richard prince – Page 3

Gig: The Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference, Friday 9/28, 2PM

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

The Secret Ingredient Turned Out To Be Infringiness

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]

Two Gigs: Saturday 9/22 @Printed Matter, Friday 9/28 @NYABF

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.

Cowboy Photography Workshop By Eric Doeringer

I so wish I was in town for this:

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.

Just another day in the life of HELP/LESS, Chris Habib’s amazing show at Printed Matter.
Doeringer has searched out original copies of the Marlboro ads Prince began rephotographing in 1980, and began his own re-creation? re-enactment? re-performance? of Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) photos last year.
After the jump, I’ve transcribed a section from Prince’s court deposition where he discusses his early rephotography process:

Continue reading “Cowboy Photography Workshop By Eric Doeringer”

Friday At Printed Matter, 6:30, Eric Doeringer, Hermann Zschiegner & Me

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

Beebe v. Rauschenberg: Declaring ‘Victory’

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.

Continue reading “Beebe v. Rauschenberg: Declaring ‘Victory’”

Beebe v. Rauschenberg, The First Big Appropriation Lawsuit

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

Prince On Vinyl

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]

Richard Prince’s Bird Talk

Like, apparently, a lot of folks, particularly writers who are bombarded with awful art press releases, 303 Gallery’s announcement for their current show of Richard Prince paintings came as an atypical surprise. It begins:

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]

Canal Zone: Yes Kate Moss

Can you tell I’m trying to clear out the to-post photos from my desktop? In Februarry Christie’s sold an interesting, large Richard Prince Joke painting in London that was made in 2007. The date is significant for reasons that the lengthy catalogue description studiously avoids.

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.

Opening: ‘Canceled’

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.

After seeing Patrick from Mondo Blogo’s photo above, Lauren asked for the original hardcover edition, which, right? I love that cover, with the legal exhibit reproducing the covers of both Prince’s and Cariou’s books. I mean, that’s where my title came from. Maybe I’ll have to bring that back on a revised edition.
Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures (April 18, 2012 – June 30, 2012) [centerforbookarts.org]

Richard Prince, Art Blogger

Can I just say, it’s only a couple of weeks in, but I’m loving Richard Prince’s blog. [And loving Anaba all over again for linking to it. Thanks, Martin!]
Not really a blog, I suppose, but more of a journal. Some notes. They feel pretty perfect, though, very authentically him, for better or worse. Generally for better, though.
I’ve been going especially deep on Prince for the last few weeks as I try to prepare the script for a live reading/restaging of the artist’s Cariou v. Prince deposition, which was won by some lucky bidders at Art Fag City’s benefit auction in February.
That means turning the 400-page, seven-plus hour transcript into a couple of hours of informative, relevant, and hopefully entertaining highlights that accurately communicate the real issues of the copyright infringement lawsuit; and that capture the key elements of Prince’s history and practice, and how this Canal Zone series fits into it. Even in the totally oddball pressure cooker environment of a deposition, where basically every question is adversarial, leading, and contested by the other lawyers in the room, Prince’s reality comes through. He’s not cynical, but he is a pessimist. He has very clear, even compelling insights about his work and his controversial methods. He’s occasionally funny and awkward and pissed. A human, an artist, not a construct or a brand.
I keep meaning to go through the Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta book and post some highlights. Maybe in relation to this staging, I will. Meanwhile, here’s one: Dan Brooks, the lawyer for photographer Patrick Cariou, who questioned Prince, definitely seemed to be operating under the hypothesis that Canal Zone was conceived as nothing but a giant moneymaking venture. In various times and ways, Prince rather convincingly refuted that, I think, but never more powerfully than when Brooks asked about a film pitch, and Hollywood, and turning Canal Zone into a video game:

DB: Where do the video game rights come into this pitch?
RP: Is that–are you asking me–you’re asking me?
Q: These are your words in the interview?
A: Right.
Q: What did you mean?
A: I think I was thinking about the fact that I know nothing about video games and–but my–all my stepson’s friends play them. And I felt that there might be a possibility to–I had seen some of the graphics involved in some of these games when they play, and I felt that the different tribes that take over the different hotels and they kind of, you now, it was just a thought. And I think I ran this by Michael Ovitz and he loved the idea.
Q: So you viewed this whole thing as an extremely commercially successful potential venture, paintings–
A: the pitch?
Mr. Hayes: Objection.
Q: Paintings, movies, and video game rights, right?
Mr Hayes: Objection as to form.
A: No, I’ve never thought that what I do or what I produce or what I put out will ever, one, sell.
I’ve made art for 34, 35 years and nothing sold. What I–my experience in terms of what i make, it seems that a lot of people just couldn’t dig it. And to tell you the truth, it was not one–when I put up the Canal Zone show at Larry Gagosian’s there was not one review in any newspaper, in any magazine. And I find that incredibly unsuccessful.
Q: But weren’t some of the paintings sold before the show even opened?
A: They were sold, yes.
Q: For millions of dollars?
A: I wouldn’t characterize it for millions. For a couple million dollars, there were two paintings I believe that were sold before the Lehman Brothers meltdown, yes, there were two paintings that were sold for approximately 2-million dollars.

OK, maybe the two million dollar part undercuts the never selling part a bit, but the point is, it’s not about the money, people. It’s getting Roberta over there to write about your show.

Richard Prince And Friends

I’ve tweeted on this a bit already, but it’s really worth repeating: Richard Prince’s appeal of the Patrick Cariou copyright infringement decision is a really great read. The brief was filed last week, and I finally got around to reading on Halloween night. I find it makes a very clear and persuasive argument for throwing out Judge Batts’ sweeping ruling, and it’s a nice, not too esoteric discussion of appropriation and fair use as well.
Basically, Prince, his new lawyers, and Larry Gagosian argue that Judge Batts wrongly applied the prevailing legal standards for fair use, especially the most recent, relevant case which had been before the same court, Blanch v. Koons.
I think I’ve written before that Prince’s work, and his first-round defense, relied very heavily on Koons’s winning argument that an artist’s transformations of size, scale, material, and context were sufficient for fair use. But their briefs almost never cited Blanch and did not make that transformative use argument clearly or well. That has changed.
Prince’s lawyers also argue that Batts overreached and erred by finding all 30 of Prince’s Canal Zone works to be infringing, regardless of what, how, or how much of Cariou’s imagery they contained. And that it’s wrong to force Prince to hand over all the artworks to Cariou when the settled precedent of monetary compensation exists.
I think that, at the very least, the court will find that each painting must be evaluated, and that the court will have to decide Prince’s transformative efforts. While I would love to publish such a document, because it would just be the best kind of worlds-colliding art criticism around, I suspect a check will be cut before the judges take out their rulers.
I could rattle on about this all day, but why not just read it yourself? Here is a copy of Prince’s filing, which I’ll host on my ~~Dropbox~~ own site for a while. The 135-page ruling has a lot of very nice, full color illustrations and clocks in at around 7mb.
[OBVIOUS DISCLOSURE ABOUT GREG.ORG AND THE CREATIVE CAPITAL | WARHOL FOUNDATION ARTS WRITERS PROGRAM, WHICH IS COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH, HERE.]
And in even more interesting news, Joy Garnett just gave me a heads up that the Warhol Foundation has actually filed an amicus brief in Cariou v. Prince, warning the courts that if Judge Batts’ ruling were to stand, it would put works by other artists in jeopardy, and would cause “such uncertainty in the field as to cause a chilling effect on the creation of new works.” I expect I’ll come back to this after I read it all, but the Foundation’s brief defends Prince’s work as part of a broad, artistic history of appropriation, quoting, and collage. Should be interesting. The Foundation’s 57-pg brief [pdf] is linked directly here.
Previously: the five most ridiculous things about the Richard Prince copyright decision
The Richard Prince decision? You’re soaking in it!
Richard Prince’s Spiritual America
Size Matters?
“THE WITNESS: This could be a cool book.”
“The Movie is called ‘Eden Rock'”

‘The Movie Is Called Eden Rock…’

It’s all in the book, so you could definitely buy it and read about it in depth, but it didn’t occur to me until Brian Dupont tweeted about it [“Aspen : #OccupyWallSt :: St. Barts : Canal Zone. Every apocalypse needs a last stand.”], that there might be a connection between the Occupy Wall Street protests and Richard Prince’s movie pitch.

See, in defending his Canal Zone paintings against Patrick Cariou’s copyright infringement claims, Prince and his lawyers repeatedly cited The Pitch, a 1.5 page text for a post-nuclear apocalyptic movie called Eden Rock in which Cariou’s Yes Rasta photo subjects were one of several tribes. The strategy–failed so far–was apparently to demonstrate how completely Prince had transformed Cariou’s work, thus obviating the infringement claim.

Prince included the The Pitch text in Eden Rock Show, a brief 2007 exhibit of a large collage/painting made up of pages from Yes Rasta at St. Bart’s Eden Rock Hotel. It was included in court exhibits in Cariou v. Prince and, like I said, is in the Selected Court Documents &c. book.

When I started typing this, the way I had remembered The Pitch had me thinking it is occasionally starting to sound like a future documentary, minus the global thermonuclear war part. Now that I’ve re-read and typed it all in I don’t think that anymore. But I’m not so sure Prince agrees with me. But as the view from his position as a pessimistic artist in the lower reaches of the 1%, but not of the 1%, it does have a certain authenticity, and so I thought The Pitch is worth posting:

The Pitch
Charles Company, his wife, son and daughter arrive at the St. Barts airport, late afternoon two days before Xmas, he’s meeting up with his brother and sister-in-law… staying on the island for a couple of weeks…vacation…

As he’s landing, he sees out the window a lot of people running around…general commotion.

As the plane taxis up to the gate he asks the pilot what’s going on…

As the Company family disembarks the plane, there’s more pandemonium…

People grabbing, shouting, some hysterical…it’s a tiny airport, but there’s an overload of people waiting to get thru customs and many people literally “crying”…they’re “crying because there are no planes going out…no planes returning to St. Martins…returning to Miami…returning to NYC…returning to London…returning anywhere…

There are no returning flights because these cities and many other major “areas” in the continental U.S. and Western and Eastern Europe have just been obliterated by nuclear attack.
Charles Company and his family are informed of this fact and seemed to melt into the tarmac under 88 degree temps…holding their bags, their backpacks…what will come to be as all their worldly possessions.

They hook up with Charles’s brother, who will fill them in with a bit more detail on the events “round” the world. “What are we suppose to do?” is Charles’s wife’s first question…
“There’s nowhere to go”, is the first answer.

A good part of the world, “most” of the world, has been nuked and they are here on a tiny French island in the middle of nowhere…which in a year’s time will become part On the Beach, part Lord of the Flies.

Background: Charles is 55, has no military background, is pretty much out of shape…makes his living as an architect.

To make this pitch even shorter I’m going to cut to a year later…
People on the island have broken up into “tribes”…most of the houses have been ransacked and all of the hotels occupied.
Charles Company is now Charlie Company. He has been exercising. Hes also learned to load a weapon, field dress a wound, cook without a fire. His daughter is the #1 scavenger…
He his wife, son and daughter, brother and sister-in-law, (along with several followers) have taken over the Eden Rock Hotel. It’s headquarters.

Stockpiled. A Mini-Mart. As best a fortress as can be under the circumstances. Everything is rationed, everything is “used”…
Next: Charles’s son is standing lookout. Thru his telescope out in the ocean he sees what appears to be a periscope…he sounds the alarm…

The movie is called Eden Rock…

[from an October 2008 email prepping for the Canal Zone show at Gagosian]

Additional Eden Rock/Pitch Material written MARCH 2008–

More on Eden Rock

1. Rastas and Reggae…they escape from one of the Cruise ships, (they were the band aboard the ship) three days after the bombs went off. They go to the Hotel Manapany. Six band members, two roadies and a manager.

2. The Backpackers…these are college kids, use to spring breaks, know nothing of responsibility or the real world.
They gather first in bars then take over a small hotel just above Shell Beach. They keep partying, drinking, smoking..they are the first to “go native”…the first to smear “war paint” on their bodies…they’re also the first to get wiped out…

3. The Amazons…Four Lesbians who escape a second Cruise ship, who bring along part of hte crew and take over the Guanahani Hotel. These are large well built women along the lines of Shena Queen of the Jungle, Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, think Raquel Welch meets Linda Hamilton in the Terminator. Their outfits, hair and make-up remind us of Road Warriors…

4. The Ultimate Ones…this tribe is made up of rich, affluent masters of the universe…these are guys who own the huge private boats parked in Gustavia…they have the loyalty of their crews, they have their own weapons and in the beginning access to food and water. They quickly make deals with the local St. Bart police force. They stay on their boats at first but then take over the Ill de France hotel…these guys are use to privilege and shaping the future…they don’t take “no” for an answer…they believe they “own” the island and everyone is their subject…several come to be assassinated, held hostage, and hanged upside-down…in an opening scene one of them is pictured buried up to his head in the sand at Saline Beach with the tide coming in…

These are the four main tribes along with Charlie Company…

Charlie Company represents “family”
Rastas and Reggae represents “The disenfranchised”
Backpackers represent “alternative”
Amazons represent “sex”
Ultimate Ones represent “power”

Richard Prince
—– End of Forwarded Message

[spelling and punctuation original]
Previously: Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: The Book

Canal Zone Yes Rasta &c. In The Brooklyn Rail

Holy smokes, The Brooklyn Rail reviewed Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta:

Appropriation art is such an accepted part of the contemporary vernacular that some already find it passé–or at the very least no longer trendy. Gagosian isn’t exactly at the forefront of art discourse; perhaps the texts of Cariou v. Prince reintroduce the still-revolutionary possibilities of Prince’s proposition within the broader, non-art context. The court takes the role of the beleaguered parent who has just discovered that her child is having sex, to the point where Judge Batts employs pointed scare quotes in her introduction of “appropriation art” as a term.

A “scrapbook-style curiosity” that reads like a parent discovering their child having sex? I can’t really top that.
Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c, reviewed by Andrea Neustein and Alex Neustein [brooklynrail.org]