121 Nurses
A layered work of appropriation by the New York conceptual artist Eric Doeringer (b. 1974), best known for the “bootleg” miniatures of blue-chip artworks he sold on the street outside art fairs and for his Copycat Publications, which meticulously re-create rare conceptual artists’ books.
121 Nurses compiles the pulp nurse-romance paperbacks whose lurid covers Richard Prince scanned and reworked for his celebrated Nurse Paintings (2002–2008). The book is itself an appropriation: it borrows its design from Prince’s own 136 Nurses, the catalogue raisonné of those paintings — so Doeringer appropriates the source material Prince appropriated, and the form in which Prince catalogued it, folding authorship back on itself. Offset-printed in Los Angeles, 42 pages, perfect-bound, 21.5 × 14 cm. Issued without ISBN in the tradition of the artist’s book and zine.
