NEWSgrist - where spin is art

More thoughts on the Cariou/Prince Affair

RICHARD PRINCE
Back to the Garden, 2008
Inkjet, acrylic and collage on canvas
80 x 120 inches (203.2 x 304.8 cm). Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, NY.

 

What follows is brief interrogation of myself on the subject of the Cariou/Prince Affair, by Bernard Klevickas, first posted as comments on Ed Winkleman's blog (March 28, 2011):


Bernard Klevickas: [Patrick] Cariou took the photos. He did the legwork to produce the images. He wanted them displayed a certain way and (as I understand it) has a right to see through his vision commercially of the photographs as he wants.

Joy Garnett: Of course. And no one, not [Richard] Prince, nor his appropriations, are stopping him from continuing to do so. On the other hand, Cariou's lawsuit inflicts those very same conditions of obstruction upon Prince and his work, and more.

BK: Prince appropriates the images and forever changes the way they will be interpreted, no matter how Cariou then decides to display them the context has been altered by Prince.

JG: Good point. However, no image is "safe" from being experienced in contexts other than those intended -- that lies far beyond the artist's control, and always has. Context cannot be nailed to your work. As the world changes, so do conditions for experiencing art, and so does the meaning of the artwork, for better or for worse. It is true that photojournalists in particular tend to want to control the context in which their work is experienced. This has a lot to do with the history of photojournalism and news agencies/wire services. But where this control impinges upon free speech -- either critique by others or use in others' works that reference them -- this desire to control context is overreaching. Imho artists really need to learn to defend themselves from this kind of overreaching control, not censure their own work and process in order to preempt it.

BK:  Perhaps he could have made money off of the new context of the works, but believing he had a reasonable case against Prince he chose court.

JG: Yes, of course he could have just piggybacked on Prince's success. In fact, he already has :-) You opt to go to court because you feel you've been victimized. "Feel" is the operative word here. Such decisions to litigate are fueled by emotion; and yet "feeling" you've been victimized doesn't necessarily mean you have been. In this instance it looks like there were other things going on as well, including a dealer working with Cariou in order to squeeze Prince/Gogo for some $$$.

BK:  Considering "Molotov Man" as an example the original photographer did not intend (as I understand it) to display her photo of "Molotov Man" as art in a gallery.

JG: The painting is entitled "Molotov". And actually, Susan Meiselas has displayed her photograph, entitled "Esteli, 1979", in galleries and museums on multiple occasions; ("Molotov Man" was how she referred to the figure in the shot). Like lots of crossover photojournalist/artists, she has shown many of her photographs in art galleries for decades.

Please remember to distinguish her photograph from my painting -- this will also help to distinguish Cariou's photographs from Prince's paintings in this discussion. And so: I never displayed her photograph; I displayed my painting. Prince never displayed Cariou's photographs; he displayed his own paintings.

 

L: Joy Garnett: "Molotov" (2003) 70 x 60 inches. Oil on canvas.

R: Found jpeg (source image).

 

Image Via

BK:  Plus this was a single image of which you found online and then cropped to focus only on the molotov cocktail thrower.

JG: Nope: I found the source image for my painting as a pre-cropped, uncredited jpeg, on a blog. I grabbed the entire cropped jpeg and used that as my source image. Sometimes I crop; back then I didn't because the idea was to let the actual paint and act of painting do the transforming...

BK: Prince used many (40, I think) images from the book (and the images were only in book from, not published online, I think).

JG: Prince used a large number of Cariou's Rasta images, all found in the book Yes Rasta published in 2000. I think he used 41 or 44 images in all. He also took a large number of Richard Kern's cheesecake photographs and worked them onto the same canvases as the Rasta scans. He did a number of things to tweak those images, transforming them into one-of-a-kind objects, from his mass-produced photographic sources. Prince's work has always commented on mass culture -- it all makes sense.

What's really interesting is that people willfully choose to ignore what Prince did to the images once he scanned them, as if he took Cariou's photographs and nailed them to the gallery walls. So if you never saw them and don't believe me, here's a brief description on the Gogo site:

"Some images, scanned from originals, are printed directly onto the base canvas; others are 'dragged on,' using a primitive collage technique whereby printed figures are roughly cut out, then the backs of those figures painted and pasted directly onto the base canvas with a squeegee so that the excess paint squirts out on and around the image. On top of this are violently suggestive swipes and drips of livid paint and scribbles of oil-stick crayon which, together with the comic, abstract sign-features that mask each figure's face...much of what shows up on the surface is incidental to the process."

 

This brings up something else that's pretty important, and that distinguishes the Cariou photos from the Prince paintings: that thing called "facture" -- the sense of how a painting was made -- what went into it, "the hand", etc., and history, the history of painting and visual media itself. This comparison offers another way to look at Prince's work. For anyone who got to see them in the flesh, their facture was pronounced and inescapable. (This, obviously, does not come across in jpegs). And with straight photography such as Cariou's, there is no facture at all; such photographs opt instead for the myth of "transparency", discarding facture altogether.

That and the fact that mass produced photographs are fundamentally different entities from one-of-a-kind paintings should give anyone pause before jumping to the conclusion that Prince simply took someone's photos and threw them up on the wall and sold them for millions. Hey, now that would be stealing ;-)

BK: You clarified some of the things I (admittingly) was uncertain about. This still does not change my opinion. Even Prince uses the word stealing: "I knew what I was stealing 30 years ago but it didn’t matter because no one cared, no one was paying any attention." But, I suppose we could say he can't incriminate himself. I still see it as Prince and Gagosian profiting largely at Cariou's expense and Cariou wanted some of those profits. Should all artists now be paranoid of being accused of theft? Hell no. Carou is David beating Goliath.
Why should Goliath always win?

JG: Why should Goliath always win? This indeed expresses the real reason why so many people -- artists included -- want to see Prince go down. But it has nothing to do with the case, which is still dangerous precedent.

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 268

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 268, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 267

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 267, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Random Richard Prince Copyright Dispute News (via artnet)

Édouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian, 1868-69.  

(Photo: Kunsthalle Mannheim/Margita Wickenhauser/Courtesy of MoMA) Via NYmag

via artnet news, March 23, 2011:

 

RANDOM RICHARD PRINCE COPYRIGHT DISPUTE NEWS

The news that Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery had lost a big copyright case last week (news that was broken on the APhotoEditor blog) ping-ponged around the art world, but failed to evoke any response from the principals. That’s standard procedure in ongoing court cases, needless to say, as was noted by Daniel J. Brooks of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis, attorneys for Patrick Cariou, the French photographer who brought the copyright lawsuit.

"We are pleased with the decision," Brooks said. "It’s thorough and well-written, and lays to rest the notion that ’appropriation artists’ are entitled to a different fair-use standard than anyone else." He declined further comment when asked about possible damages or any settlement talks, and also declined to make his client available for an interview. "It’s not a good idea while the case is proceeding," he explained. Brooks might want to convey this to Cariou, who yesterday gave an interview to Artinfo in which he mused that what Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg did was alright, undercutting his own complaint.

For his part, Prince has other fish to fry. His special exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, titled "American Prayer," opens this week, as does "de Kooning," a show of his works at Gagosian Gallery Paris. Presumably these collages, which famously combine imagery from Willem de Kooning’s paintings of women with gay male pornography, can be called proper parodies, and thus fall under the "fair use" exception to copyright law.

The decision in Cariou v. Prince does seem to have far-reaching implications for many contemporary artists, who like their historic predecessors are known to copy a thing or two from an assortment of sources. "It puts a lot of artists in trouble," said painter and blogger Joy Garnett, who keeps a close eye on copyright issues in her blog, Newsgrist. "The idea that referencing other artworks might be subject to legal regulation goes counter to any idea of creativity," she added, echoing the sentiments of critic Charlie Finch.

"The case is radioactive,” exclaimed John Koegel, the Manhattan art lawyer who has represented Jeff Koons on similar issues. Koegel noted that Prince and Gagosian could immediately appeal the liability ruling to the second circuit -- the demand that all the infringing works be turned over -- or try to settle, or go to trial to determine damages. In the latter instance, Koegel said, the trial would determine what portion of the value of Prince’s works were due to Cariou’s photographs. “You’d have the spectacle of collectors testifying as to why they bought those paintings, whether it was because of Cariou’s Rastafarian imagery, or because of some other reason.”

Another attorney, who asked to remain anonymous, was even more pessimistic. “It’s a pretty radical decision,” he said. "The only issue is how much Prince and Gagosian are going to have to pay," he hazarded. "The way I see it, they get slammed five ways: 1) their profit, 2) destruction of the works, 3) Cariou’s losses for his unsold works, 4) attorney fees for the plaintiff, and 5) they have to deal with the collectors who bought the works, who now can’t display them and would probably want their money back."

Students of Prince’s "Canal Zone" series may remember, as well, that not all the imagery comes from Cariou’s scenes of Jamaica. The works also feature pinups -- taken from photographs by Richard Kern. "I’m not suing," Kern said, laughing. "Richard’s a friend, and wrote the intro to Action, the Taschen book that contains the photos he used."

On Prince v. Cariou: Or Why Judge Batts is Bats

 

Works by Cariou, left, and Prince. Courtesy Patrick Cariou- via ARTINFO

 

The following was posted by Ed Winkleman on his eponymous blog a few days ago, in response to the recent ruling by U.S. District Court judge Deborah A. Batts on the Richard Prince/Patrick Cariou case. My single comment comes at the end of the comments section:

Gam's remark is exactly right:

"When I read a lot of the comments on other photography sites, what really discourages me is the underling animosity towards painters. Maybe it's deserved, maybe it's not, it's just a schism within the arts.."

It's a very deep, very real animosity. We've seen it surface on countless occasions: think of the infamous lawsuits and C&Ds wielded against Warhol, Rauschenberg, et al. As usual, there's more to it than meets the eye (sorry, bad pun). If one digs but a little deeper into the early history of photography and its reliance on painting for both its pictorial conventions and subject matter (not to mention, er, outright 'copying'), a much richer story emerges than the one framed by recent legal history; the culture of photographers is way more twisted than the simplistic reasoning ('appropriation is theft') and scapegoating of bad boy artists (such easy targets) would have you believe.

 

I want to add that that Prince, like other notoriously arrogant bad boys (Koons, Fairey), screwed up big-time. Not in the making of their work, but in the extreme hubris demonstrated elsewhere, including in the courtroom, and in Prince's case, in the way his lawyers went after Cariou (declaring that his photographs were not 'original' enough. I mean, what idiots...). So, the artworld bad boys screw not only themselves, but the rest of us who may need to rely on good fair use case law for protection against copyright zealots and the like.

via edwardwinkleman.com:

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Appropriation Prohibition (or Why I Think Judge Batts Is Wrong)

Pssst....hey buddy...wanna see an outlawed Richard Prince painting?

I'm not sure that the recent ruling by U.S. District Court judge Deborah A. Batts (that paintings from Richard Prince's series “Canal Zone” cannot now lawfully be displayed by the collectors who parted with millions of dollars to buy them) won't make the works all that more precious to their owners. I'd love to know what the judge thinks those collectors need to do to comply with the ruling. Hang a velvet curtain over the paintings? Keep them crated and in storage for eternity? Something even more absurd?

The ruling was a chilling decision for artists who work in appropriation. Artnet.com has the story:

On Mar. 18, 2011, U.S. District Court judge Deborah A. Batts ruled that Richard Prince had infringed the copyright of photographer Patrick Cariou when Prince appropriated 41 photographs from Cariou’s Yes Rasta (PowerHouse Books, 2000, $60), a book of photographs of Rastafarians in Jamaica, for Prince’s own show of artworks at Gagosian Gallery in New York City titled “Canal Zone.”

Prince’s mural-sized collage-and-painting works used figures of Rastafarians from Cariou’s photographs, altering them notably by placing oval shapes over the eyes and mouths of the figures, and by inserting guitars into their hands, sometimes combining them with figures of pornographic nudes (not photographed by Cariou). The exhibition took place Nov. 8-Dec. 20, 2008. Cariou filed his copyright infringement lawsuit against Prince, Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli (publishers of the catalogue) in December of 2008.

The most unsettling part of Batts' ruling, as artnet.com reports, is how she went so far as to declare Prince's intent for him: "[T]he court found that Prince’s motive in copying Cariou’s photographs was primarily commercial...." If Prince hadn't been using appropriation for decades, I might be able to see Batts' argument (given that "Gagosian sold eight of the works for a total of $10,480,000"), but even then, the notion that an artist cannot do both simultaneously [make important artwork and profit from it] seems a bias that the judiciary, of all institutions, should refrain from propagating. For Batts to claim Prince's primary motivation in creating this body of work was sales is a rather frightening exercise in mind-reading.

But the ruling went far beyond mere money and made a few uniformed declarations about process:

[T]he judge rejected Prince’s claim that his “Canal Zone” works represented “fair use” of Cariou’s original photographs, particularly because Prince’s works do not specifically comment on Cariou’s originals. In testimony Prince admitted that he was not commenting on Cariou’s photographs or Rastafarian culture, but rather sought to pay homage to Cézanne, de Kooning, Picasso and Warhol and other artists. Prince also said that he intended to emphasize three themes: men and women; men and men; and women and women.

Citing the judgment in the 1992 Rogers v. Koons case -- involving Jeff Koons’ String of Puppies sculpture copied from Art Rogers’ postcard photo -- the judge noted that allowing copyright to be infringed solely on the claim of a “higher artistic use” would in practical terms eliminate copyright protection altogether.

This is a philosophical question, and, of course, those who feel their copyrights have been infringed deserve to have their day in court, but "inherent in the process of appropriation is the fact that the new work recontextualizes whatever it borrows to create the new work" (emphasis mine). To my mind, that recontextualization is, in and of itself, always commentary.

I realize this leaves open the door for anyone who can dredge up some hypothetical dooms-day scenario involving one of my artists' work being copied outright with commentary of dubious significance as its rationalization (I can tell you, I'd have to see the work before I'd object), but all of that leaves out the fact that Richard Prince is an acknowledged pioneer and leader in the use of appropriation, who has dedicated his career to exploring the recontextualization of images that are all around us.

Another part of the ruling that is sure to make sphincters twitch throughout Chelsea was this:

The ruling also found Gagosian Gallery liable for Prince’s infringements, on the grounds that the gallery should have ensured that Prince had the rights to the material he used before the gallery offered the items for sale.

It may be a simple (and ultimately expensive) call to one's lawyer to ensure the work a gallery plans to show falls within the realm of "fair use," but it's hard to imagine this won't dissuade younger galleries from presenting work they may be found liable for across the board, or pushing back to make the artists pay the legal fees to prove "fair use." The potential impact of this on art history is (as Charlie Finch so rightly noted in his insightful take on the case) Kafkaesque.