Screenshot from 2023, when Richard Prince’s second deposition was streaming at depositionrow.com
Since Richard Prince’s video recording of his 2018 deposition in the McNatt & Graham lawsuits briefly surfaced online in 2023 until it was screened at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis as a work, Deposition (2025), it feels like the number of people who have watched the full 7-hour thing would not have filled the smallest theater at the Quad Cinema.
If you’re not going to watch it—again, it’s almost seven hours of Richard Prince talking extremely slowly in an adversarial conversation with offscreen lawyers—Russeth’s take and highlights will get you the gist. And the importance.
For me the standout of this second deposition is the extent Prince will go to to maintain an artistic process of freedom and experimentation, almost five decades into his practice. True, it may be the kind of freedom only available to someone making $45 million/year—the tens of thousands of billable dollars per hour represented by a conference room full of the most expensive lawyers in America doesn’t begin to account for the cost incurred to realize this one video work.
But if you’re an artist with the means to re-create the circumstances of your most surprising, innovative moments of creation, wouldn’t you do it? Shouldn’t you?
I saw “2 results for ‘the second deposition of richard prince'”? and then this loaded.
In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.
This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.
I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.
Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.
“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion. And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”
The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”
With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.
Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.
One day you’re wondering where all the stories are about peoples’ experiences with David Hammons’ artwork, and the next, you’re seeing an entire oral history of working with Hammons that almost fills a whole issue of Ursula Magazine.
Randy Kennedy spent almost a year collecting accounts of the many, many, many people involved in Hammons’ massive 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth LA. That show, a culmination of almost two decades of interaction with Hammons and his crew, is already the subject of a whole-ass book. Though that book basically has no words.
The latest issue of Ursula (Issue 12) makes up for it. With thousands and thousands and thousands of words, it could be the most comprehensive account to date of working with and observing Hammons. [Obviously whole books of criticism have been written about Hammons’ work, which is not the same as Hammons working.]
Ursula 12 also includes Linda Goode Bryant’s essay about Concerto in Black and Blue, and this one quote from Ian White resonates with Bryant’s account, too. White, the son of artist and teacher Charles White, was hosting Hammons in 2018 when he was scouting out H&W’s LA space for a possible show. White is alongside Hammons, seeing how he sees:
Because a show for David is not just object-driven. He’s thinking about the space, he’s thinking about how new and existing works will interact, about how the work sits in the space, about whatever is happening around the gallery, out on the streets. He calls himself an urban archaeologist, something to that effect. So a lot of the time when you’re with him, you just wander around for hours. You’re looking for oddities and identifiers of whatever community or culture—or supposed culture—is evolving around you. He’s great at keying into that shit. He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked. Things that, if you bring them to light, give you a different understanding of the world around you.
Literally two minutes later update: Am I going to have to liveblog reading this thing? Can you have a better shoutout for your book than this?
[Stacen] Berg [H&W partner & exec. director]: I think he was waiting for some constraints to be put on him. And if we just kept saying yes, then there was nothing to fight against. Our approach was: “We’ll do anything you want. If you want that space, you can have that space. You want all the spaces? You want the courtyard? You can have it.” I mean, he also carried around a book titled Tell Them I Said No, by Martin Herbert, about great artistic refusals.
OK, this one sticks out. On the one hand, there’s a decades-long cultivation of relationships with Hammons’ intermediaries, then him; which includes a conventional exhibition in Zurich in 2003 [with a misremembering of the text stenciled on the side of the boxes in the sculptures]:
[Marc Payot, H&W president]: …It was never going to operate like a conventional exhibition. There was no checklist or price list. There were no dates and very few labels on works, except the work of others that he included in the show, like Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten and Dan Concholar. The commercial side of the show was very limited and came very late. It would have been OK with us if it had never happened. Most of the work was not for sale and came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York after it was over.
The commercial side is not a show with a price list, but the timeline does not make it any less conventional. The talk at the time was that H&W bought the entire show, which is not just conventional, but traditional. This comment by Payot seems to belie that, but a lot of title transfers can fit behind the statement that most of the work “came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York.”
I’ve been working my way back through David Naimon’s Between the Covers, and was listening to a 2023 conversation about translation and African language with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when I had to pause the pod’ for Neptune Frost. The 2021 Afrofuturist musical was made in Rwanda by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman in February & March 2020, escaping a global pandemic shutdown by four days, like the Deathstar plans leaving Scarif.
Uzeyman and Williams’ conversation with Eugene Hernandez at the 2021 NYFF gives a sense of the project’s origin, their artistic influences, and the euphoria of pulling it all off.
Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.
Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-partinterview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.
The September 2020 zoom panel for Judd, MoMA’s mononymous Donald Judd retrospective is already a fascinating document of its moment. For a show that was closed for four months by COVID restrictions, there was much discussion of the people, and the physical experience of Judd’s work. Spatial qualities, social distancing, the reflectivity of its surfaces, the subjectivity of seeing one’s masked self seeing.
Rachel Harrison’s mesmerizing photos of details of the work and Leslie Hewitt’s discussion of how photogenic it is drew insights from curator Ann Temkin about how much she’s learned from watching visitors photograph the show, and how they’d debated whether it was safe to allow photos at all, and how much our relationship to photography has changed since even the last major Judd retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004. Harrison pointed out the historical shift in Judd photography, citing James Meyer’s catalogue essay, about Judd’s first show is documented by just two black & white installation photos by Rudy Burckhardt.
John Waters’ Visit Marfa, 2003, six-color screenprint by Globe Poster Co., 30 x 22 in., ed. 100, on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, as sold on eBay
Jeffrey Weiss’s last comment was to suggest Judd saw people–and museums— as things to be avoided, not courted, though, which is why he kind of withdrew to Marfa and set up his own spaces. When Temkin said we’ll end thinking of Marfa, Harrison piped up to say, how about John Waters instead? And his great poster, which she paraphrased fondly as, “Welcome to Marfa, the Disneyland of Minimalism,” inviting everyone at home to Google it.
It is actually, The Jonestown of Minimalism,” of course, but the misquote was a clue, probably, of what Harrison was reading up on for her Judd panel. Waters’ 2003 poster was on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, which was largely dedicated to the first major museum exhibitions historicizing Judd and Minimalism. It included articles by Temkin [on Judd conservation], Weiss [on artists’ writing], and Meyer [on scale]. Waters’ poster is the lede for a spectacularly grumpy review by Yve-Alain Bois of three museum shows—including Judd at Tate:
“Take the Whole Family to Marfa, Texas,” exhorts the broadside, beneath a Li’l Abner–style middle-class family, grinning like they’ve just won a vacation to Disney World. A bubble on the poster advertises “The Jonestown of Minimalism,” mocking the tenacious cliché of the movement’s “spirituality” by likening it to a senseless sect.
Bois’ review, the whole issue really, including the lengthy back & forths in the letters, reads very much as of its moment, when the entire art world was talking to itself in the magazine of record [sic * 3 obv]. When I’d go back and read my blog posts from the early 2000s, I used to think my self-referentiality and -importance was insufferable, but now I realize I was soaking in it. It really did be like that sometimes.
So some art world things and faces are the same, but what’s changed? For one, you actually can fly to Marfa now—and some of us [sic] did. In April 2020, the early freakout days of the COVID shutdown, Nate Freeman reported that a private jet flew from Teterboro to Marfa with three passengers. Who quarantined at addresses of the Chinati Foundation, and a studio compound owned by Christopher Wool & Charline von Heyl.
But I think the most salient—and terrifying—development is revealed in Harrison’s prescient malapropism. Does anything capture our dire cultural moment more clearly than the conflation of Disney World and Jonestown?
Have you seen me? Ellsworth Kelly, Tiger, 1953, oil on five canvases, collection, NGA
I was listening to a recording of Ellsworth Kelly’s 1999 Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and I have some questions. Some could probably be answered by a video of the lecture—more of a conversation, with curator Marla Prather—or with a review of Kelly literature I don’t have.
Our oldest had to read Mansfield Park in 9th grade and very much did not like it, and so I’ve avoided it. Until I heard poet Dionne Brand talking about it with David Naimon on the Tin House podcast, Between The Covers. [youtube] Brand’s latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, is a forensic return to a whole host of “classic” texts, including Austen’s Mansfield Park, that find Blackness where it has been omitted by the structures of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. But Brand goes beyond literary analysis to question the function of a novel, and how forms of writing—and thus thinking—perpetuate and protect the structures that spawned them.
[Dionne Brand] I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
[Saidiya Hartman] I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful.
Even if I hadn’t heard Brand’s conversation, I like to think I’d have spotted the glaring anxieties of capitalism that obsess almost every character in Mansfield Park, as well as the many references to Antigua and, thus, the direct dependence on plantation slavery of the family’s fortunes—and their entire world. I’m only halfway through, and this book [Austen obv] is grim as hell.
Brand’s not through, though. Her and Hartman’s discussion of photography, visual art, aesthetics, and beauty continues to work away in my mind.
[meanwhile, in case you needed any evidence that this conversation happened in September: “Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)“
The Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment is a daily artist conversation series, which is an incredibly ambitious amount of programming, but also the most natural-seeming thing in the world.
Diao talks with Fyfe about his explorations of painting surface and technique, his search for imagery, his critique of monochrome and abstraction, and his long engagement with the history of painting through painting.
Open up the gallery’s list and installation shots to see and identify more of the pivotal older works Diao discusses.
Last summer Copenhagen artist Henriette Heise held a seminar at the National Gallery of Denmark to consider artists’ late work. The artists ranged from Michelangelo to Lutz Bacher to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She discussed it with Pernille Albrethsen for Nordic Art Review:
When it comes right down to it, the late works are eyewitnesses from the edge, from the end of life. Many of them testify to a courage to dare to look at what scares us. We must somehow train ourselves to get better at going through changes without becoming paralysed, unable to act. I myself am of an age where I can remember the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Chernobyl accident, and other things. There are short periods of stability and then there are periods of great upheaval, such as the one we find ourselves in now. At present, I feel a great need to think about how I can use my voice in the current crisis without having to make art that has been somehow pre-ordered or could have been made by AI. So, yes, one of things I have learnt from many of the late works is a kind of unlearning, a resetting of what you think you know and think you can predict.
Quoting her takeaway here only makes me want to read and see it all; it sounds like it has only gotten more relevant in the six months since it happened.
I listened to Thomas Lawson’s conversation with the Rabkin Foundation’s Mary Louise Schumacher on the way home this afternoon. I aspire to accomplishing so much and being so concise I can get it all done in a 31-minute podcast. He should win an editing award on top of the writing.
Lawson mentions his January 1988 essay in Artforum on the history and contemporary resonance of cyclorama paintings, and I just read it. The ending is absolutely eerie in its torn-from-today’s-headline vibe. And by today, I mean not just 1988, but 2024. How is that possible?
I wish I’d known of Lawson’s essay in 2010 when I was writing a series of posts proposing ways of saving Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg, which was under threat of demolition by the National Park Service. TBF I was focused much less on the cyclorama painting—which had already been moved to a new, purpose-built visitor entertainment center—than on how the surviving architecture related to the built and marked history of memorialization on the battlefield. [Spoiler alert: it was destroyed.]
