For The People of Los Angeles
With the rather ill roundup of L.A. artists, gallerists, and mavens in last week's LA Weekly, it seems high time to share some "thing" that made it into our inbox a few months back, sent by the mysteriously-nomered Prins Lawrence. CLICK ON THE TOAST IMAGE to see what Lawrence is talking about in the below letter.
"For the people of Los Angeles:
The toast image comes from weeks of long discussions with other artists about our general disappointment with the 'Thing' exhibition at the Armand Hammer museum. As a kind of survey of young contemporary Los Angeles sculpture we felt the show initially failed by inaccurately representing Los Angeles sculpture and tragically disappointed us by being fucking boring. I had a more enlightening experience looking at woodcuts next door. But, what was frighteningly worse than the bad and uninformed curation was the publicity it generated. Concerning Matt Johnson's 'Toast' piece: I do feel it is important to stress that the attack is not on Matt. The attack is on those with the power to decide a representation of a piece of toast is the best example of intellectual work coming out of young art school graduates. For Christ sake they made a T-shirt out of it, and yes, I bought one and stuck my dick through the mouth of that Toast image too. I also stuck my dick through the photo on the catalog cover and the museum calender. Anyway, the photo was and is a joke, sort of, that I thought young artists like myself would appreciate as a stab in the mouth of the institution that repeatedly misinforms and misjudges what the masses want from those who bring the inspiration and culture.
—Prins Lawrence, Los Angeles, 2005