RICHARD PRINCE / HOWARD JOHNSON — The Pope’s Butler, Fulton Ryder, New York, 2012

Richard Prince / Howard Johnson, The Pope’s Butler. Fulton Ryder, New York, 2012. Staple-bound softcover; 20 pages, 19.5 × 24.5 cm; black-and-white offset printing.

A slight, deliberately anonymous publication from the Fulton Ryder orbit, where the distinction between artist book, found document, joke and evidence is allowed to remain unresolved.

The cover is built from the spines of commercially produced religious DVDs: The Lost Tomb of Jesus, The Spear of Christ, Jerusalem: Center of the World, Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons and others. Removed from the shelf and reproduced together, their titles begin to read less as merchandise than as a strange inventory of belief, conspiracy and mass-market spirituality.

Inside, that language disappears. In its place are close, degraded black-and-white images of stained, burnt, torn and heavily repaired cloth. One spread is followed simply by the title page: The Pope’s Butler by Howard Johnson / Fulton Ryder. The publication gives little instruction as to how its parts should be reconciled.

That uncertainty is central to the object. Howard Johnson is presented as author; Richard Prince sits behind the publication and Fulton Ryder, the short-lived New York bookshop and publishing project through which Prince circulated books, editions, appropriated material and objects that frequently complicated conventional attribution.

Almost nothing about it settles into a single category. A found image becomes a cover. Damage becomes subject matter. A name becomes an unstable attribution. A modest stapled booklet carries the structure of an artist’s work without needing to announce itself as an artwork. It belongs to the quieter side of Prince’s publishing practice: objects whose significance is produced through selection, reproduction, adjacency and circulation rather than spectacle.

Condition: Very good. Light handling and minor edge wear consistent with age; internally clean.

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