CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/6/2015

Vern Blosum

"Planned Anticipation" (1963) is reproduced from Vern Blosum, JRP|Ringier's concise study of the pseudonymous 1960s painter who showed hoax Pop paintings with Leo Castelli, one of which was acquired by MoMA and others of which were written about by leading critics, before it was discovered that he did not, in reality, exist. Editor Lionel Bovier writes, "Despite the short time span of his practice and whatever the level of (in)sincerity he put into these paintings, and, I would even say, whoever made these paintings, there is an artist’s work here: one that sits with Pop art in a singular way, that has less to do with the 'spectacularization' of culture than with the symbolic regimen of objects and language, and one that reflects on its own condition of production ... There is for me, beyond the anecdotal conditions of its emergence, a quite contemporary take on what it is to 'fabricate' a work, to construct an artist’s identity through painted surfaces, and to question its becoming through time. The question one should ask, rather than 'Who is Vern Blosum?' or 'Who made these pieces?' is: 'As an artist, can you avoid the construction of an oeuvre, whose meaning is by definition ephemeral, changing with context—somewhere between a planned anticipation and a planned obsolescence?'"