projects – Page 27

From The Department Of Corrections: Side-Stepping

You never know what you’ll find digging around in archives, even your own. While looking back at greg.org posts about Alexander Payne and Dany Wolf, I bumped into this gem from 2003, the reconstructed list of artworks Sam Waksal bought from Gagosian Gallery without paying NY state sales tax, and how much he paid.
At the time, I’d written that not only had Waksal, the CEO of ImClone whose case broke around the same time his friend Martha Stewart was getting charged with insider trading, the newbie collector hadn’t negotiated a discount from the gallery beyond the sales tax. And that the ploy of having empty boxes–or in some of Waksal’s purchases, just the invoices–sent out of state, had “been tripping up art world naifs since the 80’s, at least.”
Well, this statement was incorrect on several fronts. The investigation of Waksal had followed on the fraud investigation of certified art world naif Tyco CEO Dennis Koslowski, remember, which had been triggered by an art sales tax evasion inquiry involving the fictitious shipment of 3rd-rate Monets to a factory in New Hampshire. But in a subsequent 2004 wrap-up on the caper, the NY Times’ Timothy O’Brien reported that as many as 90 art world figures were implicaited in DA Robert Morgenthau’s investigation, including many non-naifs.
And as for the 80’s, well.
On a recent visit to the Leo Castelli Gallery collection at the Archives of American Art, I came across a letter from the gallery to Mr. Frederick Weisman, one of the biggest collectors around, who had apparently been confused by the arrival of an empty box at his Sunset Blvd office. The letter was dated Jun 22, 1965:

The package you received was intentionally empty. It represents a Lichtenstein banner that Richard purchased. The package was sent to your California address to side-step New York City tax. I hope this hasn’t caused you any unnecessary concern.

It’s not specified, but I’ll assume the banner was Pistol, 1964, the best of the three Lichtenstein made with the Betsy Ross Flag & Banner Co., Richard, of course, is the Richard Weisman of Find The Warhols! fame, who does in fact live in California. And so, it would seem, does the banner.

The history for a Pistol banner sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 mentions its inclusion in a 1967 exhibition at the Pasadena Museum, which Weisman’s uncle Norton Simon would soon take over.
It appears the only nair around here is 2003 me.

Shh, Don’t Speak.

From Dennis Lim’s brief Q&A with Gus Van Sant at Cannes, where Restless is [finally?] debuting:

We did silent takes of almost every scene so we could maybe use them in the editing. Terry Malick apparently shoots silent takes so he can mold what he wants out of the scenes. But with our takes we actually created a silent version because we had enough material and we realized we could — maybe it’ll be on the DVD. Everything is there except the dialogue — all the sounds and music, and you hear all the footsteps, but there’s nobody talking and no lips moving. They’re the same scenes, but it has the distance of not being dialogue-driven. It’s the exact same love story but it plays like a different movie.

It’s funny, because Gerry and Elephant only have like 10 pages of dialogue between them anyway.
Previously: Gus Van Sant’s go-to guy, the greg.org 2003 interview with producer Dany Wolf

There’s No Escaping Leviathan

Hm, OK.
I think we’re in the clear here, satelloon-wise. It is true that Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan is inflated, and 35 meters tall.

But when you enter the Grand Palais to see Leviathan, you enter Leviathan itself. It’s a space, a bulbous, three-chambered cathedral of a space, “like going into the belly of a whale,” says the Guardian. Though of course, it’s really going into the belly of a cinematic whale. So it’s a belly of imagination.
But it’s a space, not an object. At least, not at first. When you exit, though, it’s a thing. And well, hm. At first, things look pretty grim, which is to say, satelloonish.

But ultimately, it’s a different thing, very different. One thing that’s emphasized in Kapoor’s talk to the Guardian is the light and space of the Grand Palais, and its vast expanses of glass:

“This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall,” Kapoor said. “It’s three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It’s almost brighter than it is outside.”

There are any number of spaces–dirigible hangars, stadiums, train stations–that could hold a 100-ft mirror-skinned aluminum sphere; but in this time, there are no art spaces except, now, the Grand Palais. And that’s part of the point.

Not only can satelloons not escape the problems Gerhard Richter diagnosed for spheres–they’re too beautiful and perfect–they blow these problems up [sic] to gargantuan scale. Which is kind of interesting.
Monumenta 2011 has a Facebook wall [facebook.com]

Where is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein?

So all this time, I’ve assumed it’s common knowledge that I am planning to recreate a satelloon and exhibit it in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. And if the curators of Monumenta, the annual contemporary art installation there, hadn’t called about it yet, it was just because they were busy clearing the older guys [Kiefer, Serra, Boltanski] off the list first. Which is fine, of course. No rush.
Sketch for echo satelloon in Grand Palais
But then I get this tweet about Anish Kapoor’s project, which opens next week, and well:

You can understand my concern. So I “c’est quoi ça?” retweeted, and then I started poking around the Monumenta 2011 site more carefully.
And before I figure out if Kapoor’s workin’ my side of the street, I have to say, I’m now slightly fascinated by the mechanism of the teaser, the reveal, and the spectacle.
Monumenta has assembled a range of concepts and images highlighting aspects of Kapoor’s practice which, I assume, they see as relevant to or illuminating of their own commission.
Artwork become landscape
To see is to imagine
Entropy
Self-generation
The écorché
Fiction and ritual
Concaveness
Light become ghost
Void become shape
The artwork skin
Non-object
Colour
Inhabiting space
Leviathan
I can’t help but imagine them as a narrative, a presentation, an argument that culminates in the essential, inevitable work. Leviathan: c’est logique!
The work is called Leviathan, and with references to sea serpents and gargantuan invaders and gaping maws, the write-up taps every ominous, apocalyptic Leviathan reference available, from Job to Hobbes.
Which, now that you mention it, does sound a lot like several of the works Kapoor has done before. And there’s this sense of simultaneously wanting something new, that no one’s ever seen before–oh, boy, will they be surprised!–and of wanting more of what works, what you know, what has been before. And then what is the nature of anticipation and experience when the pitch for the project is, “it’s like Marsyas at the Tate, but bigger and spookier”?
So I’m basically thinking it’s the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: The Original Series, but in red? Or mirrored? Or mirrored on one side, and red on the other:

And then today, there’s a teaser photo, a detail, on Facebook, which doesn’t quite match up to my image:

Unless maybe it’s the Doomsday Machine’s nuts. Either way, it’s all good, and totally different. Still, it’s an important lesson learned, and I’ve decided to preserve a bit of the mystery surrounding my Monumenta project. Which is not to say anticipation.

Monumenta 2011 au Grand Palais, 11 Mai – 23 Juin [monumenta.com via @Monumenta2011]

The greg.org Evening Sale

Flipping through the lots for Christie’s upcoming contemporary sale feels like diving into the greg.org archives. Besides the Rauschenberg combine coming out of the Ganz’s closet, there’s also:

a great Johns White Numbers painting (1991) by Sturtevant. This text is nice, too:

To create her paintings, Sturtevant does not copy. She does not employ grids, squares, tracing paper or cameras. She summons her memory of images to recreate and reinvent them. By obsessively utilizing the identical materials and techniques as those who came before her, Sturtevant asserts her work is not about copying or appropriation, rather, the power and autonomy of originality.

Love that, so Pierre Menard.

Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #21 (1961) is up for sale again, too. In her biography of DC artist and JFK mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, author Nina Burleigh mixed up #21 with #44. It was the former, not the latter, which was the subject of some controversy in Washington when it got yanked before the opening of the 1963 Gallery of Modern Art exhibit, “The Popular Image.” Burleigh said Meyer whispered about it to JFK, who laughed and kept it in. The painting in the show. But I looked it up, and no. The painting stayed out, probably because it included a nude next to an image of the sitting president. Or something. Anyway, censorship! Scandal! Sale!

And speaking of scandal and mystery, Los Angeles collector Richard Weisman is apparently selling one of his remaining sets of Warhol Athlete Series paintings, which he commissioned en masse back in the day.
They’re like the set that was reported stolen from his dining room a couple of years ago. The disappearance of which prompted LAPD’s art theft unit to release the awesomest wanted poster ever. Which I tried to Kickstart into production as the Find The Warhols Project, only Kickstarter and I had apparently not developed our audiences sufficiently to accept the idea of a project-as-critique. And the reward for which was discontinued anyway when Weisman decided to drop his insurance claim, because of the investigative hassle. Which art theft experts read as a sign that the theft was an interfamily job, and not the kind of thing that one likes to have reported out in all the papers if one can help it.
But it’s not that set; I checked. Instead, it’s the set Weisman tried to sell in China during the Olympics for $28 million. Now priced to move, with an estimate of just $4-6 million. Also, too bad the Warhols don’t need finding anymore; that poster looks really sweet. Guess I’ll save it for the retrospective.

Mister Rauschenberg’s Neighborhood

Christie’s is selling The Tower, a 1957 combine by Robert Rauschenberg which Victor and Sally Ganz bought from Betty Parsons in 1976. The work is a double portrait assembled from found, painted objects and light bulbs, and was originally part of the set for a Paul Taylor Dance Company production based on the myth of Adonis. The costumes for the production were designed by Rauschenberg’s partner Jasper Johns.
Did I say partner? I guess I meant neighbor. Here’s Christie’s quoting Paul Schimmel from his 2005 Combines exhibition catalogue:

While Rauschenberg’s work does respond to the painterly traditions of the 1950s, it does so in a manner that isolates the act of painting from the complete composition. For him, painting became a thing, an object treated similarly to Assemblage in which elements were organized on a non-hierarchical surface. Rauschenberg took aspects of Picasso and the Cubist collage, Kurt Schwitters, and the Surrealism of Joseph Cornell and created a three-dimensional, collage-based art. Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg defined the American art of the 1950s; Pop art would have been inconceivable without their respective breakthroughs. Incidentally, many of their most important advancements were devised when they were most closely associated, living as neighbors, during the second half of the 1950s-the period during which The Tower (1957) was created.

[emphasis added for salient points regarding Short Circuit and for WTF, respective? Incidentally? Neighbors??, respectively.]
Schimmel goes on to note that the appearance here of a broom “anticipates Jasper Johns’s use of the broom in Fool’s House (1962), at a time when they were no longer neighbors.” Yet while he notes that “Lights and bulbs,” one of the defining elements of The Tower, “recur in numerous works”–of Rauschenberg–the fact that just months later, while they were still, uh, neighborly, Johns chose a light bulb as the subject of his first sculpture goes completely unmentioned.

Light Bulb (I), 1958, Jasper Johns, image: mcasd.org
Here is Post-War & Contemporary Deputy Co-Chair Laura Paulson in a gallery talk video,

The Tower is very autobiographical, using found imagery, found objects that would give you clues to aspects of Rauschenberg’s life. Rauschenberg was a gregarious, outgoing, very generous person, but he spoke often in sort of cryptic, very defined ways. And in Tower you have this sort of personage, which to me is just so perfectly Rauschenberg, you really feel this inside/outside aspect of it. And to me, that really defines how his art was: very autobiographical, giving you clues, but not necessarily the full story.

You don’t say.
It’s a little bit funny. One reason I’ve stayed so interested in Short Circuit has been the implications of finding the original Jasper Johns Flag on the creation myth of Flag itself. Because really, what would it mean if Johns’ first flag painting was actually shown inside his boyfriend’s combine? And he didn’t even get credited for it? What if Johns’ idea to paint the flag came from the same place as his idea to paint the map, Rauschenberg?
But what if it goes both ways? The Tower, Schimmel writes, dates from “the middle of Rauschenberg’s Combine period, which extends roughly from 1954 to 1962.” Which is, incidentally, also the period Johns and Rauschenberg were a couple. What if combines came from Johns? Or silk screening?
Or maybe it’s not so simplistic or binary. Maybe “their respective breakthroughs” were collaborative? Maybe they talked through and worked through “their most important advancements” together? How does Target with Plaster Casts relate to the combines of 1955? Or how do the combines relate to Johns’ object-laden paintings of the post-breakup era? What do the famously autobiographical, emotionally-charged-yet-obdurate works of these two artists reveal about each other, their life together, their production, and the culture in which they lived?
For three generations now, the art and art history worlds have been arguing for the separation of these two artists and the distinct, unknowable power of their “respective” achievements. Some day maybe we can tell the full story.
Lot 28, The Tower, 1957, est. $12,000,000-18,000,000 [christies.com]

Did You Buy A Copy Of The Richard Prince Deposition Book?

Then please email me if you haven’t already.
greg at greg dot org
Electronic or print, either one. Because I have something for you.

Verne Blosum Found! Or Rather, Found By Verne Blossum

You stumble upon something that Google doesn’t know anything about, and you post about it, and then a while later, the other handful of people wondering about the same thing eventually email you, and you try to figure this stuff out together.
Thus it is that the Verne Blosum Fan Club is proud to welcome the Greensboro Chapter to the table.
The other day, a curator from the Weatherspoon Art Museum contacted me after seeing my 2010 posts about the pioneering Pop Art painter Vern Blosum. Because it turns out the museum which is affiliated with UNC-Greensboro, has a Verne Blossum painting, Twin Expiration, above, from 1962.

I first found out about Blossum when his parking meter painting, Violation was illustrated alongside Andy Warhol in a 1963 Washington Post article about Alice Denney’s foundational Pop Art show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
Then it turned out MoMA has a Blosum parking meter as well, Time Expired, purchased for them in 1964 by Larry Aldrich. [No, I’m not typing it wrong, his name shows up in contemporary sources with both one s and two, with an e and without.]

The Weatherspoon discovery [for whatever reason, their collection database has not been indexed by Google] comes on the heels of another out-of-the-blue email from some folks in California. Seems they’d come across Vern Blosum in the catalogue for Pop Art USA, a 1963 exhibition curated by the Pasadena Art Museum’s own John Coplans. That Blosum, titled 25 Minutes.

Clearly, there’s a theme, and I’m not just talking about parking meters. 25 Minutes was apparently lent by the L.M. Asher family. Betty Asher was one of the major collectors and supporters and curators at LACMA for many years. Just phenomenal. And her son is Michael Asher.
The Weatherspoon’s Blossum turns out to have been donated in 1981 by Robert Scull, probably the most famous [or infamous, depending] Pop Art collector of them all, in honor of Virginia Dwan, who has had a long, generous relationship to the museum.
For an artist who seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the art world, Vern[e] Blos[s]um sure left behind, not just an intriguing body of work, but also an incredible body of collectors.
The work continues.

Dear pwn0 on Publicsurplus.com, I want to buy your Palomar Sky Survey Prints

Dear pwn0,
How are you? I would like to discuss with you the Palomar Sky Survey prints you bought on publicsurplus.com in 2010.
I know it was a POSS-I set of prints, but from the size of the file cabinet, it looks like it was an early or partial version. And I hear from the folks at the planetarium who sold it that it might have been incomplete.
I have attempted to relay a message via publicsurplus.com itself, but the company does not respond to any non-automated communication attempts.
pwn0. Are those your initials? Perhaps someone knows you, and might relay this message to you? From the other, large, shop-related items you have purchased recently on publicsurplus.com, I am assuming you live in Utah. Which is awesome. My mom lives there, and we’ll be visiting in a few weeks.
Anyway, I’m interested in hearing about that old file cabinet full of obsolete astronomy photos–and then I’m interested in buying it from you. So please drop me an email at greg at greg dot org. Thanks!

On Size Matters

And speaking of Richard Serra. I can’t figure out how James Meyer’s 2004 Artforum essay on the problematics of size in contemporary sculpture got by me until now. It ends too soon, but it’s pretty great.
Beginning with the overwhelming Tate Turbine Hall pieces by Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor, Meyer retraces the history of sculptural size and scale, and how minimalism’s supposedly non-anthropic form was still keyed to the human viewer’s presence. And how post-minimalist folks like Tony Smith and Richard Serra got into, basically, a size arms race, which manipulated the spatial power and experience of the institution instead of critiquing it or fostering self-aware perception. [I’m collapsing a whole lot here. It’s really worth a read.]
Anyway, I mention it now for two reasons, the first being that Meyer begins his history with the 1940s and Abstract Expressionist murals:

SCALE ENTERS THE DISCUSSION of postwar art within the context of Abstract Expressionism. The development of the mural canvas by the late 1940s introduced a bodily scale into painting–a scale that was variously described as one sustained between the painter and the work and between the viewer and the work; on one hand, a phenomenology of making, and on the other, one of perception. Jackson Pollock famously spoke of his drip method as a means to “literally be in the painting.” Mark Rothko noted that he painted “large pictures … precisely because I want to be very intimate and human.” Mural scale was seen as an antidote to the easel scale of Cubism and Surrealism and the illusionism this embodied. As Pollock observed in the same statement. “The tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”

Which means postwar sculpture and space becomes yet another aspect of the photomural’s history and influence I have to look into.
The other, bigger [sic] reason, though, is Meyer’s articulation of size-ism and awe-based exhibition experience. His is one of the few strongly argued critiques of otherwise-sacrosanct subjects like Richard Serra’s giant torqued sculptures and the museums that fit it, particularly Dia:Beacon and the Guggenheim Bilbao:

Having demanded and inspired the enlarged spaces that museum directors and trustees find it so necessary to proffer, Serra’s sculpture has become the contemporary museum’s major draw, an attraction of sufficient size and impact.

satelloon in the grand palais, mockup with serras
This challenge to the pervasive art world conflation of size, significance, and permanence is basically the context out of which I hatched my own idea to exhibit a Project Echo satelloon in an art space. The problem being, of course, that since all the world’s biggest, newest museums were built to accommodate Richard Serra sculptures, there are less than five venues that could actually show a 100-foot diameter spherical balloon sculpture. They’re just as prone to stylistic and functional obsolescence as a 19th century, fabric-walled salon.
Of course, the real problem is I hadn’t read it, and I really should have.
No more scale: the experience of size in contemporary sculpture, James Meyer, Artforum Summer 2004 [findarticles]

Yes Rasta Indeed.

Another book report just came in, this one from Andy: “Bonus: ups driver was smoking in the truck. Box smells like weed.”
Thanks for partaking!

On The Execution of Maximilian

The Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, image via national gallery
Edouard Manet made three large paintings in 1867-8 on The Execution of Maximilian, a subject torn from the day’s headlines, but which, because they were critical of Napoleon III’s policies, were never exhibited in France in his lifetime. [Maximilian was a Hapsburg who Napoleon had installed as a puppet emperor in Mexico. He was executed when the French army abandoned him and deposed Mexican president Benito Juarez regained power. A lithograph stone Manet was creating on the same subject was apparently confiscated, and only returned after the artist publicly protested.] Their composition all relate to Goya’s Third of May, which Manet saw in 1865.
The second painting, above, was cut into pieces after Manet’s death in 1883, and sold separately by his heirs. In the 1890s, Degas repurchased the fragments and remounted them on a single canvas the size of the original painting. The National Gallery in London acquired the piece[s] in 1918, and had them disassembled and framed separately until 1992, when they were once again reconstituted on a single canvas.
I’m kind of fascinated by all this history–the history of Manet’s painting itself, that is, not just the charged history he depicted. I think I will look into it some more, probably starting with John Elderfield’s catalogue for MoMA’s 2006 exhibition which brought all of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian works together for the first time.
I mention it now because the circumstances of Manet’s painting are discussed several times in Jasper Johns Gray, the catalogue of that incredible show at the Met in 2008 [and at the Art Institute before that. Good morning, Chicago!]. Johns had been invited by the National Gallery to make a work “in dialogue” with a work in the collection, and he chose this collaged, fragmented Manet.

Near The Lagoon via metmuseum
Johns took the composition of the Manet fragments as a formal element in several of his Catenary works, including Near The Lagoon (2002-3). As RIchard Schiff put it,

The “picture,” as a collage, is something of an “object.” Each fragment maintains a strong material presence, for its external shape is unrelated to (alienated from) the pictorial composition within it. Johns treated the shapes themselves as comprising an abstract image, a composition. He mimicked their placement and proportions with his own collaged pieces, then rotated the entire configuration clockwise 90 degrees so that it assumed a vertical orientation.

Schiff goes on to discuss pictures’ freedom from gravity as compared to a catenary’s dependence on it.
Johns’ paintings are interesting for the directness of their engagement with other artists–not just Manet, but Degas, and even Goya. There are other spots in the Gray catalogue where Johns’ Catenary paintings are considered to be in dialogue with Rauschenberg’s 1955 combine painting Untitled, which has a parachute affixed to the surface. [Johns owned the work for years, having bought it out of Bob’s 1963 Castelli show. Which, hmm, complicated? Also, I can’t find an image of it online.]
I guess I’m most interested, though, in trying to get a better sense of how collage and this picture/object relationship play out across Johns’ work, particularly with regard to canvas. There are examples reaching way back to the Short Circuit era where Johns affixes canvas on canvas, pictures [sic] on pictures [sic], or where he builds up a single work from multiple stretched canvases attached together.
[There are also many works where Johns uses hinges and doors in his work, both of which appear in Short Circuit. So far, I can’t find anyone who has taken a look at these elements specifically in Johns’ work. One thing I’m finding, though, is how this single, early combine–which has been largely unseen and unstudied since its creation, and never in the context of Johns’ work–casts a different light on much of the established critical discussion. It’s like a trigger to question the assumptions and the interpretations and inferences which have accreted over the decades.
If Short Circuit is an anomaly, a work wholly isolated from both Rauschenberg’s and Johns’ other works of the time and since, then it probably doesn’t matter; it’s just an art historical oddity. I’m kind of testing the hypothesis, though, that Short Circuit and the Flag Johns put in it, have a direct, possibly even foundational, relationship to the artists’ work. If that’s true, then it seems like it would ripple through their careers and upend much of the received understanding of these two artists. At least that’s the theory.

What Books May Come

Looks like Monday is Unboxing Day. Whether UPS or USPS, be sure to thank the union members who worked through the weekend to bring you your art nerdy books.

The hardback with the current cover design [updated link, see below] arrived in Mondo Blogoland. I really do like this cover, too. Patrick thinks I should change it back to the softcover version, though, so that his is more collectible. Which is a very generous and slightly hilarious thing to say.
I was also thinking of making a 2-color silkscreen print out of this cover image. Or maybe even a whole portfolio of the Prince v. Cariou exhibits. I tell you, look at Rauschenberg too long, and you’ll want to start silkscreening everything that’s not pinned down.
Oh ho, at Joy Garnett’s studio [below], they staged an impromptu reading of my “conceptual piece.” And now I’m thinking that staging a dramatic re-enactment of portions of the transcript some night could be a lot of fun. Hmm.

Meanwhile, back at Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. HQ, the champagne mangoes have a new, romantically exotic friend:

Cariou’s book was apparently supposed to be available as a limited edition, with a signed print. Did not know that. It says it right there on the colophon, though: “A slipcased, limited edition of this book with a signed and numbered artwork by the artist is available upon inquiry; please contact the publisher.”
There’s also a credit to The Small Darkroom, New York for “gelatin-silver prints,” a reference, presumably, to the edition. And there’s a separate ISBN number, 1-57687-074-X, which goes basically nowhere. Which means that Cariou and/or powerHouse had planned to do a limited edition, but it never happened. Wonder why that was? I guess if I were an attorney for someone getting sued for damaging someone’s book and photography market, I might care a little more.
Apr 2011 update: At the moment, the hardcover copy is not available. Here’s a new link to order a softcover copy of the new, expanded edition, which includes Prince’s entire deposition, and additional legal documents.

Google Street View’s Shiny Balls

People often ask me, “What is it that makes your Google Street View Art so different, so appealing?”
Actually, no one asks me that, they just send me “Hey, look!” emails with links to Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf. But if they did ask me, I’d probably go off about Bergson and the flaneur’s gaze and Deleuzian notions of cinematic time and the panoptic surveil–
“Hey, look! Shiny object! Want that!”

Seriously, chrome that bad boy in an edition of 5, please. I’ll keep the AP.
via Behind The Scenes with Street View [youtube]

So Sue Me, I Think My Richard Prince Depositions Book Looks Awesome

Wow, can I just say that, when combined with the rapid production power of our digitized present, appropriation art is just awesome?

I just got the first hardcover copies of the first version of the book I conceived of a week ago today, Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al, including Excerpts from The Videotaped Deposition of Richard Prince, The Affidavit of Richard Prince, Competing Memoranda of Law in Support of Summary Judgment, Exhibits Pertaining to Paintings and Collages of Richard Prince and the Use of Reproductions of Patrick Cariou’s YES RASTA Photographs Therein, and The Summary Ass Whooping Dealt to Richard Prince by the Hon. Judge Deborah A. Batts, as compiled by Greg Allen for greg.org in March 2011, and it looks rather sweet.
I’m waiting to see a paperback version [updated link info below], and to see the other cover design in person, the one reproducing the court exhibit featuring the photocopied covers of the two dueling books. I like the graphic punch of that one. But I had a hunch, and I’m seeming right, that the original un-design, the full title, laid out in giant red letters [the default setting for the annotate function in Preview, the only software I used to produce the thing] is kind of awesome. So there may be some version tweaking to be done.

Anyway, the inside is pretty nice, too. The 2×2 deposition transcript pages turn out to read just fine in a trade-size book. Which makes it perfect for the beach or wherever. And it is much thinner than I expected. 290 pages is a lot of content, but it is a pretty manageable-sized book. Also, a little sluttier, frankly. Some of those photocopied PDF’s of Prince’s paintings turn out to be pretty legible after all.
Publishing a book to serve as an indispensable art history reference–and which consists entirely of someone else’s work–should really not feel this fun. But I guess that’s why appropriation’s so hot these days.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to buy the new, expanded softcover edition, which now includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript, plus several other key legal documents. It’s a bit higher quality, too. New printer.