Process 1.05.

Continuing in a series about process.

Since we have been looking at how things are done behind the scenes, in the studio, I've decided to be rather literal today, and pick up exactly where I left off yesterday -- with source materail. How about a look at the source material behind the works of what I consider to be two birds of a feather? Richard Prince and Marcel Duchamp.

While leafing through a collection of Edward Koren cartoons, I had a moment of deja vu.

And again it happened when I was looking through an early 60s pulp.

As a matter fact, Prince has been up front about it his pillaging, even managing to cash in on it twice - once by selling his paintings and again by repacking some of the originals into a book.

The same thing happens in the world of hip hop. As you remember sampling has been battled out in the courts for years, Biz Markie's case being the most the landmark. Koons lost a similar case to Marin photographer Art Rodgers shortly after. In recent years Koons has wised up, slicing and dicing his source materials enough to best fashion photographer Andrea Blanch's lawsuit.

The following should be prolly be a separate post, but it somehow feels like it could fit here - not so much about piracy but more in looking at from where finished pieces can originate.

In 1969's Art Bulletin, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's newsletter, Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps offered the history of and an analysis for Marcel Duchamp's masterwork, Etant Donnés... Also included in the Bulletin was an amazing backstage look at the process.

Between 1965 and 1968, Ducchamp's studio was housed in suite 40 at 80 E. 11th Street in NYC, across from a union office. Denise Brown Hare visited him and captured the piece in progress.

The piece was then composed of temporary panels, brick patterned linoleum framed the viewing door.

Detail of left side panel with Peek Freans cookie tin used as housing.

The Bulletin also included some other bits of visual evidence - Mme Duchamp, in Cadaqués Spain, beside the door that would be ultimately be used for the portal in Etant Donnes... as well as the brick archway in the same town that would be the prototype for the facade (the faced was eventually built to Duchamp's specs from bricks recovered from a Greenwich Village demolition site.).

The Museum also released a photograph of a waterfall in a small Swiss village, that according to Mme Duchamp, Marcel had visited sometime prior to 1950.  The image was used as the basis for Etant Donnés...'s landscape background.

Never looked in Etant Donnés...? Here you go, pervert.