excerpt
Preface by Greg Allen
(p. 11-17)
Richard Prince has always been known for making art from and about the images and culture he finds around him.
In the early 1980s, when he was working as a lackey in the bowels of Time Life, his raw materials were magazine ads: fashion models and Marlboro Men.
In 2005, though his context had materially improved, his M. O. remained the same. Wintering on St. Barth, where his soon-to-be dealer Larry Gagosian owns a villa, he used the source material at hand: lush coffee table photography books that peppered the small boutiques in St. Jean.
It was in one such shop, perhaps Calypso, the St. Barth / Hamptons / SoHo retail mini-empire founded by Christiane Celle, where Prince purchased his first copy of Yes Rasta, a collection of exotic black & white pictures celebrating the deep spirituality and humble lifestyles of practitioners of Rastafarianism, by the French fashion photographer Patrick Cariou.
Prince had already expressed an affinity for Rasta culture. When the rare Rasta would appear on the largely white St. Barth's party scene, the famously shy artist imagined himself as a black man, sporting dreadlocks, and possessed of a laid-back, reggae-inflected coolness.
Meanwhile, Cariou's photos of the dense, tropical Jamaican landscape reminded Prince of his early childhood in the Canal Zone, a place which, through far-flung geopolitical machinations, subsequently ceased to exist. In 2005 or 2006, the artist visited his childhood home, now part of Panama, for the first time in many decades.
Beginning almost immediately and for three Christmas & New Year's after that, Prince sketched, painted, and wrote in his copy of Yes Rasta. Ruminating on the end of the world, and how the hedge fund managers, corporate titans, and socialites who surrounded him would fare if the Rastafarians' primitive, impoverished existence were suddenly thrust upon them by a global apocalypse.
This simmering narrative first surfaced in Prince's art as a movie pitch, which inspired a series of paintings and a collage, in 2006—07. Titled Eden Rock after the St. Barth's hotel where they were first exhibited, the paintings depict a tribe of bankers- and moguls-turned-mercenaries who hole up in the luxury resort after a globally devastating nuclear war. In a reference, perhaps, to Prince's famous Nurse series, which were highlights of the artist's 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, the Eden Rock paintings contain imagery reminiscent of the cover illustrations of vintage pulp fiction novels.
The lone collage in the show depicted another of the tribes of survivors: Rastas, escaped, Prince imagined, from a marooned cruise ship in Gustavia harbor. For this work, Prince removed 36 over-painted pages from Yes Rasta, and arranged them in a grid on a sheet of particleboard. He titled the piece The Canal Zone.
At the same time, Prince used the same book-altering technique to engage with one of the greatest painters of the modern age: Willem de Kooning. Prince drew, painted, and collaged figures and faces into catalogues of de Kooning's iconic Women paintings. But then he took the next, ambitious step: he made large-scale paintings from his own book-sized assemblages, transferring them to canvas via inkjet, which he continued to collage and overpaint.
For any artist to take a virtuosic painter like de Kooning head on is daunting. For Prince, who gained fame first as a photographer, and whose complete lack of painting technique is surpassed only by his inability to operate a camera, it seemed completely nuts.
But Prince has been a passionate believer in the creative power of inability throughout his career. He credits the punk movement of the 1970s and early 80s as an inspiration for his foundational early work with rephotography, when he deliberately used commercial equipment he didn't understand and photolabs he didn't control to produce his ad-based images. As Prince tells it, a punk rock guitarist can pick up a guitar, and a couple of days later, he's on stage performing. It's actually the musician's limitations that can make great art and let the inability shine through.
Needing a break from de Kooning's Women but still feeling his desire to somehow add his own great paintings to the culture, and still thinking the big thoughts—of women and men, the Garden of Eden, the end of the world—Prince turned to the Rastas.
In the Summer of 2008, he began transforming his Canal Zone collage pages into giant paintings, building up the inkjet canvases with Rastas, guitars, vintage pin-up girls, and squeegeed paint. He worked quickly, finishing a painting in a day, or even half a day, so as to avoid overthinking and to preserve the works' rawness.
Prince produced a complete body of Canal Zone work—around 28 paintings—in preparation for his debut solo show at Gagosian Gallery in New York. The exhibition would be on 24th Street in Chelsea, down the block from Barbara Gladstone, Prince's longtime dealer who had sold so many of the Nurse paintings. Canal Zone ran from early November to mid-December, while the world's financial markets seized up. Though several paintings sold for seven-figure prices, the show generated little critical attention and received no major reviews.
Meanwhile, downtown, Christiane Celle, who had sold Calypso in 2007, was readying a new chain of interior design gallery/bookstores. She contacted Patrick Cariou to obtain copies of his out-of-print photobooks. And she floated the idea to him of opening her Manhattan location with an exhibition of Cariou's photos from Yes Rasta in the Spring of 2009. They met briefly in New York, and for coffee in Paris in the fall. But Cariou, who had never sold prints except to a friend, never replied to Celle's emails about a show. Instead of Cariou's black & white portraits of Rastafarians, Celle would eventually open her shop with black & white portraits of African tribesmen by Lyle Owerko.
Such is the revealing and deeply personal story of the creation of the Canal Zone paintings that emerges from the contentious, seven-hour deposition Richard Prince was compelled to sit for when Patrick Cariou sued him for copyright infringement in 2009.
Prince, whose preferred mode of discussion was to be left alone, and if that was infeasible, to play the unaccountable provocateur, was subjected, under oath, to extensive, confrontational questioning by Cariou's attorney Dan Brooks. He had to explain and defend his art, his career, and his decades-long practice of appropriating images made by others while one such maker, Cariou, sat silently across the table.
When I saw Canal Zone, I assumed the giant, porny, slapdash paintings were Prince's cynical stunt tied to his switching galleries, from Gladstone to the Gagosian juggernaut, an attempt to prove that Larry could get the overhyped market to buy literally anything Prince cranked out, even the world's shittiest paintings. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, I argued with a Cariou partisan on my blog that, sorry, love them or hate them, good, bad or positively awful, Prince's techniques, transformations, and critical smackdown of Yes Rasta's shallow, fashionista aestheticization of blackness added up to a fair use slam dunk.
And then in March 2011, Judge Deborah Batts delivered a sweeping and scathing judgment against Prince and his dealer, finding that every one of the Canal Zone paintings infringed Cariou's copyrights, and were made in bad faith, and were illegal to be shown, and should all be destroyed.
And it was only in trying to make sense of the verdict that I discovered the deposition. Where it turns out Prince had made this very persuasive case for his work and practice. It offered remarkable insights into his history and biography, details he, for once, was not making up. It provided a solid and unambiguous legal justification for the Canal Zone series as truly transformative in scale, medium, content, and context. It also supported the paintings as commentary and criticism of Cariou's work and the coffee table culture that spawned it. And for some reason that still eludes me, his lawyers avoided making any reference to this defense at every possible opportunity.
Instead, the attorneys of Cariou presented Prince's diffident refusals to claim a specific “message” for his art as evidence that the artist was indifferent to copyright and only interested in money. Cariou's claims of losing a lucrative show because of Prince's appropriation went unquestioned. And a misleadingly scaled, side-by-side comparison of photocopies of Cariou's images and Prince's paintings skewed the visual evidence the judge considered; repeated invitations for the court to view the actual paintings were rejected.
Prince and Gagosian immediately appealed the court decision, but even the artist's new, high-powered lawyers asked the judges to ignore what the artist said about his own work, and to base their decision about fair use instead on the different audiences and markets, and on the myriad interpretations art historians and the public might someday apply to the Canal Zone paintings.
Dogged by controversy, suspicion, and criticism throughout his career, Richard Prince's deposition testimony reveals him to be a feisty, self-aware defender of his world view. Not a cynic, but a pessimist. He is also a deeply serious artist, very thoughtful about his practice, committed to his art even in the face of commercial and critical indifference, conceptually rigorous, passionately engaged with the great artists of the past, and eager to stake his claim in art history. And he's apparently prepared to lose his paintings and face tens of millions of dollars in damages rather than admit to all that stuff in court.
