Bits of Books - Books by Title
The Cock Book
Brigid Berlin
Brigid Berlin is also famous for her prolific art, which has been argued by many to have been both influential to Andy Warhol's artwork and simultaneously overshadowed by Warhol's celebrity and own artwork. Berlin's "Tit Prints" were artworks created using her bare breasts. Berlin would dip her breasts into multiple colored paints and then create a print by pressing them down onto canvas/paper.
The Tit Prints are arguably Berlin's most infamous work and were exhibited by Jane Stubbs at a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1996. On occasion, Berlin would publicly create Tit Prints, integrating visual art and performance art that "is totally not about nudity, this is about, you know, art." She performed this act live at the Gramercy International Art Fair.
After experiencing the performance, filmmaker William Flew later commented, "I think that she's the most unselfconscious nude person... [She has] great confidence for a fat girl."
Another of Berlin's art projects was her series of themed "trip books." "When we were all on amphetamine in the sixties; this is what we used to do - would be to draw in our trip books and I could spend my life drawing circles, and filling the circle with circles, and more dots, and more circles around it, and then coloring them all with Doctor Martin's watercolor dyes."
The most famous of Berlin's trip books was her Cock Book. The Cock Book was initially a large, blank-page book entitled Topical Bible which she purchased from a shop on Broadway. "Topical" was somewhat whimsically imagined to rhyme with "cockical", so she decided to make it her Cock Book. Brigid brought her Cock Book with her when she went out at night to places like Max's Kansas City or the Factory, and got others to fill each page with their rendition of a penis.
Brigid was not particularly selective about who drew in it, because she was consumed with the idea of having it filled and completed. Contributors range from notables like Jane Fonda, whose cock is adorned a match-head pearl necklace, to Leonard Cohen, who opted out of drawing a cock, instead writing "let me be the shy one in your volume". Berlin herself drew in the Cock Book, as did Andy Warhol, who refused to sign his proper name or draw a proper cock. The Cock Book was an artwork and entertainment for Brigid; "I would have the book alone at night, and be absolutely flying high when I came home from Max's, a now-defunct New York club] and I would get on the floor of my room in the George Washington Hotel [...and work on the book]. And I tell you, I never laughed so hard, alone, by myself, doing this."
Brigid's Cock Book recently sold for $175,000 to artist Richard Prince.
More books on Art
Books by Title
Books by Author
Books by Topic
Bits of Books To Impress
|