Artball PLAYING CARDS and the OLYMPICS OF ART

"His earliest works of note were two packs of cards, both entitled Artball (1971, 1972). The first was twenty baseball cards with artists’ faces pasted over baseball players’ bodies; on the back were poorly reproduced examples of their works. The second Artball, a slicker production, is a complete pack of 54 playing cards with the faces of art-world celebrities superimposed over football players in action postures and then their names and putative positions also pasted over the originals. Thus, uniform #41 getting ready to pass is “Stella—Running Back,” #74 with a football cupped in her raised hands is “Parsons—Quarterback.” Some of the juxtapositions are funnier than others, it is true; but in both Artballs the wholes represent a bigger joke than the sum of their parts. A third undated box, Holy Cards, puts artists’ faces into paintings of religious figures; on each backside is a religiously suggestive prose passage by or about the featured artist. His Olympics of Art resembles a jokebook in that superlative captions appear under people’s pictures, one to a page. Thus, “The Leading Copycat Artist of an Artist Father” appears under Jamie Wyeth. “Most Over-Celebrated Living Artist” appears under Victor Vasarely. And so forth. Part of the charm of this collection of one-liners is that gossip and art-historical scholarship are posing as each other." see footnote 1


	P L H 913.522.9408