the making of, by greg allen
I cannot remember what I was searching for when I found the buck wildest things sold from the collection of quirky legend Chara Schreyer, but it was not a 13-foot long face-mounted photo of a Glenn Ligon neon sculpture.
Continue reading “Chara Schreyer Facsimile Objects”
I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.
But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.
NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.
Geoff Snack posted this unopened pair of Jenny Holzer panty hose to WrongAnswer this morning, and now they’re gone. Of all the artist-designed clothing editions in the 1993 AmFAR Art Object collaboration with Barneys, I think the Jenny Holzer panty hose are the most vulnerable.
You could wear the Robert Rauschenberg tie, or the blouse with Richard Prince’s joke embroidered on the cuff—”My parents kept me in a closet for years. Until I was 15, I thought I was a suit.”—and it would survive. But put the Jenny Holzer panty hose on so you can read THE FUTURE IS STUPID or TURN SOFT AND LOVELY ANY TIME YOU HAVE THE CHANCE running down the back of your leg, and the clock is ticking. Or the pendant watch with Cindy Sherman dressed as a fortune teller.
Kenny Scharf has the Art Object print ad [pdf] listing all 19 artist collabs, and honestly Prada making a JSG Boggs backpack is an even wilder combo than Frette making Scharf’s napkins. What a world. [see below]
Jenny Holzer THE FUTURE IS STUPID Panty Hose, 1993 [wronganswer.ca]
Richard Prince X Barneys X AmFAR shirt at Bengtsson Fine Arts [artsy]
LOL 05 Oct 2023, Lot 708: A white cotton shirt for Art Object by Richard Prince, sold for £10 [busby’s]
hold up, I was all over this 2023 sale of artist books and ephemera and missed two pairs of Jenny Holzer panty hose?? [wright20]
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE] So a pair sold on eBay YESTERDAY. There were Jenny Holzer panty hose at Printed Matter. I mentioned them to a friend just now, and he was all, “Hah, yeah, I remember them from Barneys. AmFAR. I had some and sold them.” So while until yesterday I thought I’d been living in a world oblivious to Jenny Holzer AIDS fundraiser panty hose, I was actually living in a world where everyone around me knew about Jenny Holzer panty hose AND DIDN’T TELL ME.
Nate Freeman has an amazing profile of Richard Prince in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. It includes:
several interviews—the most Prince has said in years without being put under oath;
a tour of a sprawling, sculpture-studded compound in Rensellaerville, NY which Larry calls Richardville, the hub of the Prince Cinematic Universe;
and the blazing hot core exchange from Deposition, the seven-hour video epic that played in Rome this summer—which is also a best-selling book, of course, find it at a Harlem parking lot near you—and
a preview of Prince’s new paintings, which will be shown next month at Gagosian.
Oh, and photos by Taryn Simon!
Richard Prince’s Last Stand [vanityfair]
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.
And yet, it is, over and over again, described by those few who have seen it all as one of the major artworks of our time. Prince himself, in a conversation with Rick Rubin, talked about it as wanting to make a work like Andy Warhol’s Empire. Benjamin Godsill could not stop raving about it on Nota Bene. And now Andrew Russeth has delivered one of the most incisive, close readings of Prince’s Deposition I’ve seen anywhere.
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?
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.
[next morning/evening update] I found a 2009 review of Carlson’s collection of Latin texts by Chris Given-Wilson that makes this accidental algorithmic pairing feels unexpectedly relevant. The embedded quote is from Carlson:
“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.
Buy The Second Deposition of Richard Prince in softcover on Amazon for $20 [amazon]
Buy one, two, or three copies of David R. Carlson’s, The Deposition of Richard II for $29.70 each, plus $13.44 shipping to the US [abebooks]
A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.
…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.
Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.
Of course, it IS his deposition.
For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!
In the mean time, though, S’AdS has posted an excerpt from the [200 page] transcript, where Prince discusses the development of his Cowboy photos. It’s very good stuff:
Continue reading “Richard Prince On Cowboys, From The Second Deposition”
Turns out Richard Prince has made a lot more than one Poster. Max Hetzler is opening a whole show, today, in Marfa, of “a large body of” Prince Poster works on both paper and canvas. Some of them are huge, like ten feet across. Inkjetted and overpainted rephotographs of collages of the tiny, postage stamp-sized posters and captions. For all their media, appropriation, and cultural content, they also show a lot of interest in scale.
Continue reading “Richard Prince Posters In Marfa”
Early in 2017 I wrote about how Richard Prince was using the Instagram grid to gang images and to stage temporary exhibitions. One I screenshot was of a set of photos he called New Posters; it was made of vintage ads for Marboro Posters, alongside his own blurred Trump poster.
Somehow, even though I considered the possibility of IRL posters at the time, I only just now realized Prince did make a New Poster. Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, was published as a small screenprinted edition by MOREpublishers of Belgium.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, ed. 25, sold out [morepublishers.be]
Previously, related: Marboro Man: New Posters by Richard Prince
![this altered version of Caravaggio's Deposition from the Vatican Museums in Roma is a cascade of mourning figures holding or looming over the dead but still absolutely caked up body of Our Lord, with an outsized clipped version of Richard Prince's under-oath face roughly pasted onto the main figure in the center, the one who is holding Jesus, but, importantly, also looking straight at the viewer. Obviously, since this is a picture about Prince's deposition in a lawsuit, the so-called correct thing would be to paste his face on Jesus's, and in less apocalyptic times, I might have, but [looks at the world] I'm not taking that chance rn](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/richard-prince-deposition-roma1-689x1024.jpeg)
For a brief shining moment in 2023, a website called depositionrow.com hosted the entire 6h42m42s video of Richard Prince’s deposition in the copyright infringement lawsuit over his Instagram New Portraits. And then it was gone.
Well, now you can watch it again. Starting today, it is playing on a computer on a table in a Janis Kounellis installation at Sant’Andrea di Scaphis in Rome, Gavin Brown’s deconsecrated side hustle. What are you waiting for?
[apr 30 update]: there is video now, it really is like this for six hours.
Over the years, I’ve tried making some myself and used them as references for other works. Nothing profound to say here, I just really, really like Richard Prince’s little joke paintings.
They also do remind me of John McWhinnie, who showed them, and was amazing, who always had discoveries, and is gone, which sucks. So maybe it’s weird that a monochrome joke painting can also be mournful, but here we are.
22 Nov 2024 Lot 811: Richard Prince, Untitled, 1992, est. $100-150K [update: sold for $296,000] [christies]
What was going on in 2016 that I missed an entire Richard Prince copyright infringement lawsuit? It makes no sense!
Well, it kind of makes sense, because it lasted for about five minutes before it was withdrawn, and it never reappeared.
Continue reading “Sid Litigious: The Forgotten Richard Prince Lawsuit”
I’ve never been more excited for the Third of May, or more implicated.
It’s still wild and sad that artist Jason Polan is not here, and not just because he left his project to draw every person in New York unfinished. Polan’s collection is coming up for sale on May 3rd, 2024, and it includes a bunch of his own work, plus artworks and artist books by others.
Among those works is this surprising quartet being sold as the The Catcher In The Rye Collection, which includes: JD Salinger’s original 1951 novel; an unopened copy of Richard Prince’s The Catcher In The Rye, which he sold from a blanket along Fifth Avenue in 2012; Eric Doeringer’s 2018 bootleg version of Prince’s Catcher, with an original drawing for and by Jason; and
[mic drop]
[picks mic back up] The Deposition of Richard Prince, which I published with Bookhorse in Zurich in 2013, and which feels like the hardest of the four to find sometimes.
Obviously everyone is encouraged to bid. If you can’t wait, four of you can at least get your own copy of Doeringer’s book directly from him.
3 May 2024 Lot 121: The Catcher in the Rye Collection, est. $500-700 [update: sold for $2,016] [wright20]
A few weeks ago, I got a correction from Jeffrey Rian about which Richard Prince interview of his I was quoting, and I wanted to see what the one I’d missed actually said. It was from the March 1987 issue of Art in America magazine, and Prince’s work was on the cover. There was an interview, an intro article, and copious full-page images of Prince’s work. The print copy I looked at in the National Gallery’s library looked fresh as the day it was bound.
The interview was indeed interesting in unexpected ways, and I’ll get to it in a bit. What jumped out at me, though, was Untitled (Kool-Aid), 1983. It felt unusual, and had I realized why at the time, I would have tried to take a better snapshot of it. #rerephotography
Continue reading “Oh, Yeah! Hey, Wait: Richard Prince’s Untitled (Kool-Aid)”