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Drying blood shrinks leather.

     

Click on the picture for a larger view.

   
O.J. Simpson
Newspaper, wood and leather.
H.60, W.40, D.7 (1996).
Chantal Marnham Collection, Paris.
 

Let us briefly recount the Simpson affair:
A football superstar and a famous actor, O.J. Simpson is accused of having massacred his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman on June 12, 1994. He is a black man who despises Blacks and likes only affluent Whites. His wife was a beautiful tall blonde whom he'd batter during harrowing scenes. "HeÕs going to kill me and get off with it", Nicole told her friend Faye Resnick shortly before the double murder. The trial lasts nine months and over one hundred witnesses testify before Judge Lance A. Ito. The prosecutors Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden and William Hodgman gather overwhelming evidence. But the black lawyer Johnny L. Cochran Jr. is the cleverest. After four hours of deliberation, on October 30, 1995, O. J. Simpson is acquitted and let out of jail where he spent 474 days.
No one doubts he is guilty but he can't be given a second trial: the 5th amendment rules out prosecuting someone twice under the same charges.
If justice is flouted, civil peace is ensured.
He had to be declared innocent, otherwise the black ghettoes would have descended on the affluent White neighborhoods with the expected result. During the Dreyfus trial in France, a century ago, it was the reverse. The Jewish Captain German spy had to be guilty to ensure civil peace. The almighty Catholic France, anti-semitic and thirsting for revenge, would not have accepted to be ridiculed by the acquittal of an innocent man. War is at hand. (see sculpture 23).
The author wanted to treat here the problem of the black leather glove with which Simpson has often been photographed. A glove of the same type was found on the crime site, soaked in blood.
Judge Ito asked the accused to try it on: "ItÕs too tight, itÕs not my size." And the prosecution bended before a triumphant Cochran.
The author, very angry that the prosecutors gave up so easily, has put in the washing machine, on a warm cycle and without detergent a man's leather glove — yes, I know, to do it right he should have let it soak a whole night through in human blood — and the man's glove has become the child's glove which we see here on Simpson's fist. Leather, indeed, shrinks when it is wet, and this Mrs. Marcia Clark didn't know.


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