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PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, 5 vols, hbk, 5.25 x 8.25 in. / 1,622 pgs / 10,881 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2021 p. 87   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781938221286 SDNR30
List Price: $135.00 CAD $180.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
WORLD Except France

THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

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Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

SIGLIO

Richard Kraft: It Is What It Is

All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017–January 2021


Richard Kraft: It Is What It Is

A daily reckoning, a refusal of normalcy and a bulwark against forgetting: Richard Kraft’s epic visual and notational account of Trump’s four years in office

When Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, New York–based artist Richard Kraft felt the necessity, like many others, of keeping a close watch on his presidency. Every day, Kraft scoured the news and Trump’s Twitter feed, assigning, like a referee in a soccer match, colored cards associated with transgressing rules and codes of conduct.
Published in an edition of 650 copies, this five-volume set presents over 10,000 cards for Trump’s words and actions. In soccer, yellow signifies a warning. Red is for those offenses for which a player should be dismissed. Soon after the inauguration, Kraft began adding more colors for other infractions.
When asked about COVID-19’s death toll by journalist Jonathan Swan, Trump replied, “It is what it is.” This project takes its title from that callous dismissal. A brute confrontation with the facts of Trump's presidency, it is also a durational work of art, marrying futility with vigilance, transforming toxicity into beauty.


Featured image is reproduced from 'Richard Kraft: It Is What It Is'.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Bookforum

Fran Bigman

The stubborn systematism of Kraft’s project [is] [a] touchingly futile attempt to collate ephemeral news and prevent forgetting.

Hyperallergic

Louis Bury

Not just a feat of bearing witness but also a commentary on how concerned citizens struggled to process Trump’s calamitous, norm-violating presidency in an age of information overload.

Brooklyn Rail

Leah Ollman

The books are beautiful—vibrantly so, insistently so—and this visual splendor exerts an elevating counterforce to the despair elicited by the very same information delivered verbally. Moral depravity is made to co-exist with sensual pleasure. Through the project's own inherent contradictions, Kraft fine-tunes the incredulity that suffused the Trump years into a persuasive case for simultaneity.

Richard Kraft: It Is What It Is

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/6/2022

Transforming toxicity into beauty, Richard Kraft's penalty cards track Donald Trump's transgressions in office

Transforming toxicity into beauty, Richard Kraft's penalty cards track Donald Trump's transgressions in office

During a week remembered by most for its national and personal trauma and shame, we can think of no better book to feature than Richard Kraft's five-volume It Is What It Is: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017–January 2021, published by Siglio. Collecting almost 10,000 offenses and transgressions committed while in office via a system of soccer-style penalty cards—coded from yellow (mild) to red (severe) to egregious beyond any previous card-notational scale (magenta, purple and finally, crimson)—each volume contains textual annotations for each card and an index by penalty type (Conspiracy Theories, Environment, Golf, Race, etc.). "I signed up to be a referee for a game that everyone is watching, but for which the rules, when applied, seem to have no effect," Kraft writes. "From about any vantage point, this piece is an exercise in futility, and that futility made the effort all the more worthwhile. After all, what better way to counter a man for whom money is the only measure of worth than to make a durational art work that is broad in its reach, large in scale, and crucially, utterly useless ... nevertheless, I feel exactly the same now as I did when I began: the gravest danger with autocrats is to allow their crimes to disappear. This is a record, one among many, all of them essential as a bulwark against forgetting." continue to blog


RICHARD KRAFT MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Richard Kraft: It Is What It Is

RICHARD KRAFT: IT IS WHAT IT IS

Siglio

ISBN: 9781938221286
USD $135.00
| CAD $180

Pub Date: 12/21/2021
Active | In stock


Richard Kraft: Here Comes Kitty

RICHARD KRAFT: HERE COMES KITTY

Siglio

ISBN: 9781938221088
USD $32.00
| CAD $42.5 UK £ 28

Pub Date: 5/26/2015
Active | In stock