lies, and where the attention is directed. And the extent to which money, class, rarity, and luxury color our experience of art, even when we claim self-awareness and critical resistance, and even if the artist seeks to thwart such influences in the reception of her work.

And I thought on the existence of quasi-illicit, out-of-edition Gurskys infiltrating the market in a don't ask, don't tell way, ably performing their functions as markers of capital and luxury objects. And how it was acceptable to ask if you collected Gurskys, and even when you started, but not to ask how much you paid, or how big a discount you got, or what number this here Gursky was in the edition.

And I wondered how close you could get to the experience of standing in front of a Gursky, the encounter with the artwork, the image and scale and finish and physicality of the object itself. What would happen to the rest of the experience? Could a Gursky ever generate a genuinely critical encounter of the system that has spawned it, from within that system?

And that's where the idea of the Ghetto Gursky came from: a full-scale recreation of the Gursky Experience, made with publicly available imagery and publicly available production technology. Which, by the way, has become widespread, if not commonplace, in the decades since Gursky began using it.

What would such a commonly produced object do to the socioeconomic aura of the originals? If a Gursky were a sign of significant wealth and sanctioned taste, what would a Ghetto Gursky be a sign of? Clueless and failed aspiration--the contemporary art equivalent of putting an elaborate copy of Michelangelo's David by the pool? We can call this the outcome the Carlos Slim. Or would it be a way to show off the modesty of one's means? The Art Basel cheer of absolutely no one, "Hey, I have five thousand dollars!"

The polarization of the art market is such that a Ghetto Gursky has less justification for existing, and less likelihood of being sold, than a real Gursky. Which seems ridiculous. So I decided to go ahead and make one and see what it's like.

Rhein, 1996, blown up 4x from a thumbnail for effect

I've ordered a full-size print of Gursky's 1996 photo Rhein, which is being made using the largest jpg version of the image I was able to find online. Then I'll have it mounted on Perspex and framed, just like his original. This is not Rhein II (1999), which is like 2x3.5m long, and is currently the most expensive photo sold at auction. [An edition of Rhein did just sell at Phillips a couple of weeks ago for $1.9 million, which is not nothing, but still.]

Rhein is only around 5x6 feet, big when it was made, but now, not really, which is kind of the point. It's also a more manageable size to experiment with. It will fit on my wall and in my car and in my storage. Katy Siegel wrote in 2001 that ""Gursky's motivation is the masterwork, the valorization of the fetishized object of high art." A Ghetto Gursky will invariably be as heavy and large and unwieldy and difficult to transport, store, and hang as a real one, which only contributes to its implausibility. Which is kind of the point.

In the era marked by the discovery things like electromagnetic waves, radio, and x-rays, invisible realities beyond visual perception, Hilma af Klint sought to depict the higher/spiritual/imperceptible world in paintings, drawings, and writings that she largely hid from public/male view during her life. It all seems like the future, though, by which I mean the present. It's uncanny.

Anyway, here's a documentary where curator Iris Müller-Westermann talks [in Swedish] about the work and practice of Hilma af Klint. The retrospective she organized at the Moderna Museet closed today. It will be in Berlin in June and Malaga in October. [via and a half]

Artist TimK made this animated GIF simulation of viewing Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés some time before January 1998, which was when the Internet Archive crawled his Duchamp webpages for the first time.

That site is long gone, but TimK now has marcelduchamp.org.

Not sure how I never considered this, but I suddenly came across a couple of strong connections between Enzo Mari's autoprogettazione furniture and Gerrit Rietveld.

For one, check out the crate that this 1965 version of Rietveld's Red Blue chair came in; this one's from Galerie VIVID in Rotterdam. I've never seen this before. Maybe that's just how they used to make crates in the 60s. But it sure looks like the underside of my Enzo Mari X IKEA table, the EFFE model.

It looks even more like the structure of the Tavolo Quadrato, the square autoprogettazione table.

Then there's Rietveld's 1923 Military Table, designed for the Catholic Military Home in Utrecht, and in and out of production ever since. This unfinished Oregon pine example's from the 60s, and was in Marseille, via 1stdibs. [I have never paid much attention to Rietveld's Military Table, but suddenly it is looking pretty sweet.

The top is fixed onto these cross braces. It's a solution that Mari eventually used as well. The crosspieces are not in the original autoprogettazione plans, but they did turn up in the kit of precut parts that were sold under the Metamobile name in the early 70s.

Even though Rietveld's autonomous approach to furniture is an obvious precedent for Mari's; and I knew from hands-on experience that the autoprogettazione designs have a lot more "design" than their basic function requires; I guess I never imagined that Mari would make overt references to what had come before.

Previously:
The making of an Enzo Mari dining table
Enzo Mari X IKEA Mashup Recap

So I've decided to make me a lamp like this Larry Rivers lamp Frank O'Hara had in his loft in the mid-60s.

Which means I've been trying to map out the number and types of sockets and adapters up there. And I've begun poking around for parts. At first, I was going to rework a vintage, industrial-style floor lamp, but those aren't turning up with anything like the frequency I need. And the current crop of adaptable floor lamps are actually pretty unappealing, too. Really, they just make no sense here.

So to stay closer to Rivers' approach, I think I'll just build up a lamp from galvanized steel pipe. [I saw Colin Powell puttering around the hardware store yesterday, btw, the hardware store that had no such plumbing parts at all, just PVC, which, no thanks.]

Rather than a fuse-blowing heater made with 14 incandescent bulbs, I figure I'll make a little constellation of incandescents, CFCs, and LEDs, in a range of whites. And as for the wiring and cord, well. I am really jonesing over this:

It's an extension cable, from Olafur Eliasson Studio, released in 2004 as a limited edition with the title, 10 Meter Cable For All Colours. Which, I know, is just nuts. But still. There have been more than a few works like this from Olafur, where very modest functional objects are produced for internal use, which are recouped or spun off as an edition. It is a model that works for him, and the demand is there, so.

Technically, though, for this project, it's not what I need. And I wouldn't cut up an Olafur cable to rework it into my thing anyway. I just mention it here because the world is an amazing place.

Previously: Frank O'Hara's and Alfred Leslie's Larry Rivers' Lamp
Previously and amazing and related: Lindsey Adelman's autoprogettazione-style, You Make It chandelier

DAY AFTER UPDATE: Whoa, well, then. The Hirshhorn board split and Koshalek announced his resignation by year-end. What a way to go.

While designer Liz Diller made her politico-architectural case for The Hirshhorn Bubble in her 2012 TED talk, the Museum's own justification for the project has been unclear and uncompelling.

Explanations center on making the Hirshhorn "an agent for cultural diplomacy." In February director Richard Koshalek told Kriston Capps, "This institution should be the leader in terms of setting arts and cultural dialogue. Cultural policy is set in Washington, D.C." This is debatable enough, as both mission and content.

The programming that's always discussed, though, a "Center for Creative Dialogue," involves conferences and discussions created by the Council on Foreign Relations and outside staff, not the Hirshhorn itself, or even the Smithsonian. Critics of the Bubble vision like Tyler Green note this disconnect, and that the Museum doesn't need a bubble to host such policy-flavored forums and events; they could do it right now, in the existing auditorium. And in fact, they did just that last Fall, where a capacity crowd watched TV journalist Judy Woodruff moderate a panel on "Art and Social Change" during to the Ai Weiwei exhibition.

No, The Bubble is a thing apart, apparently, from the programming that would inhabit it. Its absurdist form on this symbolic site, and the transgressive gesture towards Gordon Bunshaft's concrete donut, are meant to be self-justifying. Capps calls it "a public art stunt," and the Washington Post suggests it could "break DC from stagnation." It's starchitecture as spectacle and a catalyst for attention and, eventually, one hopes, the holy grail of Washington existence: relevance.

Meanwhile, it's amazing that until Capps' reconsideration of the project last winter in the City Paper, there was no mention of what would be, for lack of a better term, the business model: The Bubble would be a for-hire event space.

Koshalek swears the Inflatable will engage the Hirshhorn's curators, too. When the Bubble is inflated, part of its programming will correspond with whatever's lining the gallery walls of the museum. The rest of the timeshare will go to whichever universities, think tanks, and corporations rent it out--a money-making proposition for the Hirshhorn which could lead to exclusive uses not quite in keeping with Diller's civic scheme. (And certainly not with the museum's artistic mission.)

The Hirshhorn's board is scheduled to vote on whether to proceed with The Bubble, the most prominent initiative of director Richard Koshalek since he arrived at the museum in 2009.

Even though The Bubble was the subject of one of my all-time favorite posts, I have not written much about it since. I have reservations about it, but I have only wished the museum's success, and so have been willing to give the current regime the benefit of the doubt as they pursue their vision.

But that has been a vague slog, and far from a sure thing. It's remarkable that the board which hired Koshalek is apparently reluctant to support his efforts to do what they presumably hired him for: raising the profile of the Hirshhorn, and raising money for the Hirshhorn and its exhibitions, acquisitions, and educational programs.

Maybe that is because there are persistent and unaddressed issues with The Bubble and its ostensible purpose. It is true that Koshalek's stated vision for The Bubble--to host some kind of cross-disciplinary cultural forum, with content generated not by the Museum, or even the Smithsonian, but by the Council on Foreign Relations--still comes across as squishy and alarmingly unconcerned with actual art and artists. That disconnect is even more inexplicable for being unnecessary.

About The Bubble itself, though: I didn't care much either way before, but after watching Liz Diller's TED talk from March 2012, I am really starting to sour on Diller Scofidio + Renfro's design and their entire approach. Titled "A Giant Bubble for Debate," Diller's speech is the rare, unmediated, extended discussion of The Bubble by a principal. As such, it's worth a closer read.

For Diller and her client, who wants to take advantage of the Museum's unique and symbolic site "at the seat of power in America," the National Mall, "the question is, 'Is it possible, ultimately, for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs?' and 'Could the Museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy?'" Technically that's two questions, which not only are not answered, but which beg more questions--insert itself to what end, and agent for whom?

"I blush whenever I show this," says Diller of the slide above, to laughter. "It is yours to interpret." Wait, what? So I guess she interprets this insertion into the Hirshhorn's hole as a phallus? Or given the material, I guess it could be a sex toy, or a condom? Or at least some flavor of kink, given the "study of some bondage techniques" that went into the tension cable design on the next slide?

Diller continues: "We were asked by the bureaucracy at the Mall, 'How long would it take to install?' And we said, 'The first erection will take one week.'" And if it lasts longer than that, I guess, call your architect.

Diller shows the interior space of The Bubble in use, with renderings of a panel discussion in the round; a spotlit performer; a movie screening; and a Barbara Kruger-style text projection. In every instance, the activity is the same: an audience sits and watches something happen. This "breath of democracy" turns out to be just more entertainment and spectacle. And this purportedly transgressive, iconoclastic structure does absolutely nothing to change or challenge the programs of the Mall's museums Diller just criticized, or by extension, the structures of power she pretends to subvert.

Diller's claim that her structure, built to house extravagantly ticketed events like TED, the WEF, and CFR fora, will somehow embody "the ideals of participatory democracy" is obviously nothing but hot air.

Which is still just part of the problem, seeing as how the ideals The Bubble is embodying are those of pay-to-play capitalism. More on that in the next post.

As soon as I saw these images of Marines called in to hold umbrellas over Presidents Obama and Erdogan yesterday, I laughed imagining how the Booya! diaspora of military fanbois from the previous administration would take it.

And right on cue, they declared a scandal, because male Marines do not hold umbrellas. Which, honestly.

This round goes to Obama on points. [images uncredited somehow on booyahoo! it's like the first step of their tumblr acquisition is to stop crediting image sources]

A months-long investigation by WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio into New Jersey Transit's preparedness and response to Sandy last fall has produced at least one beautiful result.

The "New Jersey Rail Operations Hurricane Plan" was provided by the state agency in response to two separate Freedom Of Information Requests from WNYC and The Record.

The three-and-one-quarter-page plan was deemed exempt from FOIA and redacted completely. I don't think it diminishes the content in any way, nor our understanding of what happened to NJ Transit and its facilities and operations during the storm. In fact, it feels to me like it explains quite a lot.

I will add it to this series of monochromes. I feel a book coming on. Information wants to be free!

How NJ Transit Failed Sandy's Test [wnyc.org]
Previously: EPIC FOIA DHS

I just saw this blog post float by on Twitter, and the title immediately made me think of Random International's Rain Room, which, of course, just opened at MoMA as part of Expo1.

It also answered the question I'd never asked until that moment: what if Walter de Maria's Earth Room and Lightning Field ever hooked up and had a kid?

"Rain Room," according to MoMAPS1, "consists of a field of falling water that visitors may walk through and experience how it might feel to control the rain." Which is amazing, because on Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in my car in Chelsea as this intense downpour passed by and pummeled everyone on the street.

Gallery walkers would huddle under the High Line until it proved too tall and useless against the windswept rain, and they'd have to evacuate to a nearby street scaffold. People also ducked into the nearest gallery, even if it was one you never go into.

The storm warning announcement just a few minutes earlier on the radio had warned of "quarter-sized hail", so I parked under the High Line to protect my windshield and paint job.

But the WNYC storm warning also included something I'd never heard before: a warning to get inside because you could be struck by lightning. Which, honestly. What are the odds? Except that when you are in the middle of a weather event like that, it does feel like your odds get immediately, exponentially better. Or worse, I guess, depending. And for people standing on a railroad in the sky, they get worse still. Statistics and logic are overwhelmed, or at least put to the test, by physical experience and emotion.

And so The Lightning Room. It is an empty gallery where lightning bolts are occasionally generated. And none of this van Graaf generator, hair-stand-on-end science fair lightning, either: it has to be real, kill-you-dead-or-at-least-fry-your-eyebrows-and-your-sense-of-smell lightning.

To enter it, you have to sit through a briefing or a safety film, some kind of orientation about the deadly risks posed by possible lightning strike, and then you sign a thick waiver absolving the institution of any liability or responsibility. Maybe they sell you life insurance policies on the spot, with part of the proceeds supporting the museum. Contingent planned giving.

If you had certificates for the people who went in, or even stickers, it could be too much incentive for idiots to try it, so you really can't offer anything. And of course, most people who do go into The Lightning Room are not going to get hit. Nothing'll happen at all. The point has to be, though, that something could. As Maggie Millner said in that otherwise unrelated blog post mentioned up top, "An empty space is a space full of potential."

If art can be a giddy dance room offering the technologically mediated illusion that we can control the weather, it can also be a room with a potentially deadly menace where the only control we have is over whether we engage it.

Related: John Perreault's review of Voids: A Retrospective, an exhibition at the Pompidou and Kunsthalle Bern [above] in 2009 [artopia]

Wow, the first shipment of Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA 2: The Appeals Decision & The Appendix arrived, and they actually look very nice.

Which is good.

Because people are writing about it. And buying it. And it would be kind of awkward if it sucked.

Your Thievin' Art: At play in the field of fair use [artnews]
Not yet in stores: Buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA 2: The Appeals Decision & The Appendix direct, $12.99 [createspace]

Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham) (1959), collection: Kunsthaus Zurich

Robert Rauschenberg incorporated objects and materials he found on the street to make his early combines. Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham) (1959), for example, includes a beat up sign, poster fragments, and scraps of wood.

Volon (Cardboard), 1971, is my favorite among many [image via]

In the early 70s, Rauschenberg made a series of works out of used, altered, or dismantled cardboard boxes. He created editions with Gemini G.E.L. that meticulously simulated used cardboard, which he called Cardbirds. The Menil showed these Cardboards and related works, many of which had remained in the artist's collection, in 2007.

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983, photo: Dawoud Bey, via group a ok

In early 1983, David Hammons laid out several dozen snowballs on an Indian blanket and sold them, priced according to size, alongside the junk merchants and fences of Astor Place. Dawoud Bey came along to document the event, which, everyone seems to have reproduced the one shot over and over ever since. Here is a different angle that shows more of the work's original context. It's not clear that Hammons got any takers, or what happened to the snowballs and other materials from the piece.

via wnyc's feature tied to Orozco's 2009 MoMA retrospective

Before his 1998 show at Marian Goodman Gallery, "The Free Market is Anti-Democratic," Gabriel Orozco had already been making artworks from shit he found on the street for several years. Mostly, he'd find or make a work, and then just take a picture of it. Like Island within an island, 1993 [above]

Penske Work Project installation shot, Marian Goodman Gallery, 1998-99

For the Penske Work Project, he rented a truck and drove around Manhattan, pulling things out of dumpsters and assembling them into a sculpture on the street just long enough to take a Polaroid. Then he'd throw the stuff in the truck and drive off. The photos served as instructions for reassembling the pieces in the gallery.

Here is Penske Work Project: CD Tube, 1998, a length of scrap pipe and a stack of CD jewelboxes, from Jerry Saltz's review of the show. 1998-99 was a very tenuous time for digital imaging, it turns out. Our web history does not age well.

All of this was in my mind last night when I caught up with @therealhennessy's tweets about making a sculpture on the street and trying to sell it via Instagram. He started out straight, with a found object.

I'm gonna start selling garbage I find on the street through my Instagram. Anybody wanna by this paper... instagram.com/p/ZEEc4ZLmu9/

— Hennessy Youngman (@therealhennessy) May 8, 2013

I just dropped the price to 20$.

— Hennessy Youngman (@therealhennessy) May 8, 2013

Then he did something to it.

C'MON I'LL TOSS IN THIS MINIMAL PLANK TOO. $20! SIGNED BY ME instagram.com/p/ZEFpWvrmgt/

— Hennessy Youngman (@therealhennessy) May 8, 2013

On Friday March 22, I went to see Kenneth Goldsmith reading Richard Prince's The Catcher In The Rye in front of a Prince rephotography piece in MoMA's 2nd Floor galleries. I'd been bummed to have missed Goldsmith's talk on Wednesday night [granted, I had an opening of my own, but still] so I wanted to make sure I didn't miss this most appropriate event. When he saw my tweets about it, KG graciously offered to reserve a ticket for me, a gesture which set a certain expectation in my mind of guest lists, seats, or crowd control.

Even as I asked at the desk for the ticket, though, my sense began to change. I suspected, and was right, that this was not a ticketed gig, or even a gallery talk-style crowd with a limited number of slots which, if you didn't get one, you could shadow and eavesdrop on anyway. The ticket was for getting into the Museum. Which, of all things and all places, I did not need a comp for MoMA.

I know the US Government is selling off lighthouses all the time, but the Liston Range Rear Light in Delaware strikes me as exceptional.

It is a 120-ft tall, braced iron tube built in 1876 that sits, unusually for a light house, three miles inland from the mouth of the Delaware River. It stands on around half an acre of land. It's a few miles south of 95; I think that's the exit where the Denny's is. There's a 100sf building at the base that's included, but the adjacent keeper's house and assistant keeper's house were sold quite some time ago. The cylindrical tower is lined with wood, and the steel spiral staircase has five landings, in case you need to rest on the way up.

As a range light, it is twinned with a front light which is lower and closer to the water's edge. Ships navigate by aligning the two lights in a range light.

The Liston Range Rear Light still contains its 2nd-order Fresnel lens, which is unusual.

It is now being sold by the US Coast Guard. The current bid is $10,000. I repeat, $10,000.

One catch, and it's a big one, is that the Coast Guard retains title to the Fresnel lens unless and until it decides it doesn't need to be in the range light aid to navigation business anymore. At which point, it may decide to give the lens to the lighthouse's owner. Who must agree "to display the Fresnel Lens if and when it is discontinued in accordance with the standards set forth in the Guidelines on the Care and Maintenance of Historic Classical Fresnel Lenses."

It's a bummer about the Fresnel Lens, but until I can get my hands on one of those late 19th century War Dept. Gettysburg observation towers, this range light might have to do.

Liston Light Tower [gsaauctions.gov]
Liston Rear Range, DE [lighthousefriends.com, bottom image of Fresnel Lens, LOC via LHF]
Liston Rear Range Light [wikipedia]

So I did this.

I am very pleased to announce the latest title from greg.org, Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA 2: The Appeals Court Decision in Cariou v. Prince, et al., Also The Court's Complete Illustrated Appendix. It is available now.

It would have been available sooner. It really should have been available sooner. I got it all together by the end of the day the Appeals Court decision came down, but there was seemingly endless futzing and back & forth with the digital publisher about proofing and formatting, etc. So sorry for the delay.

CZRPYR2 is a follow-on and indispensable primary source companion to Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA, [above, available here], which contains the full transcript of Richard Prince's incredible 7-hour deposition, as well as many key filings and exhibits from the first phase of Cariou v. Prince.

I wondered what you wondered: why not just add the Appeals Court decision to the original book? And if CZRPYR2 was only the decision itself, I might have done just that. Or not bothered with it at all. But then I found the beautiful Appendix the Court created for the decision, and I realized it deserved a permanent place in the history of the case, a book of its own.

Following on Patrick Cariou & friend's own slapdash effort, the Appeals court produced a high-quality, carefully cross-referenced catalogue of each use of Cariou's YES RASTA images in Prince's Canal Zone paintings. This indexing was the basis of the judges' Solomonic decision to divide the Canal Zone series into 25 non-infringing works, and 5 infringing?-who-knows-let's-look-again works. Where applicable, the Court added highlights to Cariou's images, arguably creating yet another transformative work. And submitting it into the public record.

For this 142-page volume, I integrated the Court's collections of Prince & Cariou images, to facilitate painting-by-painting review of Prince's appropriations. And I annotated them for easier referencing. But otherwise the Court's primary documents are preserved, with an eye to posterity, as they were prepared,

CZRPYR2 is in this way a salute to the Court's own transformative, creative spirit.

Buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA 2: The Appeals Court Decision in Cariou v. Prince, et al., Also The Court's Complete Illustrated Appendix (142 pages, b&w, 6x9-in.) for $12.99 [createspace]
Buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince, et al for $17.99 [they can ship together, but I'll probably only sell 2-vol. sets in person. Maybe on a blanket next to Central Park.]