{"product_id":"rafael-melendez-mlii-academy-of-realness-2025","title":"RAFAEL MELENDEZ, MLII, Academy of Realness, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003ePart of an ongoing sequence of artist publications made with generative AI, \u003cem\u003eMLII\u003c\/em\u003e is built from synthetic images in which art history is fed back through a machine and returned polished, recognisable and slightly wrong.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe source material is deliberately loaded. David Hammons reappears through \u003cem\u003ePissed Off\u003c\/em\u003e — the 1981 action, photographed by Dawoud Bey, in which Hammons urinated on Richard Serra's \u003cem\u003eT.W.U.\u003c\/em\u003e — and through \u003cem\u003eBliz-aard Ball Sale\u003c\/em\u003e (1983). Felix Gonzalez-Torres's strings of lights surface elsewhere. The front cover takes the sculptural language of Wade Guyton's U forms and returns it as an immaculate, almost commercial render.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book belongs to Melendez's developing Psychofigurism, here operating as a kind of art-historical laundering. Existing images are not reproduced faithfully; they are passed through early generative AI, stripped of their original photographic conditions, and rebuilt from the machine's approximation of what it has learned.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title performs the same operation. PLAGIARISM contains four letters that can also function as Roman numerals: M, L, I, I. Rearranged conventionally they become MLII — 1052. The word itself is processed through another system, leaving only what that system recognises.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is an art-historical lineage through Sturtevant, whose repetitions of Warhol, Johns, Stella and others destabilised the distinction between original and copy decades before machine-generated imagery. AI introduces a further problem: it does not simply repeat the artwork. It reconstructs a statistical memory of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSturtevant repeated the artwork. AI repeats the memory of the artwork. \u003cem\u003eMLII\u003c\/em\u003e works in the difference.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is no conventional essay inside the book. The only text appears on the inside of the removable dust jacket, where AI is also credited as part of the publication's production. The text sits somewhere between manifesto, corrupted critical essay and machine confession: plagiarism becomes an \"error state\"; imitation becomes evidence of replication; archives generate \"millions of digital ghosts\"; and \"the original disappears, replaced by circulation.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIts placement matters. The images occupy the book; the language explaining — and implicating — their method sits on its removable outer skin. Even the explanatory apparatus refuses a stable position.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMLII\u003c\/em\u003e is not homage so much as reprocessing: art history treated as image matter, passed through AI and returned as synthetic residue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcademy of Realness, 2025. 15.5 × 20.5 cm, 50 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Edition of 30.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Very good; light handling and minor surface wear to dust jacket.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"\/blogs\/journal\/the-new-rare-at-glue-book-fair-2026\"\u003eThe New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54661292163410,"sku":"TNR-2026-0657","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Melendez_Rafael.Mlii.2025.jpg?v=1789073950","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/rafael-melendez-mlii-academy-of-realness-2025","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}