I really like Richard Prince’s Hoods; they felt like thoughtful work of their time–I’m thinking of the Loaded Neo-Minimalism of the early 90s, though they bracket that–and they were an unabashedly beautiful standout series at the Guggenheim in 2007. If they’re not under-known, I think they are, Randy Kennedy’s valiant efforts notwithstanding, under-appreciated. [Prince’s comment via Kennedy about not seeing a distinction “between his making and collecting practices” was a huge kick in the pants for me in 2007, btw. More on that another time.] A friend’s sweet Prince Hood at “Spiritual America,” 2007, image: artobserved Maybe it’s kind of hard to discuss them when the artist pretty much wrapped them up so sweetly himself:
It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life. I mean I didn’t have to make this shit up. It was there. Teenagers knew it. It got ‘teen-aged.’ Primed. Flaked. Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened.
That’s typically cited as coming from 2003, from an interview with Jeffrey Rian published in Phaidon’s Richard Prince monograph, but the Q&A was actually first published in March 1987 in Art in America. [2024 update: Rian emailed to correct this; the Phaidon interview was new and separate from his AiA piece.]
I totally get the car culture finish fetish approach, but I wonder why I like the messier, Bondo-ier ones a little better? Some kind of vestigial taste for the painterly? An unacknowledged prejudice against outsourced fabrication? A closer link to the aesthetic brilliance of the hoods’ found, unfinished driveway project origins? Untitled (SB Hood #1), 1989, “acrylic, cast fibreglass and wood,” sold for £313,250 last week at Christie’s. I was pondering on this very question when I saw this hood coming up at Christie’s, where it sold last week. [For my money, I’ve always liked the painting-style, wall-mounted hoods best–the hung-whole ones, not the ones embedded in canvases, which seem superfluous and accede too much for me–but the floor models are Juddful and irreverent, no doubt. Oh, except this one at Larry’s, which, um, Matthew Barney. But the installation does make one think maybe the hoods are only under-appreciated in public discourse. Maybe in their proper context, surrounded by enough architecture and acreage, they’re beloved.] Anyway, as I’m reading the critical texts at hand–the auction catalogue’s lot notes–I see this:
Inspired by a trip to Los Angeles in 1987, Prince takes the molds of cars he has always admired–Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers, all masculine uber American models– and paints them, celebrating the simultaneous engineering of the American machine and his own sculptural prowess.
And I’m like, wait what? Did Prince take fiberglass molds of car hoods to celebrate his sculptural prowess? I thought the whole point was not having any sculptural prowess, so he ordered them from the back of Hot Rod magazines. Time for a cross-check. Professor Phillips de Pury, you sold Pro Street (1992-2002), the most expensive Car Hood to date, for $744,000 in 2006; what do you have to say on the matter?
Pro Street is unique amongst Richard Prince’s car hood series; it spans the entire ten years […I- -ed.] he was in production with the other examples from the series. Inspired by a trip to Los Angeles in 1987, Prince takes the molds of cars he has always admired–Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers, all masculine uber American models–and paints them, celebrating the simultaneous engineering of the American machine and his own sculptural prowess.
Yes, well then. That seems appropriate. Now if we could just clear up a question about the materials. It says Untitled (SB Hood #1) is “acrylic, cast fibreglass and wood.” But when it sold in 1995 it was listed as “Wood & oil, body compound, cast fiberglass.” So I’m just, I know it seems nitpicky, but–you know what, never mind how it’s made or from what, I guess the important thing is it made the reserve.
So, Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince. They’ve both had their way with photography, and painting, and even squeegeeing, but do we ever consider them together? I mean, I’ve tweaked on each of them for several years now, and even I have to admit, I haven’t thought of their work in relation to each other, until this instant:
Gerhard Richter’s 1996 photo edition, Small Bather, is based on an identically titled painting from a couple of years earlier.
And yes it’s the blur, but it’s also maybe the towel on Mrs. Richter’s head, but when I saw it in the Christie’s catalogue for next month’s London sale, the first thing I thought was “Whoa, Nurse Painting.”
Richard Prince, Piney Woods Nurse, 2002, image: oh, it’s around
Seriously, how awesome would that be? I mean, the Chapmans worked over those Goya prints; and Kippenberger turned that Richter into a coffee table. I mean, sure you could paint over an inkjet of the thing, and flag your est. £40,000 – £60,000 for other things. But why?
On his site, Richter shows Small Bather, above, as it was published: “Cibachrome photograph, fixed on stiff, white cardboard, framed, behind glass.”
This example at Christie’s, though, is only shown cropped to the c-print, and is only listed as on the “artist’s mount,” which, that’s where it’s signed and numbered, so. So? So if some chucklehead compromised this particular piece by taking it out of the artist’s frame, why not use it as an ingredient in a new work? There are presumably still at least 53 others out there to carry on. Contemporary Day Sale, Feb. 14, 2013 Lot 183: Gerhard Richter, Kl Badende, Small Bather, est. £40,000 – £60,000 [christies.com] Kl. Badende | Small Bather, 1996 [gerhard-richter.com]
Painting from life: Life Magazine, image: gagosian
In trying to figure out the why, no seriously, WHY? of Bob Dylan’s second [!] painting exhibition at Gagosian [!?], Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller was left with the same Only Possible Explanation that’s been dogging me since the musician’s first baffling Gagosian gig in October 2011:
All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using “Bob Dylan” as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.
Exactly! It makes perfect sense. Explains everything. Clear as day. All evidence points to it. Every piece of evidence there is. I will go so far as to say that wars have been started with less evidence than this. If Richard Prince were Iraq, we’d have invaded him and pulled him out of his Dylanholes by now, is what I’m saying.
Let’s look at the facts. Or rather, let’s look at the facts while entertaining the possibility that Prince is performing as Dylan the visual artist.
The 2011 show, The Asia Series, were originally presented as–and understood as–a tour documentary. We’re on the bus, walking the street, just hanging, seeing the world as Dylan sees it:
He often draws and paints while on tour, and his motifs bear corresponding impressions of the many different environments and people that he encounters. A keen observer, Dylan works from real life to depict everyday phenomena in such a way that they appear fresh, new, and mysterious.
And if this fantasy come true weren’t enough, Dylan’s real life turns out to be as exotic and mysterious as we’d always imagined The Orient to be:
The Asia Series, a visual journal of his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea, comprises firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape, which can be clearly identified by title and specific cultural details, such as Mae Ling, Cockfight, The Bridge, and Hunan Province. Conversely, there are more cryptic paintings often of personalities and situations, such Big Brother and Opium, or LeBelle Cascade, which looks like a riff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe but which is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo-opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade.
That was the setup, the view that held for the first few days before Dylan’s paintings were revealed to be copies, tracings of old photographs. Whether the source was as famous as Henri Cartier-Bresson, as prominent as a new Magnum photo [licensed, apparently, after the fact], or as anonymous and obscure as a collection of 19th century, hand-tinted lantern slides scanned and uploaded to flickr, they had two things in common: 1) they were entirely unacknowledged, and 2) they were thoroughly and inevitably trackable.
In fact, Dylanologists were already on the case; they’d puzzled over the sudden change in Dylan’s painting style as evidenced by the images Gagosian was teasing the show with: a 1966 LIFE magazine cover slightly altered with “pulp references,” and a scene in an opium den which was quickly traced to a 1915 Leon Busy photo by the curator of the Opium Museum.
screenshot from amy crehore’s blog, via expectingrain
And then the plagiarizingshit hit the fan. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but the media freakout over Dylan’s Asia Series paintings was so out of proportion to their obvious reality, it seemed staged.
both above from Okinawa Soba’s flickr stream
Instead, it’s the kind of thief/appropriation/credit criticism that has followed Dylan throughout his entire career. Which should give him and Prince something to talk about.
“Welcome to Bob Dylan’s world, Soba-san!” [image: expectingrain.com]
After the photo-based painting controversy broke, Gagosian tweaked the press release: “Dylan works from real life” became “Dylan is inspired by everyday phenomena,” and “a visual journal of his travels” became “a visual reflection,” which is no longer considered “firsthand.” But then, in these mediated days, what is? La Belle Cascade, dylan, gagosian via nybooks
I think the key to Dylan’s show is to be found here, in the reality gap between how something is “billed” or presented, and how it is received. Because as Dylan turns out to have told MoMA Chief Curator-turned-Gagosian adviser John Elderfield in the show’s catalogue interview, photographs are part of real life:
A number of the paintings–such as Emperor, La Belle Cascade, Cock Fight, and Shanghai–show very complex scenes. Were these done from sketches, or do you paint from photographs–or from drawings made from photographs–some of the time?
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind-the-curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
But besides the knack for appropriation-fueled outrage, what does any of this have to do with Richard Prince?
It’s true that the outsized criticism of Dylan’s photo-based painting struck me as ridiculous at the time, Fall 2011, when the Cariou v. Prince verdict and appeal were getting increased attention, and when the Corinna Belz’ documentary Gerhard Richter Painting and Richter’s retrospective were both receiving rapturous acclaim. Oh, and when John “yes, that John, right in the middle of it all,” Elderfield was taking his victory lap at MoMA with the last and greatest painting show of his career, the Willem de Kooning retrospective.
And I knew that Prince was involved–maybe implicated was the better word–because I saw he’d written a piece in the Asia Series catalogue, in which he mentioned D.H. Lawrence’s paintings, and compared Dylan’s La Belle Cascade to–holy crap–Cezanne’s Bathers:
The paintings that Dylan showed me out in L.A. were paintings from his travels in Asia. Some of them looked too big for him to have painted them while he was there, so maybe he had done them from memory or a photograph or a sketch or a drawing. I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask a lot of things. I didn’t need to. I just enjoyed the experience. I liked a painting called La Belle Cascade because it looked to me like one of Cézanne’s Bathers. And Cézanne’s Bathers are some of my favorite works of art
And when that essay was republished on the NY Review of Books after the controversy broke, I started wondering about the possible differences between “Dylan’s paintings” and “The paintings Dylan showed me,” and this equivocation about Dylan’s studio suddenly seemed a lot less benign than it had previously:
Dylan’s studio. I think it was Dylan’s studio. I’m still not sure. It didn’t look like any artist’s studio I’d ever been in.
Someone was working to not be pinned down. Prince knew what was up, and so, for that matter, did Elderfield. And so did anyone who looked at a 4-ft, vintage photo-based painting and wondered how the hell anyone, much less Bob Dylan, ever painted it on a Thai tour bus.
But it wasn’t until a few months later, when I was deep in my own Destroyed Richter Paintings project, and I unrolled the first shipment of canvases from Chinese Paint Mill, that I recognized the painting style–as Bob Dylan’s. The same flatness, the same traced-over-projection line, the same filled-in spaces. Whether he’d ordered them from Chinese Paint Mill or from somewhere/one else, it now seemed obvious that Dylan did not paint his paintings.
Not that outsourcing his fabrication would grant Dylan anything greater than general admission at the contemporary art ball. Fling an iPhone in Chelsea, and you’re bound to hit an outsourcer, a fabricator, or both. These paintings aren’t any less “Dylan’s” or “Dylans” for having been painted by someone else. And are they any more Prince’s or Princes for him having made them? Or having them made? Are those Koonses actually Sarah Morrises? Are those Morrises actually by [names of her painters who call to chat and dish redacted]? That Richter painting Kippenberger table: was or is? Construction with J.J. Flag or Short Circuit?
As long as Dylan signs his paintings–whoops, he doesn’t–well, as long as they’re presented as his, under his name.
And he’s obviously on board with the project. If not, who would have engineered it? At Gagosian? Would Prince have claimed to have visited Dylan’s studio [sic] if it hadn’t happened? Well, yes. But would Elderfield have claimed to have interviewed him? And written two essays for two shows? For a Henry Codax-style, ghost Dylan?
This past Summer, while working on a live restaging of Prince’s Canal Zone lawsuit, I started to sense that outsourcing, or hands-off production, was as important to his own practice as appropriation itself. The hand-off of his Cowboys film to commercial processors was an early example. It stuck when he testified about not meeting a now-grown Brooke Shields in 2005 when Sante D’Orazio shot her for a recreation of Spiritual America [above]:
Q. You just weren’t there?
A. I just–well, I wasn’t there by purpose.
Q. Okay. What was the purpose?
A. To transform the image.
Q. The photo–
A. Yes.
Q.–that Mr. D’Orazio took?
A. Yes. [M]y not being there is a transformative–the absence of the author is I believe a way to transform an image.
[Prince noted that his “contribution” also included selection, or “editing” D’Orazio’s 300 shots down to the one that would get printed. And then he showed it, as an unpublicized surprise, to guests at a private dinner held in the Rivington St. storefront where the original Spiritual America was first shown.] Untitled (Original), 2010, image: fultonryder
In his Fall 2009 deposition Prince also testified of tracking down the original illustrations used for pulp fiction book covers, such as those used in his Nurse paintings. He’d begun pairing these drawings & paintings with the books themselves. Untitled (Original), as the series is called, are featured at Fulton Ryder, Prince’s bookstore. Where, upon close inspection, it is immediately obvious that “the originals” in Untitled (Original)s are actually copies of the covers, which he has created. Or has had created. Commissioned.
And the Charlie Company paintings [above] he showed in St. Barth at the Eden Roc hotel in 2008? Same thing. They look like reworked details and collages of various he-man adventure pulp covers? But they’re not paint on inkjet, but acrylic on canvas. Different process. Entirely fabricated, Princes painted to order.
Which all brings us to this year’s Dylan show at Gagosian, improbable under the most craven, degraded, celebrity-worshipping cultural best circumstances, Revisionist Art. I confess, I haven’t seen the paintings in person, but from the artists I know who have seen them, I’m better off for it. [I will get to the show, though, before it closes.] Playboy Magazine, Sharon Stone, 2011-12, image: gagosian
As image/objects, these large, supposedly “silkscreen on canvas” paintings are apparently jaw-droppingly awful. One person called them “wretched,” and couldn’t begin to see how they were silkscreened at all. The only explanation he could come up with was “silkscreen” as a technically accurate description of the 4-color Photoshop separation & printing process. They’re cheap and dead. As objects. And they’re puerile and unfunny and lame as content. Which makes them all the more befuddling and exasperating in their hallowed–or at least blue-chip–context.
Prince had written of the Asia paintings, “I think [they] are good paintings. They’re workmanlike and they do their job.” For the new show, this assessment serves as a lowered bar not to cleared, but to be mamboed under.
And all of which makes me even more certain of Prince’s involvement in Dylan’s painting project, and which makes me suspect that this reaction, the very experience of the paintings and the show, is the artist[s’] central focus.
In such a view, address labels for “Richard Staehung” and “Ricardo Wellhung” are not just sophomoric jokes, they’re signatures. By the guy who makes joke paintings. And autographs.
Bob Dylan with guitar and harmonica, signed photo, dated 1/22/03, POR, via fultonryder
And then you start seeing Prince connections everywhere. The model, for instance, on the mockup cover of Playboy looks like she was photographed en route to an OCTPFAS read-in at “Mr. P’s” shop.
Over the summer, Fulton Ryder’s blog featured this Birdtalk, Prince’s term for the short appropriated texts and aphorisms he’s published throughout his career:
Daniel Boorstin says in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America: that American life is becoming increasingly organized at every level, and that spontaneous events are being replaced by “pseudo-events”. We find ourselves in a situation where we accept reality as it is reported rather than as it really is: “We become so accustomed to our illusions, our images, that we mistake them for reality.” – Birdtalk
And this Fulton Ryder grouping was posted in September and again in November, just before Dylan’s opening. The titles displayed could be a poetic artist statement for the show:
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
Wallace Berman Verifax C[ollages]*
De Kooning Recent Paintings
D.H. Lawrence’s Paintings
Fuck You
A magazine of the arts
Easy Guitar & Harmonica Edition * few days later update: I realize I’d skipped the Berman reference, which is nuts, because Berman’s Verifax collages are ground zero here. Here’s another one, connecting Lawrence, The Band, and the NY punk era that is Prince’s psychic hometown. To quotethe man himself,
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
To be honest, I looked at John Dogg and Howard Johnson, and, I thought Bob Dylan was just Prince’s giant middle finger to the screwed up art system that doesn’t give enough of a damn to look at what it’s buying and selling and fawning over. Not just the death of the author, but his murder, and the propping up of the author’s corpse, Weekend At Bernie’s-style, in order to keep cashing his checks.
A magazine of the arts: Revisionist Art images ganked from some Danish Dylan messageboard
But then as I was walking it back, trying to see, if not why, then where and when a Prince-for-Dylan relationship might have begun, I hit 2007, the year of Dylan’s first art exhibitions [of overpainted printouts of scans of pages from Drawn Blank, a 1994 book of tour sketches, which, mhmm]. And also the year of Todd Haynes’ remarkable movie I’m Not There, where six different actors portray six different Dylans and various times of his life.
Haynes spent seven years on the project, and a surprising amount of it feels captured in Robert Sullivan’s 2007 tagalong for the New York Times, which is one of the most sensitive and insightful making of stories I’ve ever read.
And I’ll steal Sullivan’s amazing hook here because it’ll only make you want to read the whole thing. It’s about being on the set for the identical mug shots of the Dylans which open the film [they’re in the trailer, too, above]:
Then Haynes took [Ben] Whishaw’s seat on the empty set and, in the video monitor, happened to perfectly align his head with those of all of his Dylans. When I stepped from the wings to look through the camera itself, I saw, in one semimystical, semirevealing moment, the artist as one with the artist he was trying to artificially reassemble.
Because Todd Haynes’ Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan.
I think that’s what Prince is trying to do here. To be Dylan, to make a show and art that is what Dylan is all about. To make something real, whatever it takes, in the middle of a screwed up world. To confound and infuriate as you create, and to transform yourself in the process. And suddenly the answer to “Why??” becomes so crystal clear, I’m embarrassed to have even asked: “Because he could, and given the chance, you would, too.”
After I started taking this speculation seriously, and researching and relooking–I guess I could have started with this, but then where’s the fun?–I’ve been sort of, I don’t know, reached out to. [Not by the artist(s), who, how would you be able to believe either one in a situation like this? They’d just add one more refraction of ambiguity.] And holy smokes, people. About this one thing, at least, Prince’s centrality to Dylan’s paintings and shows, I don’t wonder anymore. How Many Paintings Can One Man Make Before He Decides to Stick to Music? Bob Dylan Gets a Second Show at Gagosian [galleristny] John Elderfield Interview with Bob Dylan, Spring 2011 [bobdylan] The Asia Series discussion on Dylan fan site Expecting Rain [36 pgs] [expectingrain] Deciphering the Asia Series: Dylan, Duchamp and the letter from Woody [swarmuth]
Barnett Newman, 18 Cantos, image via portlandart.net
Barnett Newman, from the statement included in 18 Cantos, a set of lithographs produced in 1963-4 with ULAE:
I must explain that I had no plan to make a portfolio of “prints.” I am not a printmaker. Nor did I intend to make a “set” by introducing superficial variety. These cantos arose from a compelling necessity–the result of grappling with the instrument.
To me that is what lithography is. It is an instrument. It is not a “medium”; it is not a poor man’s substitute for painting or for drawing. Nor do I consider it to be a kind of translation of something from one medium to another. For me, it is an instrument that one plays. It is like a piano or an orchestra; and as with an instrument, it interprets. And as in all the interpretive arts, so in lithography, creation is joined with the “playing”–in this case not of bow and string but of stone and press. The definition of lithograph is that it is writing on stone. But unlike Gertrude Stein’s rose, the stone is not a stone. The stone is a piece of paper.
I have been captivated by the things that happen in playing this litho instrument, the choices that develop when changing a color of the paper size. I have “played” hoping to evoke every possible instrumental lick. The prints really started as three, grew to seven, then eleven, then fourteen, and finished as eighteen. Here are the cantos, eighteen of them, each one different in form, mood, color, beat, scale, and key. There are no cadenzas. Each is separate. Each can stand by itself. But its fullest meaning, ti seems to me, is when it is seen together with the others.
I joked about 18 Cantos this morning; it’s one of my absolute favorite print works ever. [And no, I don’t have a copy, so no, I will not be breaking it up and giving it away to random Twitter followers.]
But it just occurred to me that Newman’s perception of the lithograph stone as an instrument to be played, not a medium to be translated, is very similar to Richard Prince’s early approach to photography.
Here’s just one example from Prince’s Canal Zone deposition, when questioned about a 2003 Artforum Q&A where he said he “played the camera”:
I was extremely–to tell you the truth, I was extremely conservative, on the other hand, in terms of my artistic attitude.
And I knew that in order to maybe discover something new I had to change a bit and take on another persona. And I felt that by playing, quote, as I said in the interview, the camera, just like a punk rock guitarist who picks up a guitar, seven days later he’s playing on stage. He doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but it’s his inability which shines through, which is really exciting. And the fact that he’s not a virtuoso–it’s the very limitations I think that make–can actually make great art.
I am stoked and a bit daunted to be participating in a session on appropriation at this year’s Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference. It will be this coming Friday at PS1, as part of the NY Art Book Fair, and will take place in the Performance Dome:
2:00-3:30 pm
Appropriation and Intellectual Property
Debates on the the legal complexity of appropriated imagery have resurfaced in light of a recent lawsuit between artist Richard Prince and photographer Patrick Cariou. Artists Greg Allen and Eric Doeringer and lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento will discuss notions of “fair use” and “transformation” with our digital culture, as well as the question of how copyright law should adapt to rapidly evolving artistic practices and whether copyright law might constitute a medium in and of itself. Organized and moderated by Stephen Bury.
I hope you can come to the Fair, of course, because it is amazing. And while you’re there, I hope you’ll come by the session. It’s a big dome, and it’ll feel even bigger if it’s empty. CABC Conference Sessions [nyartbookfair]
image: from DJ Francois and Juan Atkins’ performance during the MoMA PS1 Kraftwerk Festival, via timeout
Well that cat’s out of the bag. Joy Garnett posted audio from the Richard Prince Canal Zone discussion she, Chris Habib and I had Saturday night at Printed Matter. It’s available for streaming or download at the Internet Archive. OR for remixing, autotuning, and stop-action animating, whatever you want, since artpanelsjustwanttobefree it’s public domain.
It clocks in at almost an hour and a half, and who knows what you’ll find in there. I was too high on life and drunk on power–I was running the projector, too– to really remember what was said. Though I do remember something about megayachts, Perry Mason vs Law & Order; and wishing you were Rasta and/or punk. So really, something for everyone.
Many thanks to Chris and Joy, to Keith and Max and the PM Crew, and especially to the awesome and engaged audience. We’ll do it again for either the damages hearing or the Supreme Court phase. Cariou v. Prince Meets Iron Chef, Discussion & Crit at Printed Matter, NYC [archive.org] Joy Garnett’s flickr photoset clearly reveals I have no veto power over her photos of me [flickr]
I’m really stoked to be participating in two events in New York in the next few days. Please come if you’re in town, and pass the word.
crappy photocopy court exhibit of Specially Round Midnight and the Patrick Cariou photos that went into it
The first is at Printed Matter this coming Saturday evening, Sept. 22, from 6-7:30PM. It should be a hoot:
The ongoing Cariou v. Prince trial have presented a high-stakes platform for debating copyright, appropriation, fair-use and artists’ rights. One thing that’s been oddly missing from the discussion, though, is the art itself.
Printed Matter will host a raucous crit of Richard Prince’s little-seen but much-contested Canal Zone paintings, culminating in an open-forum, Iron Chef-style evaluation of each artwork in terms of content, aesthetics, and infringiness. The Ocean Club, 2007
Using bootleg copies of Prince’s banned exhibition catalogue and excerpts from the artist’s own sworn deposition testimony which were never entered into evidence in court, panelists Joy Garnett, Greg Allen, and Chris Habib will take a closer, critical look at Prince’s paintings and practice in an art historical context.
Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, NY. She is also the founder of the blog NEWsgrist (where spin is art).
Greg Allen has been writing about the creative process at greg.org: the making of, since 2001. He published Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al. in 2011.
Chris Habib is an artist and the curator of HELP/LESS, which runs through Sept. 29th at Printed Matter.
And then next Friday, Sept 28 at 2-3:30, I’ll be speaking at the Contemporary Artist Book Conference as part of the NY Art Book Fair at PS1. The session, led by Stephen Bury, will be on the limits, excesses, and future of appropriation and copyright law. Artist Eric Doeringer and artist/lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento will also speak. It should be awesome. If you’re at the Fair, definitely come join us in the Dome.
July 28th, 5-8PM, Eric Doeringer, Cowboy Photography Workshop
Artist Eric Doeringer will bring vintage Marlboro advertisements from his collection and will assist participants in re-photographing them in the manner of Richard Prince. Visitors will leave with a high resolution digital file and information on how to have it printed at a large size. Participants are welcome to drop in anytime during the workshop. There will be a small materials fee.
So tomorrow evening, Friday, I’ll be speaking at Printed Matter. If anyone reading this is in town and interested, I hope you’ll stop by. Bring a fan, though; it gets hot in there.
Eric Doeringer and I will be discussing appropriation and artist books, though he’s already won the night, merch-wise, thanks to his two new titles he’s launching. Fellow Prince appropriator Hermann Zschiegner will be moderating.
The whole evening, which starts at 6:30, is part of HELP/LESS, Chris Habib’s frankly awesome-looking show of authorship, originality, reproduction, and appropriation, which is taking over the whole store this summer. If you can’t make the talk, you should still swing by to see the show. Eric Doeringer + Greg Allen/ Book Launch + Discussion [printed matter’s facebook invite for the event] HELP/LESS, curated by Chris Habib [printedmatter.org]
Previously, related: Untitled (300×404), a print after Richard Prince Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: The Book
One of the first and only reports I could find that discussed San Francisco photographer Morton Beebe’s pioneering 1979 copyright infringement lawsuit against Robert Rauschenberg is Gay Morris’s Jan. 1981 article on photo appropriation in ArtNEWS. The title pretty much says it all: “When Artists Use Photographs: Is it fair use, legitimate transformation, or rip-off?” [excerpt here.]
Beebe and Rauschenberg settled before the case really got rolling–for $3,000; a copy of Pull, the Hoarfrost Edition that included a two-layer, screenprinted version of Beebe’s “Diver” image; and a promise of a good faith effort on the part of Gemini and Rauschenberg to include a photo credit for Beebe whenever Pull was exhibited or published. [The extent of Gemini’s subsequent ability and/or effort to secure such credit from institutions can be seen in the print studio’s own catalogue raisonne at the National Gallery of Art. Where there’s no mention of Beebe.]
When I first called him a few weeks ago, Beebe told me what he told Morris, even though the settlement was paltry, and his lawyer got basically all of it [including, if I understand correctly, Beebe’s initial copy of Pull]: I consider it a victory for myself and for photographers.” [update: nope, according to his website Beebe kept his copy of Pull and only sold it in 2004, along with his correspondence, and a print of his original photo.]
Rauschenberg’s and Gemini’s lawyer, Irwin Spiegel, meanwhile, continued to assert the right of artists “working in the medium of collage…to make fair use of prior printed and published materials in the creation” of their original artwork.
Though he opens with Beebe v Rauschenberg, which may be the first actual lawsuit filed against an artist for using a photograph, Morris’s ArtNEWS article covers a lot of photographic territory. It conflates the use of photographs by artists to make paintings or prints–like Warhol’s use of Patricia Caulfield’s flowers photo, taken from a magazine, or Larry Rivers’ drawing based on Arnold Newman’s portrait of Picasso–with companies using photos in fabric patterns and in publications without permission or payment. Which seem like completely different scenarios, though it’s not like the copyright world reflects that, even 30 years later. It’s still “a legal issue,” as Caulfield said in 1981, “because there’s a moral one.”
photo of hibiscus flowers by Modern Photography executive editor Patricia Caulfield, published in that magazine in 1964 where it was found and used by Andy Warhol
What bugged Caulfield, she said, was the way using an image without recognition or permission “denigrate[s] the original talent.” [Definitely read Martha Buskirk’s account of Caufield’s sexist denigration at the hands of Team Warhol in her great 2003 book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art.] For Newman, it’s the way these artists “think it’s just a photograph” without considering that there is a person behind the photograph, as Morris writes, “just as there is a person behind a painting.” Beebe’s complaint, too, was primarily one of “recognition.”
And undeserved anonymity never hurt so bad as when you have to find out about it in Robert Hughes’ Time cover story that the World’s Most Famous Artist’s latest , greatest masterpiece was basically your uncredited photo:
But the delicacy of his touch produced its masterpiece in the Hoarfrost series he did with Gemini in 1974. The Hoarfrosts are sheets of silk, chiffon, taffeta, one hung over another. Each sheet is imprinted with images from Rauschenberg’s bank. In Pull, 1974, the dominant one is of a diver vanishing into a pool, seen from above, swallowed in blue immensity like a man on a space walk. No reproduction can attest to the subtlety of its play between the documentary “reality” of collage and the vague beauties of atmosphere.
And that comes just a few paragraphs after Hughes praised Bob’s amazing aversion to fame and his generous love of collaboration, even at his own expense. [“Dozens of people ripped Bob off for money and time,” a friend from the ’60s recalls, “and he knew it, but he never said a word against them.”]
I mention all of this, partly because it still sounds so familiar: the indignation of wronged photographers. The artists defending their innocent intent, freedom of expression and transformative practices. The vast disparities in celebrity, critical response, and economic value between the sourcer and the sourced. The near-universal frustration with the expense and hassle of the court system, which almost always culminates in a privately negotiated, not litigated, settlement.
Beebe told Morris that he settled rather than “risk losing the case on ‘a technicality.'” He told me that Rauschenberg, whose LA-based lawyer had argued to have the case dismissed or moved out of [Beebe’s hometown] San Francisco because of the onerous burden of traveling there, caved rather than go through a deposition. [Which, given Richard Prince’s fraught experience being deposed, is understandable.] Though Beebe also touted the judge’s sympathetic-bordering-on-slamdunk statements to me, I think he recognized that the settlement was the best deal he was gonna get.
I’ve obtained and reviewed the court documents in Beebe v. Rauschenberg. In the case’s one court hearing, held on June 13, 1980, Judge Robert H. Schnacke scoffed at Spiegel’s assertion that just being “an artist of international repute” didn’t mean that Rauschenberg fell under the Bay Area court’s jurisdiction, and anyway, Los Angeles was far easier for his client to reach. And he repeatedly voiced skepticism toward what he called, “copying”:
THE COURT: I’m a little concerned that an artist of international repute finds it necessary to copy photographs into his finished product. I appreciate that I’m not current on all present modes of art, but I thought there was a distinction between copying and artistry.
MR. SPIEGEL: Well, certainly, but that gets into the merits of the case and when we get to the merits–
THE COURT: Apparently the international repute of the artist in some way was relevant to our argument. I was just wondering if [his] international reputation was built upon the fact that he copied other people’s work.
Nevertheless, Judge Schnacke ruled that Beebe would need to front Rauschenberg’s travel expenses to San Francisco for a deposition. Which might have had some impact on Beebe’s priorities as well.
I think I’ll do at least one more post that looks at the way the conflict unfolded–the timeline feels nontrivial to understanding the case itself–and to looking into the “technicalities” of Beebe’s image, where it ran, and how Rauschenberg & Gemini used it. And I’ll probably scan and post at least some of the key court documents, especially Beebe’s complaint and Gemini’s rather extensive information requests and affirmative response.
Meanwhile, to start, I’ve transcribed the first letters of exchange between Beebe and Rauschenberg, which were precipitated, Beebe said, by Christo & Jeanne-Claude recognizing Beebe’s “Diver” from Time Magazine. It all sounded so amenable and promising.
I’ve been annoyed for six weeks now by Laura Gilbert’s op-ed in The Art Newspaper which argues, rather speciously, that “‘appropriation'” [her scare quotes] is somehow a less “savvy” artistic practice than licensing images or seeking permission. She frames this as somehow “rarely reported,” as if there’s a taboo in the art world about acknowledging that some highly successful artists who have been accused of copyright infringement find the process annoying and expensive, and thus seek to avoid it going forward. This is certainly true, but such burdens could just as easily be used to argue, as some TAN commenters have, that the copyright litigation system is unwieldy and favors the big and powerful. [The examples of happy happy licensing Gilbert cites–Koons & Marvel; Warhol & Disney–support this.]
But whatever, I decided way back when the Cariou v. Prince complaint surfaced that I wasn’t going to go tit for tat on every column or blog post concern trolling about copyright infringement.
Rauschenberg’s Pull (Hoarfrost Series), 1974, 8×4 feet, offset and silkscreen
on fabric, silk, and cheesecloth collage and paper bags, ed. 29 plus a bunch of proofs, image: nga.gov.au
What I will do, though, is confess that for all the soaking I’ve been doing in appropriation, I had never heard of the case Gilbert discussed at the greatest length: when Robert Rauschenberg was sued for using an image from a magazine ad in one of his collages by the photographer who took it, Morton Beebe.
San Francisco photographer Morton Beebe only discovered that Robert Rauschenberg had used two of his photographs in the 1974 print Pull when his friends, artists Christo and Jean-Claude, were looking at his portfolio. Christo pointed to the photograph Mexico Diver and said: “My God, is that yours or Rauschenberg’s? Have you seen Time magazine this week?”
Beebe got hold of the magazine and saw in a feature about Rauschenberg that he had not only used Mexico Diver but also his photograph of a native New Guinean repeated across the top of the print. Both pictures were part of a series Beebe had shot for an advertisement for Nikon cameras that had appeared in 17 magazines.
Beebe sued. Rauschenberg’s printer testified that the artist had showed him the Nikon ad and said: “I’ll just lift it.”
Rauschenberg settled, paid the photographer’s legal fees and gave him a numbered print of Pull. He promised that whenever the image appeared in print Beebe would be acknowledged. Later, when Beebe discovered another unauthorised use of Mexico Diver, Rauschenberg gave him another print of Pull, which Beebe sold for $13,000.
Beebe points out that potentially high legal fees makes photographers reluctant to sue (in the US litigants typically bear their own costs). After the suit settled, in 1980, Rauschenberg shifted to using his own photographs exclusively for the next 28 years if his life, according to the Guggenheim Museum and others.
I am quoting Gilbert’s entire account of the case here because it sounds quite compelling and authoritative. But it is also biased–it’s based entirely on Beebe’s version of the claim and the settlement. And after investigating the original court documents, it’s clear that Beebe’s take leaves out key details and facts that could significantly affect how the case is perceived, and what it means.
There’s no doubt that Rauschenberg used Beebe’s image without permission, nor is there any uncertainty that Beebe felt wronged by the far more famous artist’s action. It’s also the case that Rauschenberg insisted, even after settling with Beebe, that his collage process was fair use, and that it resulted in entirely new work. If for no other reason, Beebe v. Rauschenberg should be better known because it embodies these emotional, economic, and power complexities so concisely.
Ultimately, though, I think the case does not support the anti-appropriation position that Beebe and Gilbert are promoting. [As recently as 2010, Beebe used his Rauschenberg complaint to lobby the White House (pdf) to strengthen IP laws “to better protect the creative community from piracy even from our fellow artists.”] I’ll get to that in the next post[s].
The other thing that’s amazing and feels important about Beebe v. Rauschenberg is the similarity–which Gilbert surely caught onto as well–between Rauschenberg’s appropriations and Prince’s. I mean, seriously, people, Rauschenberg had made Pull from a Nikon ad in 1974, three years before Richard Prince rephotographed his first magazine ad at all–and six years before he rephotographed his first Marlboro cowboys. And while Prince was working in the bowels of Time Magazine making tear sheets, Rauschenberg was designing his own Time cover–and putting a little registered copyright symbol in the corner. No Longer Appropriate? by Laura Gilbert [theartnewspaper]
One of the few articles to discuss Beebe v. Rauschenberg, Gay Morris’s 1981 Artnet article, “When Artists Use Photographs: Is it fair use, legitimate transformation, or rip off?”, is excerpted in the 2007 textbook, Law, Ethics, & The Visual Arts
Maybe I was blinded by the, uh, headlights, but I somehow have not added Richard Prince to the greg.org survey of artists working in the medium of vinyl wrapped car.Dear Mary, 2008, a 1987 Buick Grand National coupe covered in Prince’s biker chick pin-up Girlfriends was shown at Gagosian during Canal Zone. Dear Mary, 2008 [richardprince.com]
303 Gallery is pleased to announce our first exhibition of new works by Richard Prince since 1991.
Some people see leaves falling from a tree and see it as, leaves falling from a tree. Others see it as an inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane closed-off simulation of a world sign.
The world is intolerably dreary. You escape it by seeing and naming what had heretofore been unspeakable.
Naming the unnamable and hearing it named.
These paintings should be shown to the man from Mars.
And it goes on with a refreshing WTF-ness that clearly had to be the artist’s work, not the gallery’s. [That it reminded me of some crypto-poetic, surreal, and increasingly cultish press releases from the early days of the shuttered Daniel Silverstein Gallery only reinforces my impression that Lisa & Mari or whoever did not come up with this stuff.]
What still left me scratching my head, though, was a passage from Richard Prince’s deposition where he totally hates on press releases, even when they’re written well. Patrick Cariou’s lawyer Dan Brooks asked Prince whether he agreed with the press release Gagosian director Louise Neri wrote for Canal Zone [pp293-8 or so]:
DB: But do you find this to be an apt description of your paintings in the Canal Zone exhibition?
MS BART [Gagosian’s attorney]: Objection to form.
RP: It’s not necessarily the way I would have described it had they asked me to write the press release. But I don’t write press releases and I don’t read them.
DB: And this is the first time–
RP: I find them — sorry.
MS. BART: No, you were talking. He interrupted you.
DB: Go ahead.
RP: I find press releases incredibly silly and boring, and I just don’t — I’ve never wanted anything–because they’re really just trying to hype the work. And I don’t particularly like to get involved in that.
DB: And, again, this is the first time you’re seeing this press release?
RP: This is the first time I’m seeing this.
And so I was kind of amazed that Prince would actually write something for a press release. And so I, like a lot of folks, read it and wondered what it all means.
And it means that I, like most people, haven’t read enough of Richard Prince’s writings, because if we had, we’d recognize the press release as excerpts from the artist’s ongoing accumulation of quips, quotes, comments, and Deep Thoughts, which he has termed, “Bird Talk.”
There are a few mentions of it online, and Prince quotes it on his book tumblr, Fulton Ryder, but I can’t yet figure out yet when Bird Talk began. The range of texts, though, shows it to be a living document. One comment about audience [“I would imagine my immediate audience are people just like me. People who are thirty-five.”] sounds like it’s from 1984. A rare book dealer’s catalogue description for a proof of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow comes from 2003. Most bits sound like Prince’s observations [“Heavy metal is retriabalizing. (sic)”], but there are two [uncredited] Marshall McLuhan quotes, a reference to a 1965 Ad Reinhardt interview with himself, and at least one fantastical speculation [“Vermeer lost over one hundred paintings in a ship wreck.”]
Which means Bird Talk could be seen as a miniature Atlas or Arcades Project on the one [ambitious/generous] hand, or as Prince’s fridge door on the other. Whatever it is, it’s a useful and highly accessible primary source for the artist’s thinking, and even his work [“Rephotography could be a form of re-adjusting sensory bias.”] Which almost no one has ever quoted or discussed; on almost every quote I checked, Prince’s own website was the sole Google result. Bird Talk [richardprince.com] Fulton Ryder, Prince’s bookstore/imprint/gallery/tumblr [fultonryder.com] 2010 Prince interview mentions Bird Talk–and the Cariou case [russhmagazine.com]
on closer inspection, beneath the dripping paint which adds such texture to the surface of Untitled (Portrait), it becomes clear that the entire background is comprised of images of the supermodel Kate Moss either topless or wearing a bikini top. Untitled (Portrait), then, is a contemporary palimpsest, a conceptual layer cake of imagery which allows Prince to juxtapose a range of seemingly discordant materials in order to play a complex game with the recognisability of celebrities from the art world and indeed the world in general: Pollock, Moss, and of course Prince himself.
The auction house namechecks Pollock, and goes on about Prince’s de Kooning paintings, which he’d just completed in 2007. But the action paint-on-tearsheet collage Kate Moss painting is very similar in medium and process to the first work Prince made from Patrick Cariou’s Yes Rasta photos. Canal Zone, 2007, Installation shot at Eden Roc Hotel, St Barth’s, late 2007
The piece, actually titled Canal Zone (2007), consisted of a loose grid of 34 or so overpainted pages torn from Prince’s copy of Yes Rasta, mounted on a board, and exhibited in a small show at the Eden Roc Hotel in St. Barth’s over the Christmas/New Year holiday in 2007. Prince had purchased Cariou’s book at a local shop, and then began writing, sketching, and painting in it over the course of his annual visits to St. Barth.
The Kate Moss painting seems to have been made in a nearly identical way, from similar source material–reproductions of highly aestheticized, black & white photography–at about the same time. It’s not a stretch to imagine Cariou’s photos taken–or at least simulated–by Steven Klein, just more of the same genre Prince is already working with.
As in “Canceled” is opening, not “Opening is canceled.”
I’m very stoked to announce that Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al… will be included in an exhibition at The Center For Book Arts.
“Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures,” curated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick, opens April 18th and runs through June:
This exhibition presents cancelled or otherwise prohibited exhibitions that now exist as publications or in other formats. These publications document the process and politics of cancellation, exist as an alternative manifestation of the exhibit, act as a critique of the forces that called for its cancellation, or they may be an admission and exposition of an ultimately productive failure. In the context of the Center for Book Arts, Canceled highlights the book form as a crucial means of disseminating documentation and information on a wide and accessible scale, potentially in ways that are more historically stable, and more effective, than the original exhibition would have been. Through utilizing printed matter, these artists and curators have found alternative routes by which the politics surrounding the presentation and creation of art become at least as relevant as the work itself.
…
Publications, Works, and Documentation: Bas Jan Ader, Greg Allen, Jo Baer, Wallace Berman, Christoph Büchel v. Mass MoCA, Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince, Dexter Sinister, Exit Art, Brendan Fowler, Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, David Horvitz, Douglas Huebler, Wu Hung, Jill Magid, Rhoda Rosen, Seth Siegelaub, Temporary Services, Lawrence Weiner, Werkplaats Typografie, Anton Vidokle, Marion van Wijk and Koos Dalstra, Amy Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and others.
