Richard Prince | Untitled (Black Bra)

Richard Prince

Untitled (Black Bra)

Berlin, Germany: Texte Zur Kunst, 2024

31 × 30.8 cm.

Edition of 100 [+20 AP] signed and numbered copies

Released last June in an edition of 100, Prince’s third edition with Texte Zur Kunst (a Ditone print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag) has sold out. 

"Richard Prince began appropriating fragments of contemporary visual culture at the end of the 1970s and, closely linked to the Pictures Generation, he has drawn from diverse contexts and created a multilayered oeuvre held together above all by appropriation as an artistic method. By borrowing imagery from advertising, pop culture, or other artists and making it into an element of his own work, Prince questions the mechanisms and protocols of the socioeconomic systems from which his material originated. 

For his third TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, Prince has chosen one of his “Black Bra” works, which consists of underwear on canvas – or rather, of canvas wearing lingerie. The motif of the black bra has been a recurring one for Prince recently, including in his latest series of Instagram screenshots, the “New Portraits,” which show lightly clad influencers painting while shirtless, stripped down to their lingerie. Prince’s series highlights the “Rückenfigur” as a particularly popular pose for presenting oneself effectively on social media. Each image of the “New Portraits” is accompanied by comments – a mix of (auto)biographical and art historical notes that form an essential component of the work – posted by Joan Katz (handle joankatzz), with whom Prince supposedly founded a band called Black Bra in 1990. 

“Supposedly” because he subverts principles such as authorship and originality not only by appropriating visuals but also by playing with identities and myths, which are just as fundamental to fame in art and pop culture as iconic images. The motif of the edition “Untitled (Black Bra)” also adorns the cover of Prince’s artist’s book “New Paintings,” dedicated to the “New Portraits” and released by the artist’s Fulton Ryder imprint.”

- publisher’s blurb

Fiona Tan | Scenario

 

Fiona Tan

Scenario 

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, vandenberg&wallroth, 2000

176 pp., 22 x 17 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

"Scenario is a retrospective of the work of Indonesian visual artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan, whose film May You Live in Interesting Times was awarded the prize for best Dutch debut at the Netherlands Film festival. True to its title, the book is constructed as a scenario: a storyboard that evokes its own story but also offers glimpses of as-yet-unrealized projects and dreams, mixing Tan's work with "found" photographs and images. It provides perhaps the most interesting look yet at Tan's concentrated oeuvre of film and video installations, which consider the recycling of history as visual material and problems concerning cultural identity and migration. Scenario includes correspondence between Fiona Tan and John Berger, a conversation between Tan and filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, a story written especially for the book by Oscar van den Boogaard, and essays by Lynn Cooke and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen.”

- publisher’s blurb

Raymond Pettibon | Bottomless Pond

Raymond Pettibon

Bottomless Pond 

Lawndale, USA: SST Publications, 1986

[unpaginated], 22 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

An early zine that intersperses Raymond Pettibon’s drawings with those of the artist’s young nephew. Nelson Tarpenny is credited with contributing to other publications by Pettibon, though none so overtly. A quick Google search for Tarpenny turned up no information, beyond auction results for these collaborations. 

Vanessa Beecroft | Performances 1993-2003

Vanessa Beecroft

Performances 1993-2003

Milan, Italy: Skira, 2003

454 pp., 25 cm x 3,5 x 30 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

"As a subject for art, the female body still, after all these thousands of years, has the power to shock and subvert, no less so in the hands of Italian artist Beecroft, who uses women themselves as her medium. This 9½"×11" catalogue, which includes a huge foldout dust jacket, covers the retrospective of Beecroft's work at Turin's Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, documenting 52 of Beecroft's "performances," which involve dressing (or undressing), coiffing, painting and arranging groups of real-live "girls" (as Beecroft consistently, and rather disturbingly, refers to her most often 20-something models) with generous references to classical art, films and history. 

While many of the 300 color and b&w photos show cadres of nude blondes with severe makeup in near-militaristic formations and poses, the performances, Beecroft writes, depend on the almost entropic breakdown of discipline of the models: "A constant element of the performances is to start from a drawing of a precise concept and move towards the loss of order and the beginning of chaos.... The girls need to interpret the rules, making them their own, updating them every time a performance takes place.” 

Included is an interview with Beecroft and four essays on her work, one of which is a rather intriguing analytical breakdown of elements in her pieces, such as the controversial VB50 in Sao Paulo, in which Beecroft used white girls painted black (thereby losing her corporate sponsor's approval). The flatness of the images, often blurry here when they could be sharp, do not completely capture the sense of live performance, and the models remain just that, rarely achieving in print the individuality that Beecroft says she is seeking. Still, the layout is canny, and, though deliberately lurid, the photos do convey deep questions about femininity, art and spectator-based consumerism.”

- publisher’s blurb

Richard Long | 4 Sculptures

Richard Long

4 Sculptures

Monchengladbach, Germany: Stadtisches Museum, 1970

20.5 x 16 x 2 cm

Edition of 330 numbered copies

The 11th Stadtisches Museum boxed catalogue accompanies an exhibition of Richard Long’s work (his second, ever) that ran from July 16th to August 30th, 1970. 

A floor plan of the museum’s first floor is printed on the inner lid of the box, and texts by the artist and curator Johannes Cladders are printed, in German, on the bottom inner lid. Enclosed is an 18 page bookwork containing 13 images of works and a portrait of the artist on the cover. 

The 4 sculptures of the title refer to works that Long produced in England, Germany, Africa, and America, between the years 1966 and 1970.

Chairs

Chairs by Franz West, Tom Dean, Rob Pruitt,  Donald Judd, Barbara Kruger, Harland Miller, and Van Maltese and Lauren Reed (in reverse order as Blogger now seems to load photos backwards - when it lets you load them at all). 

Robert Wilson | From Within: Catalogue Raisonné

[Robert Wilson]

From Within: Catalogue Raisonné

Paris, France: The Arts Arena, 2011

336 pp., 9.5 x 11”, hardcover

Edition size unknown

A now out-of-print catalogue raisonné featuring contributions from performance artists Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson, composer (and frequent collaborator) Philip Glass, pop star Rufus Wainwright, actress Isabelle Huppert and others. 

“I can’t think of any body of work as large or as influential.” 

- Susan Sontag