greg.org – Page 155 – the making of, by greg allen

What Did People E.A.T. In 1971?

I recently found a poster for a Pontus Hulten exhibition at Moderna Museet called “Utopier & Visioner, 1871-1981,” which I think may have come from Billy Kluver’s own collection.
There’s not much information online about the show with that title, but the Getty mentions it; they hold the archives for E.A.T., the art & technology collaborative Kluver founded with Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman.
Turns out “Utopier & Visioner” was the site of one node in E.A.T.’s project, Telex: Q&A, an early attempt at networked communication. E.A.T. set up public telex machines in Stockholm, Tokyo, New York [at MoMA] and Ahmedabad, India, and invited people to ask each other questions. Hulten’s show provided the theme; the dates in the title referred to the Communards and to imagining what the world would be like ten years into the future.
1
Questions about the future would be daisy-chained along to the different venues to give people a chance to read and respond. [The connections were not real-time; data was only transferred 10 minutes/day.] And to prime the pump, “wise men” in each city were invited to offer their answers as well.
E.A.T. was planning to publish the resulting conversations, but I can’t see that they ever did. The Getty has several folders stuffed full of telex strips collated into roughly chronological order. It might be interesting to look through them.

Or maybe, uh, not. The Daniel Langlois Foundation in Quebec has digitized some materials from E.A.T.’s archives, including the original press release for Telex: Q&A, which contains sample questions:

1. What will the rents be like?
2. Will pot replace alcohol?
3. What will replace pot?
4. What will the ratio be between liquid & dry foods?
6. Will food be more natural (raw meat and vegetables) or more artificial (pills)?
20. Will men wear neckties?
24. What nature will bureaucracy have?
29. Where will solutions to problems lie–technology, sociology, politics?
49. Will there be a difference between work and leisure?

Maybe I do want to know Kenzo Tange’s opinion on neckties, but frankly, it’s almost interesting enough to think that in 1971, people were seriously expecting dramatic changes would sweep through society. I mean, sure, Twitter and all, but still. Pills!

Telex: Q&A was closely related to another E.A.T. project in 1971, Children and Communications. Led by Robert Whitman, E.A.T. set up kid-sized labs in the various boroughs of New York, and connected them via fax and telex, and let kids loose in them to communicate with each other.
Langlois has some of those documents up, too; it’s kind of hilarious, in that except for a tictactoe game, and an attempt at an exquisite corpse-style story, most of the interaction is about the interaction itself. Just like Thaddeus S.C. Lowe’s first telegram from a balloon to like 90% of cell phone calls today [“I’m calling from the train.”] My favorite is this drawing, which pretty much sums it up, a screen asking the kid, “Who do you love?”:

Related, interesting: Tokyo Terminal documentation for Telex: Q & A [fondation-langlois.org]

Fractal, Pixel. Pixel, Fractal.

$fractal_pixellate_baking-ca.jpg$
“Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet.” – A. King in Society. [via mathowie]

Size Matters?

As I have tried to make sense of the Cariou v. Prince decision, to figure out how Judge Batts found it so easy to dismiss Prince’s detailed explanation of his transformative ideas and process, I can come up with two possible rationales.
One is the distinction absolutely no one except Prince–Cariou, the judge all the lawyers, including Prince’s and Gagosian’s–makes between photographs and images, reproductions in a book. It’s one of Prince’s consistencies that reveals itself throughout his deposition and affidavit. [Always be selling!]
And it’s a point that Joy Garnett makes very cogently in her editorial in artnet which looks at the difference between mass produced images and fine art objects.

The very existence of Prince’s “Canal Zone” series is apparently now in peril, in part because no one seems to be able to tell the difference between a painting, which is a one-of-a-kind object, and a photograph, which is by definition mass-producible.

The other distortion I see is scale. Patrick Cariou and his lawyers prepared an exhibit [it’s in the book, $25 hardcover, $16 paperback!] detailing all the Yes Rasta images Prince used, in whole or in part, as source material in his paintings.

Photocopied side by side, the book pages and paintings can seem remarkably similar, even interchangeable. The comparison images that Cariou and friends released to the press are even more persuasive. But if this isn’t technically deceptive, it certainly obscures the scope of Prince’s transformations.
Cariou’s book is 10×12 inches. Prince’s paintings are 6-12 feet. Graduation, the painting made by altering the coloring of Cariou’s image, reprinting it, painting and collaging it, rescanning it, cropping it, inkjet printing it onto canvas, and then overpainting and collaging it again, is 5×6 feet. A more accurate side-by-side comparison would look like this:

These details of size, color, cropping, and format might seem like minutiae. But they are also exactly the kind of transformational changes cited by the judge in Blanch v. Koons. More importantly, they map directly to the decisions Cariou used to describe his own creative process–and they were also cited by the judge in declaring Cariou’s work “highly original.”
Maybe if the judge had compared object to object instead of image to image, she might have found Prince’s efforts a little more worthy of copyright consideration. In their filings, Prince and his lawyers repeatedly invited the judge to view the paintings themselves, either in Prince’s studio, or in a gallery or other space in town. It does not appear that this happened. But maybe she looked at Cariou’s exhibit, and figured she didn’t need to see anymore.

That’s So Great! The Andy Andy Monument

We know that Rob Pruitt made the chromed fiberglass figure for The Andy Monument by bodyscanning his friend and collector, the Cincinnati former car dealer Andy Stillpass.
But am I the only one who thinks the sculpture’s face, too, looks more like Stillpass than Warhol?

And it IS called The Andy Monument, not The Warhol Monument.
Anyway, that is awesome. Or as Andy [Warhol] would’ve said, That’s so great! Andy deserves it!
Stillpass image on right: modeling his Andrea Zittel Uniform, 1993 like I said, awesome. [zittel.org]

Looking Back [At The Undocumented Richard Neutra House I Found]

Ah, the memories. It was A year ago today that I began searching for a Richard Neutra house that was supposedly built in Utah, a hunting lodge commissioned by a Neutra client in Los Angeles, but which had never been identified or documented.
After charging me $10 for the same one-line info I had already found a half dozen places online, I gave up on the Neutra family/office. Who also wanted me to sign over, for free, all the copyrights for any photos I may eventually take of the house, should I ever actually find it.
Cold-calling the organization that preserves Utah’s historic buildings and architecture for information about the only Neutra house in the state, I was asked by more than one person if this was an April Fool’s prank.
Anyway, since finding, visiting, and publishing the house last year, well, not much, really. That’s fine.
Beckstrand Lodge, 1950

OG Fujiko Nakaya Fog Sculpture

I may be too late to see the Getty Research Institute’s exhibit on postwar Japanese art, but I think it’s also past time I hotfoot it out there and start digging through the E.A.T. archives.
If there are more photos like this of Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture at E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka ’70 expo, I should be booking my study carrel right now.
Pepsi Pavilion with Fog Sculpture, Japan World Exposition ’70 [getty.edu]

From The Department Of Corrections: Archivists Do Not Find My Anecdotes Amusing

I guess if you think about it, archivists really wouldn’t think it’s exciting, or even that amusing, when you tell a story that wrongly makes it sound like they’ve been taking smoke breaks for 25 years, leaving their random blogger patrons to discover lost art treasures under their noses.
But that is apparently how my post a couple of weeks ago about opening an unprocessed box of archival material from the Alan Solomon papers sounded to Barbara Aiken, the Chief of Collections Processing at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Fortunately, she was kind enough to correct my errors, chief among which is the implication that the box I found some Jim Dine drawings in had not, in fact, been sitting unprocessed in the Archive for 25+ years; it only came in in 2007, and they are, in fact, getting to it.
On this error and the larger issues of archive processing and of artworks inside the archives, Ms. Aiken graciously sets me aright, and for that I thank her and her most professional, capable colleagues.
Previously: from the mixed up files of basically everyone [except the people who leave their papers to the AAA, where they are very well looked after and made accessible]

The Drawing Machine As Seen At The Beginning Of The Digital Age

Before I talk about Microworld, the 1976 industrial film made for AT&T by Owen Murphy Productions, let me just state the obvious, and get it out of the way:
We are long, long overdue for a comprehensive, scholarly retrospective of William Shatner’s spoken word pieces. The mandarins who keep our cultural gates should not be able to just drop a masterpiece in our laps on their own whim, not we who have known “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” for decades. I give you three months, and if I don’t see any movement, I’m taking the curatorial matters into my own hands.

OK. Microworld. Holy crap, who made this thing? Owen Murphy Productions, who made several other films for Bell Labs over the years, including Incredible Machine (1968) which screened as part of the film program [PDF] at “The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age,” Pontus Hulten’s 1968 exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art. [that’s the show with the exhibition catalogue with the crazy, stamped metal cover.] Owen Murphy probably needs his/their own retrospective, too.
[11/2011 UPDATE: Thanks to Robin Edgerton, who has been working on the AT&T film archive, for pointing out that the correct title was Incredible Machine, not The Machine, as MoMA’s press release had it. You can watch Incredible Machine online.]
That will give us a chance to appreciate the backlit photomurals

and the rather incredible prop circuitboard dioramas. [I left the timestamps in for easy reference.]

Shatner marvels for us at the minute intricacy of circuitboards reduced to eye-of-a-needle-sized microchips. Microchips which are apparently still designed in large-format, paper schematics.
Which are drawn. With a pen. By a [computer? punch card? stencil?] controlled mechanical printer.

Holy crap, people, this is a drawing.

Turned into a backlit transparency, but whatever. A DRAWING.

Jean Tinguely’s Metamatics drawing machines, we know. Olafur Eliasson’s studio folks set up that acoustic drawing machine at Tanya’s in 2008. [Wasn’t there also a thing with pulleys that drew on the wall? Who was that?]
Anyway, just saying, there are–or were–amazing drawing machines creating amazing, massive drawings, in the service of America’s most advanced scientists and engineers–who apparently didn’t bother keeping them? Where are they? What are/were they? Do any survive? What else could they be used for? I think I must find the answers to these questions.
UPDATE: ASKED AND BEGINNING TO BE ANSWERED
Thanks to Beau [aka @avianism], who points me to pen plotters and their adaptation and creative deployment, apparently in the last few years, by artists such as Douglas Repetto, whose drawing below, is part of the chiplotle group on flickr.

Chiplotle is a Python library created by Repetto and Victor Adan at the Columbia University Computer Music Center which allows you to code for and operate pen plotters from a laptop. The future of the past is here.
UPDATE UPDATE And whaddya know, via @johnpyper, there is a show of the Spalter Collection of computer code-generated art right now at the deCordova in Lincoln, MA, which includes, of course, Stan VanDerBeek, who worked on early animation and computer graphics languages at Bell Labs.

You Do Know Russell Mulcahy

When I saw it on Matt Connors’ blog, I realized I’ve never seen the 1985 music video for Culture Club’s “The War Song,” but it’s amazing for how familiar it feels.
Not the particular specter of war, of course; it’s worth remembering that the nuclear disaster we lived in fear of back then was quite different.
I mean the kind of dramatic, operatic style of the video itself. It FEELS like 80’s MTV. And no wonder. Turns out “The War Song” was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who is basically the Orson Welles and John Ford of MTV’s Golden Age. Not only did Mulcahy direct the first video ever shown on MTV, The Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star.” He made two of Duran Duran’s three greatest videos–“Hungry Like The Wolf” and “Rio.” [The 1981 video “Girls on Film” was made by Godley & Creme.] Spandau Ballet’s “True.” Billy Joel’s “Allentown.” Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes.” And on and on.
Holy smokes, in between Culture Club and Falco, he directed the original Highlander, too.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Enough Prince! Let’s talk about someone else! Richard Serra, for example.

Bellamy, 2001, Richard Serra, image via gagosian.com
Did you know–I did not, which is why I am kind of fascinated to mention it here–that one of Richard Serra’s early torqued spiral sculptures, Bellamy, from 2001, was traded for…for three Richard Prince Canal Zone paintings?

Continue reading “And Now For Something Completely Different”

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.

T-Shirt All T-Shirt No T-Shirt

Has it already been two weeks since I went to Rirkrit’s show at Gavin Brown? Sheesh. Despite being there on a Thursday, there was no soup, but there were T-shirts. Nick was cranking them out, and I wanted to get one.

But I was stymied, couldn’t decide which of the 24 different sayings I wanted. And since they didn’t have my size anyway [XL, just one X, thank you], I knew I wasn’t ever going to wear it, so. So I got them all. Which Nick thought was amusing. Apparently hadn’t happened before. He gamely offered to crank them out while I talked to Gavin, but we decided it’d be easier to just pick them up later.
Or ship them, since he also still had a stack of orders from the opening. And then I went out of town, and I’m all, maybe I should send a couple of my goons over to the gallery and have them throw the shirts in the back of Gavin’s car and hotfoot them over to me.

Maybe I’d tell them to only give the car back if they threw in a couple of the test shirts and rejects. Less Doughnuts More Courage. I Have Oil At Home.

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?”

The Five Most Ridiculous Things About The Richard Prince Copyright Decision

Paddy and her commenters have already done a pretty good job sorting through the decision in the Cariou vs. Prince & Gagosian case, and there are other folks out there with far more expertise and time than I who are also weighing in.
And while I still think this case is really troublesome for the whole fair use ecosystem as it applies to the art world–or more specifically, to artistic practice–that effect may not be lasting or widespread. Fair use and transformative work are still messy, ambiguous principles, almost by design, and artists are gonna do what artists have to do. And really, Judge Batts’ decision is so poorly constructed, and ignores or misconstrues so many basic facts of the case, that it can’t hold up to the inevitable, coming scrutiny, much less serve as any kind of practical impact going forward.
Still, it’s so awful, I can’t let it go without calling out a few of the most egregious passages, arguments, and errors. So here goes.
1) Cariou’s Photos Are Copyrighted. NO $#%ing DUH.
This is the first section of Judge Batts’ decision, and it has gotten a lot of media mention from the skimming crowd, even though it seems utterly and entirely irrelevant to anything at all. [p.10]:

Cariou’s ownership of a valid copyright in the Photos is undisputed. However, Defendants assert that Cariou’s Photos are mere compilations of facts concerning Rastafarians and the Jamaican landscape, arranged with minimum creativity in a manner typical of their genre, and that the Photos are therefore not protectable as a matter of law, despite Plaintiff’s extensive testimony about the creative choices he made in taking, processing, developing, and selecting them.
Unfortunately for Defendants, it has been a matter of settled law for well over one hundred years that creative photographs are worthy of copyright protection, even when they depict real people and natural environments.

I have looked, and I cannot find any documents where Defendants actually made this ridiculous claim that Cariou’s photos–arty, black & white, published in a book–are not copyrightable. It’s like the stupidest tumblr excuse ever [I found this image on the Internet, so it must be public domain!], not the argument the copyright lawyer for the most powerful art dealer in the world would make. Why is this even in here?

Look, the closest argument/evidence I could find is an exhibit [Doc. 61-1] rounding up dozens of Google Image searches for Rastas and Jamaican jungles and ganja tours, but that was to counter Cariou’s inference that the only way to take pictures of Rastas is to do what he did, and live with them for ten years. [Which, according to his deposition, it turns out he didn’t do, But whatever.]
~~Wow, is it really 12:30? I’ve gotta get some sleep.~~ OK, we’re back. And what follows is, by any measure, too long.

Continue reading “The Five Most Ridiculous Things About The Richard Prince Copyright Decision”