Album Covers by Artists

For the second day in a row, the Pitchfork lead album review has featured a record with a classic contemporary artwork on the cover. 

Yesterday it was the Strokes, whose new LP features the famous Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy) image, and today it was zayALLCAPS’ My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Sh*t on the Phone Yesterday. It includes an image of David Hammons pissing on a Richard Serra work. 

Untitled (Cowboy) is one of Prince’s signature works, from a series that began in the mid-1970s, when Prince earned a living clipping magazine articles for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. Only the advertisements remained, and he began rephotographing and enlarging them. 

Alongside Spiritual America (a rephotograph of a young nude Brooke Shields), Untitled (Cowboy) is possibly the most iconic work from the series, featuring a rephotographed Marlboro ad, with the cowboy figure isolated and presented anew, removed from the original commercial context.

The Stokes cover is credited to Johann Rashid, who possibly rephotographed the rephotograph. 

The zayALLCAPS LP (not yet released on vinyl, it would seem) features the 1981 David Hammons work Pissed Off, one of two interventions Hammons made with Serra’s sculptures. A series of images by Dawoud Bey document Hammons urinating on the Serra work T.W.U in 1981, and then receiving a citation from an NYPD officer [see below]. The work is titled Pissed Off. 

New and Neglected

Things have been on auto-pilot for a while now, but above are some recent arrivals or things I’ve been meaning to get to, and will soon, including works by or about: David Hammons, Daniel Johnston, Joshua Schwebel, Brian Eno, Patrick Lundeen, Jon Klassen, and Bonnie Marranca on Dick Higgins. 

Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair Opens Tonight

 

David Hammons

David Hammons was born on this day in 1943. 

David Hammons | The Holy Bible: Old Testament

David Hammons 

The Holy Bible: Old Testament 

London, UK: Hand/Eye Projects, 2002 

1002 pp., 30 x 24 x 2.5cm, leather 

Edition of 165 

Hammon's first published bookwork is a kind of appropriation closed circuit, taking Duchamp's assisted readymades to the their logical conclusion. Hammons rebound the soft-cover edition of Arturo Schwarz’s 1969 book The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp as a leather-bound, gilded edge bible with slip-case. 

The enigmatic Hammons has not spoken about the piece in interview, to the best of my knowledge and is often cagey about his work in general. Many read this piece as a critique, mocking the exaltation of Duchamp in the contemporary art world. It could also function as an update of Rauschenberg's patricidal Erased de Kooning (note the use of the old testament). But Hammon's work has frequently nodded to Duchamp in the past (such as Fountain and Nude Descending a Staircase and 1982's Bag Lady In Flight) and the piece could certainly also function as a genuine homage.

David Hammons

David Hammons turns 80 today. 

David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble

[David Hammons]

David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble

New York City, USA: The Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum / MIT Press, 1991

96 pp., 28,5x24 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Hammons's works, Rousing the Rubble includes texts by Kellie Jones, Tom Finkelpearl and Steve Cannon, and an introduction by Alanna Heiss. Photographic essays by Dawoud Bey and Bruce Talamoun. 

The title is available here, for £419.74.

"Rousing the Rubble celebrates the energetic work of American artist David Hammons, who until now has ducked the attention of art critics, traditional galleries and museums. Preferring to 'do things in the street', Hammons, a recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, places himself as an artist between Arte Povera and Marcel Duchamp. He creates his art from urban refuse and the detritus of African American life -- chicken wings, Night Train bottles, clippings of African American hair. Hammons' witty and elegant sculptures, body prints and installations are the product of his deeply felt views on racism and cultural stereotypes." 

- dust jacket blurb

David Hammons | The Holy Bible: Old Testament

David Hammons 

The Holy Bible: Old Testament 

London, UK: Hand/Eye Projects, 2002 

1002 pp., 30 x 24 x 2.5cm, leather 

Edition of 165 

David Hammon's first published bookwork is a kind of appropriation closed circuit, taking Duchamp's assisted readymades to the their logical conclusion. Hammons rebound the soft-cover edition of Arturo Schwarz’s 1969 book The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp as a leather-bound, gilded edge bible, complete with slip-case. 

The work is often read as a critique, a black artist mocking the exaltation of Duchamp in the contemporary art world, and it could also function as an update of Rauschenberg's patricidal gesture in Erased de Kooning (note the use of the old testament). But Hammons' work has frequently nodded to Duchamp in the past. Their practices share the regular use of found materials and a penchant for puns, for example. 

Bag Lady In Flight (1982) has echoes of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and selling snowballs on the streets of Manhattan might be seen as an update on placing a urinal on a pedestal in an exhibition. Even the territorial pissings of the Ricahrd Serra intervention Pissed Off can’t help but evoke Duchamp’s Fountain. Toilet Trees from 1990 [see below] makes the connection even clearer: the work consists of urinals affixed to trees by black rubber tubing. 

“I am the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic,” Hammons told New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in 2002. “We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that’s been in the art world for the last fifty years.” 

When asked about the quote by the same magazine several years later — "did it suggest a struggle to escape the Master’s shadow?" - Hammons’ smiled and quietly replied, “You never get free of Duchamp. He’s always there.”