richard prince – Page 4

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]

ABC & POD at Printed Matter Thursday Night

So when I first published the Richard Prince Canal Zone YES RASTA book in March, I got some nice responses from people, including a couple of folks who suggested I look at joining ABC, the Artists’ Book Co-operative. ABC is an interesting-looking coalition of artists and photographers who come together to support and discuss print-on-demand publishing and to bring attention to their projects.
As it turns out, Printed Matter is hosting a reception and conversation tomorrow night with active members of ABC, which is in conjunction with an exhibition of ABC/POD titles that runs until June 30th.
It should be positively informative and delightful, and I look forward to going, to meeting some of the folks there, and to possibly seeing a greg.org reader or two as well. At this point, I think I will not endeavor to join ABC, but to continue to admire them from a distance.

Seeing as how they already have at least one guy who copies jpegs of Richard Prince cowboy photos in volume, and another who just released a collection of Google Maps images showing of the peculiarly aesthetic polygonal camouflage technique used to obscure sensitive sites in the Dutch landscape, maybe a little more distance would be better for all concerned.

ABC Artists’ Book Co-operative conversation and reception, Thursday, June 16, 5-7 PM [printedmatter.org]

And Then They Came For The Sarah Morris Origami Paintings

Oh boy, here’ we go again. As @BDPNT, @joygarnett, @robertpearre, @shelawterry, and @Copycense tweeted, “Welcome to Cariou’s world.”

A leading origami artist, Dr. Robert Lang, has filed suit along with several other designers, charging Sarah Morris with copyright infringement for making paintings and prints which use particular crease pattern diagrams without permission or credit.

At issue, just as in Patrick Cariou’s complaint against Richard Prince, is the legal status of Morris’s works, and whether they are derivative, which is infringing, or transformative, which is protected under fair use exemption.
Lang has filed his suit in California, and for some reason a lawyer may be able to explain to me, a great deal of his complaint focuses on the applicability of California as a venue for hearing the case. [The filings, including a sheaf of exhibits, are available for download at Lang’s attorneys’ website. They’re very well-produced, but right now it’s too early to say whether I’d turn them into a book.]

Since I have been exactly 100% [0 for 1] wrong in my predictions for the outcome of such transformative use trials, I’m wary to go too deeply into the facts of this case yet. I will say, though, that basically every difference I see between Morris’s appropriation and practice and Prince’s only intensifies my belief that Morris is and should be in the clear, and that these kinds of lawsuits are a nuisance and a threat. Morris is not an outlier. As an artist she’s operating at the center of the art world, not its margins; her practice and method are widely known, critiqued, supported, and emulated. Within the art world.
She’s also a couple of orders of magnitude less commercially successful, price-wise, than Prince or Koons. As such, she’s more vulnerable than they are, I think, to exactly the kinds of debilitating or chilling effects an expensive, protracted legal fight would entail, especially one fought at an extreme distance. [Morris is based in NYC and London.] Because the stakes for her are non-trivial, they are also more relevant to more artists whose practice includes–I can’t even say appropriation, because I don’t even see Morris’s work within that context. But it’ll be what it’ll be, I guess.

[UPDATE: oh-ho, I may be wrong about this; a couple of people have emailed to point out that Morris is an alumna of Koons’s studio, so this may be exactly the context in which to consider her work. It makes sense, considering the number of people I’ve met who turn out to have worked for Morris at some point. Time to make the donuts.]

Two things, no, three, that stand out, though:
1) These side-by-side exhibits that lawyers for both Patrick Cariou and Lang produced are seductive and deceptive, and they tend to obscure or minimize otherwise potentially important aspects of transformative use.
Lang uses these exhibits to argue that Morris has done nothing but “colorize” [his term] his copyrighted crease pattern. In fact, she has made several substantive changes to its appearance, content, scale, and materials, as well as to its meaning, utility, and context. A crease pattern is not just the geometric form; each type of line–dotted, dashed, or solid–indicates the direction of a fold, and it a crucial, even fundamental element–for making origami. Morris removes all this functional information, a non-trivial transformation.
Another misleading element of these side-by-side comparisons is size. Even if we assume Lang uses the biggest piece of paper mentioned on his site, 20-inch squares, his pattern is still 95% smaller than Morris’s huge painted canvases. A more accurate side-by-side image might look like this:

2) Lang’s filing makes the bold but utterly ridiculous claim that “Morris’s actions have created competition for Plaintiffs by occupying the market for painted versions of their copyrighted artworks.” No such market exists, and I’d argue that Morris’s paintings have created one. If people pay $100,000 or more for Morris’s paintings, it’s not because they look like Robert Lang diagrams; it’s because they look like Sarah Morris paintings. Her realized gain attributable to the origami IP itself is incremental at best.
3) Unlike Prince, who did not profess any particular critical interest in Cariou’s Rasta photos, Morris has publicly discussed and presented her origami paintings as commentary both on origami and its history and its specific meanings and contexts, but also on its contemporary connection to science and systems. Lang the origami expert is famous in a way that Cariou the photographer precisely is not. As such Lang’s work could present a larger, more natural target for someone wishing to make critical new work about origami.
The kicker for all this, is that I’m kind of an origami nerd myself. That my greatest origami accomplishment was winning 2nd prize and $10 at the Utah County Fair one summer when we were visiting my grandparents’ house as a kid pretty much says it all. [I made my origami peacock out of printed wrapping paper.] But I still do it pretty regularly, and I’d say I have an above-average sympathy for these origami masters who feel they’ve been treated unfairly. I still think they’re wrong as hell, though, and that this case is a dangerously unproductive nuisance.

UPDATE: And speaking of my fellow nerds, look who else has spent Friday night picking apart the latest artist copyright infringement case? Joy Garnett has some solid analysis and some biting commentary. I’ll only add that between their blog headline and their PR-chasing email to Newsgrist, the origami folks’ lawyers are really angling aggressively to publicize their claim against Morris.
Lang Origami [langorigami]
Oy: These Origami Artists Won’t Fold [bayoaklaw.com]

Richard Prince Deposition Book All Grown Up

“THE WITNESS: This could be a cool book.”
– Richard Prince Deposition Transcript, p. 328
Dude, Richard Prince just blurbed my book.
Between the lawyers on both sides of Cariou vs. Prince et al, about 275 pages of the transcript of Richard Prince’s 7-hour deposition had been made public as footnotes to various briefs and memos, but there were 101 pages left out.
In the weeks since I compiled the excerpts and exhibits into a book, I’ve been trying to track down the complete transcript. Now I have it, and you can too. After trying multiple sources for obtaining it, a sympathetic party close to the case pointed me to an apparently inadvertent, unmarked exhibit appended to a late court filing, which included the entire 378-page transcript instead of the customary snippets.
And so I have revised Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA to includ the entire interview, in order, with a handy timestamped topical index, even, and with some additional rounds of legal memos, that give a fuller sense of the give and take that led up to Judge Batts’ royal smackdown of Prince’s transformative use claims.
In addition, to accommodate wholesale requests, I’ve switched printers, so the new, revised edition has slightly smaller page facsimiles, but it is also printed on higher-grade paper. It looks pretty slick.
Because of the additional quality and page count bumps, the cost went up a bit, to $17.99, but it’s still a pretty sweet deal, I think. You can buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA directly from Createspace.com, an Amazon print-on-demand subsidiary, of if you like, you can also order it from Amazon. If you’re dying to see it in person first, both Printed Matter and Specific Object have greg.org-stamped copies available.
For folks who have already purchased the book, either in print or electronic format, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. I made an Appendix which contains all the missing transcript pages, and I’ve been mailing out printed and PDF copies to people who’ve contacted me. Whenever the printed copies run out, I’ll be happy to keep the appendix available via PDF.
Because it really does have some interesting stuff in it, like the quote at the top of the page, which was Prince’s reaction to the exhibit showing the side-by-side comparisons of the Patrick Cariou’s YES RASTA images and the Prince Canal Zone paintings they ended up in. [Obviously, that exhibit is included in the book.]
Now that the whole deposition story can be told, I think I’ll go through and pull out some highlights to share here: some great exchanges, useful insights, or straight-up WTF moments. If you have any favorites, definitely pass them along. And enjoy! The damages hearing is scheduled for May 6, tomorrow!
Buy Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al from Createspace or Amazon.
The book is also available at Printed Matter and Specific Object, both in New York and online.

Did You Buy A Copy Of The Richard Prince Deposition Book?

Then please email me if you haven’t already.
greg at greg dot org
Electronic or print, either one. Because I have something for you.

Publishing A Book? Check Your Wok

So I try to create a book with as little creative alteration as possible, to hew as closely as I can to the court documents themselves, without changing, editing, or annotating them at all.
OK, so I weave images from the exhibits they’re discussing into the sections of the transcript where they’re discussing them. And–NO design–I only use Preview’s default annotation settings–giant, red Helvetica–to create the headings, and the table of contents, and the cover.
OK, so I have to cheat a little to get the cover to work, so I do end up re-keying the cover in the cover wizard, so that it matches the annotation typeface. But that is IT.
And what happens when you are aggressive about not trying to create an aestheticized object–or rather, to create an aestheticized object that looks like you did nothing aesthetic to create it? When you try to write less than a hundred words total, including your self-consciously long title?
Well, we can ask Brett in Miami. He’s the first one who spotted three–three!–typos on the back cover of the softcover edition. Well, he’s the first one to let me know he spotted them, anyway. And for that I thank him.
I corrected two immediately, and I’m still pondering about the third: “…it is intended to serve as an art historical and critical resource, filtering relevant primary information about Prince’s biography, practice and wok…”
I mean, couldn’t it stay? “Oh, Richard Prince, I love your wok!” Maybe it’s the t-shirt.
update: here’s the link to the new printer, where you can buy the expanded edition in softcover.

What Books May Come

Looks like Monday is Unboxing Day. Whether UPS or USPS, be sure to thank the union members who worked through the weekend to bring you your art nerdy books.

The hardback with the current cover design [updated link, see below] arrived in Mondo Blogoland. I really do like this cover, too. Patrick thinks I should change it back to the softcover version, though, so that his is more collectible. Which is a very generous and slightly hilarious thing to say.
I was also thinking of making a 2-color silkscreen print out of this cover image. Or maybe even a whole portfolio of the Prince v. Cariou exhibits. I tell you, look at Rauschenberg too long, and you’ll want to start silkscreening everything that’s not pinned down.
Oh ho, at Joy Garnett’s studio [below], they staged an impromptu reading of my “conceptual piece.” And now I’m thinking that staging a dramatic re-enactment of portions of the transcript some night could be a lot of fun. Hmm.

Meanwhile, back at Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. HQ, the champagne mangoes have a new, romantically exotic friend:

Cariou’s book was apparently supposed to be available as a limited edition, with a signed print. Did not know that. It says it right there on the colophon, though: “A slipcased, limited edition of this book with a signed and numbered artwork by the artist is available upon inquiry; please contact the publisher.”
There’s also a credit to The Small Darkroom, New York for “gelatin-silver prints,” a reference, presumably, to the edition. And there’s a separate ISBN number, 1-57687-074-X, which goes basically nowhere. Which means that Cariou and/or powerHouse had planned to do a limited edition, but it never happened. Wonder why that was? I guess if I were an attorney for someone getting sued for damaging someone’s book and photography market, I might care a little more.
Apr 2011 update: At the moment, the hardcover copy is not available. Here’s a new link to order a softcover copy of the new, expanded edition, which includes Prince’s entire deposition, and additional legal documents.

So Sue Me, I Think My Richard Prince Depositions Book Looks Awesome

Wow, can I just say that, when combined with the rapid production power of our digitized present, appropriation art is just awesome?

I just got the first hardcover copies of the first version of the book I conceived of a week ago today, Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al, including Excerpts from The Videotaped Deposition of Richard Prince, The Affidavit of Richard Prince, Competing Memoranda of Law in Support of Summary Judgment, Exhibits Pertaining to Paintings and Collages of Richard Prince and the Use of Reproductions of Patrick Cariou’s YES RASTA Photographs Therein, and The Summary Ass Whooping Dealt to Richard Prince by the Hon. Judge Deborah A. Batts, as compiled by Greg Allen for greg.org in March 2011, and it looks rather sweet.
I’m waiting to see a paperback version [updated link info below], and to see the other cover design in person, the one reproducing the court exhibit featuring the photocopied covers of the two dueling books. I like the graphic punch of that one. But I had a hunch, and I’m seeming right, that the original un-design, the full title, laid out in giant red letters [the default setting for the annotate function in Preview, the only software I used to produce the thing] is kind of awesome. So there may be some version tweaking to be done.

Anyway, the inside is pretty nice, too. The 2×2 deposition transcript pages turn out to read just fine in a trade-size book. Which makes it perfect for the beach or wherever. And it is much thinner than I expected. 290 pages is a lot of content, but it is a pretty manageable-sized book. Also, a little sluttier, frankly. Some of those photocopied PDF’s of Prince’s paintings turn out to be pretty legible after all.
Publishing a book to serve as an indispensable art history reference–and which consists entirely of someone else’s work–should really not feel this fun. But I guess that’s why appropriation’s so hot these days.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to buy the new, expanded softcover edition, which now includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript, plus several other key legal documents. It’s a bit higher quality, too. New printer.

The Sun Never Sets On Your Richard Prince Depositions Shopping Cart

You know what, in my six days as a published author, out there flogging his book, I find myself thinking, again, of Cervantes and Don Quixote. I mean, I it really feels like I’m living in the Quixotian name I gave my film production company, First Sally.

The cover on the paperback edition of Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c., 290 pages, $16.99
And so as I was reading Jonathan Gharraie’s post in The Paris Review, I couldn’t help but but note all the striking similarities between Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c., my critically considered selection of Richard Prince’s deposition transcripts and legal filings, and Cervantes’ work. I mean just think about it:

Both Prince and Quixote mildly shock their guests at exhibits on the Upper East SIde.
Quixote was recently republished in a carefully crafted illustrated version by a legendary artist press; I carefully assembled the Canal Zone… PDF by hand before uploading it to lulu.com.
Quixote’s idealistic fantasies are enabled and indulged by an all-powerful Duke for his own bemusement and enrichment; Prince shows–and goes to court with–Larry Gagosian, on whose gallery the sun never sets.
Cervantes gave his book one of those funny, old-timey, super-long titles; I, well, just look at the cover of the paperback edition.

I could go on and on, to the point I stop debating whether I’m Quixote or Cervantes, and begin wondering whether I’m Pierre Menard or Borges. I assume all authors go through this.

Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in hardcover, 290 pages, $24.99 [updated link, see below]

More info on Canal Zone Richard Prince Yes Rasta in the original post.
See a couple of sample spreads from the electronic edition.
Anyway, Gharraie sums up nicely the digital future where artisanal books still thrive in a tablet world:

If anything, I would rather have it both ways: the book and the blog; the lavish endeavor of the lovingly prepared new edition and the take-out convenience of the virtual text.

And I humbly announce that the future of both art and literature is here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work on my book trailer.
APR 2011 UPDATE: The hardcover is temporarily unavailable, but there is a new, expanded softcover edition, which now contains Prince’s entire deposition transcript, an additional 101 pages, plus other key legal documents. Also, it’s from a new, nicer printer.

Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Sample Spreads

Thanks for the support and feedback on the Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents &c., &c. book. [updated link info below]
Some folks who ordered the electronic version–the first to get the compilation in their hands, since the print editions take a few days to arrive–have emailed wondering where “the rest” of Richard Prince’s deposition transcript is, because there are gaps and missing pages.
That’s exactly right, and it’s why I decided to make this thing in the first place. As far as I can tell, the entire 378-page transcript of the 7-hour deposition was not entered into the court record, only the excerpts that pertained to quotes or points referenced in the two sides’ various legal motions. As I was reading those scattered snippets in various places in the court record, I realized it would be more useful to have a single compilation of all Prince’s testimony. And it’d be easier if it was in order. So I took apart the pdfs and sorted the pages, then interlaced the other exhibits [i.e., images from Cariou’s book and Prince’s show and catalogue] as they came up in the course of testimony.
Here are a couple of sample spreads taken from my original [sic, heh] pdf. There are about 250 of these transcript pages in total, four per printed/pdf page.

pp. 125-8, 149-152

pp. 178-181 and Exhibit 15, installation shot at the Eden Rock Hotel, St. Barth’s
APR 2011 UPDATE: Here is the link to buy the new, expanded edition, which includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript–an additional 101 pages–plus other key legal documents. It’s a new printer, and the finish of the book is nicer, I think.

Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: The Book

from greg.org: Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in
hardcover, 290pp. $24.99 [updated link info below]
Because really, why not?
It’s always bugged me when I read a news story about a legal case, or a scientific report, and there’s no link to the original source material. And since I’ve been quoting from them a lot lately, I have been fielding a lot of requests for copies of the court filings and transcripts in the Patrick Cariou vs. Richard Prince & Gagosian case.
It was yesterday afternoon, though, when I was sending my fourth email [or eighth, since the attachments are so big] that I realized Richard Prince’s deposition is not only the longest interview he’s ever given, it’s probably the longest interview he’ll ever give. [Go ahead, Hans Ulrich, you just try!]
I mean, seriously, the guy talked for seven hours. Under oath. In insane detail about his work, process, and ideas. Granted, he was being grilled by a guy whose art ignorance is only surpassed by his obvious contempt for Prince, a lawyer who can’t tell a photograph from a painting from a reproduction in a book. But still, he got Prince talking.
And Prince was surprisingly [to me, anyway] and admirably consistent and credible, at least in terms of his work. Yeah, it’s a nice bit of fact-checking trivia to strip away the coy mystery crap that surrounded his Guggenheim retrospective: Prince testified that he is Prince, and that he did live in the Panama Canal Zone, but only as a very young child.
But I found his explanation of his early formative inspirations, particularly Warhol and punk rock, to be both relevant and sincere. The deskilling argument that you could pick up a guitar for the first time, and by the end of the week, go up on stage and perform, with visceral effect, sounds real to me. It makes sense, at least in its own context [and in my own high school experience.]

The cover of the paperback edition includes the full title. ~~290pp~~ 376pp, $17.99
Anyway, Prince’s entire deposition transcript has not been released [update: it has now; see below], but a patchwork of 250 or so pages out of about 375 were attached as supporting documents to various filings and motions in the case. So I sifted through and pulled them all out, and then placed them in numerical order. There are a lot of gaps, of course, and legalistic joustings, but there’s a lot of information, too.
Combined with his 28-page affidavit, it really is the most extensive discussion of his work, practice and biography I’ve ever seen Prince make. The fact that it’s all coming out in the context of a copyright infringement lawsuit is really too perfect to pass up.
Into this I wove the major documents and exhibits Cariou’s lawyers discussed with Prince: all the Canal Zone series paintings; installation shots from the Eden Rock hotel in St. Barth’s; Prince’s “Eden Rock Pitch,” a rough movie treatment whose characters and story fed into the paintings; and Cariou’s extensive visual comparison of Prince’s Canal Zone paintings and the YES RASTA images that ended up in them.
And for good measure, I added both sides’ memoranda, where they make their fullest legal arguments for their fair use/transformative use and copyright infringement positions. And of course, I included Judge Batts’ ass-whooping of a ruling.
In all, 290 pages, all taken–appropriated, one could say–from the court record, but organized into a clearer, more readable format. And with a focus, not on an exhaustively documenting the case itself, but on Prince and his work.
If you were to download all of this material from pacer.gov, it’s run you upwards of $24 [$0.08/page]. And then you’d still have to sort it all out. For that money, I thought, you could have a nicely printed book. And so that’s what I did.
There are hardcover and paperback editions, and electronic copies, too, which I haven’t tested yet. I’m still tinkering with the cover design. Both versions are included inside the book, as frontispieces or title pages or whatever, but right now, the b/w cover cover is on the hardcover, and the red, made-with-Preview’s-default-annotation-settings version is on the softcover.
This is definitely an experiment, so any and all feedback is welcome. But if you’re looking for the perfect book to take to spring break, or to class up your summer share, then you have come to the right place. Enjoy!
Buy your own copy of Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents, &c., &c. in
hardcover [$24.99] or in paperback [$17.99]. [createspace.com]
APR 2011 UPDATE: OK, the response to this book really caught me off guard, so I’ve done some more work on it. The new, expanded edition now includes Prince’s entire deposition transcript, an additional 101 pages of testimony not previously released publicly, and several additional key legal documents from each side. In addition, while lulu.com was a quick and decent way to release a book almost instantly, I decided to switch to a higher quality printer for the new edition. The facsimile pages are a little smaller, which I’m still working on, but the quality of the book is noticeably higher. It now clocks in at 376 pages, for $17.99.

Richard Prince Decision? You’re Soaking In It!

What with all this Prince in my head, I start seeing and reading and remembering things in relation to the Canal Zone case. For instance:
In conjuring up a meaning for Richard Prince’s Canal Zone work that fit the crime she was convicting him of, Judge Batts cited part of a 1978 essay on Appropriation Prince wrote, which he was asked about in his deposition. 1978!

I feel that I like to get as much fact into my work and reduce the amount of speculation. I believe there’s too much–I like an artwork where that when you see something, like a cowboy or a girlfriend, I mean these are, in fact, true.

Batts decided that this meant Prince appropriated Patrick Cariou’s photos because he was trying to convey the same “core truths” about Rastafarianism as Cariou. But it actually made me think of a quote from Greg Foster-Rice’s essay in his just-released anthology, Reframing the New Topographics, where he discussed the influential early 70s photography show in terms of systems theory, and in particular the system of photography itself:

Photographs, in other words, are distinct from other forms of representation in that their connoted messages are built upon a widely held belief in the medium’s denotative status as an almost perfect copy of the real.

I have to say, I really hated Canal Zone when I first saw it, but the more I study and think about it, I’m coming around. In one sense. Prince was making paintings about photography, and about the different expectations of truth and subjectivity, fact and fiction, each medium embodies. Which is nice.
Then there’s the kicker from Steven Stern’s review of Spiritual America: The Guggenheim Retrospective in Frieze:

Perhaps the key joke for the retrospective is one that appeared in several different paintings: ‘Man walking out of a house of questionable repute, muttered to himself, “Man, that’s what I call a business … you got it, you sell it, you still got it”.’ A museum is, after all, a house meant to settle questions of repute. And this particular museum exhibition was, among other things, a comment on Prince’s clearly impressive ‘business’. Like the one described in the joke, this industry depends on a seemingly magical economy: the slippery way that things that aren’t exactly objects – such as images and sex – get valued. Prince is a connoisseur of such economies. For better or worse, no matter how much he’s sold, he’s still got it.

That is just awesome.
And last but certainly not least, is Pablo Picasso, who Prince cited repeatedly as a model and an inspiration for his work. This quote is from an awesomely forthright talk Frances Stark gave at Mandrake Bar in LA in December 2009 as part of the Contra Mundum series. Ro/Lu, you’re off the hook, but the rest of you out there, are in deep trouble for not telling me about the published version of Contra Mundum I-VII. I’m the big man, need the info. Anyway, Picasso:
“But of what use is it to say what we do when everybody can see it if he wants to?”