In 2009, photographer Patrick Cariou filed a lawsuit against appropriation artist Richard Prince for copyright infringement. Prince had used images of Cariou’s book Yes, Rasta (2000), a photographic documentation of the Rastafarian community in Jamaica, for the creation of his series Canal Zone. The case caught the art world’s attention because it represented the core of the discussion on photographic and appropriative originality and marked another milestone in the legal fight between photographers and appropriation artists. In 2011, the Southern District of New York held that Prince’s appropriations were infringing Cariou’s copyright. On appeal, Prince’s defense made a case for the transformative nature of Prince’s use of Cariou’s photographs, which then was granted for twenty-five out of thirty works. In 2014, Prince and Cariou settled the case.
The case of Cariou v. Prince foreshadowed the heated discussion of appropriation art a few years later, which showed that it very much depends on abusing positions of power—this was further twisted in the case of Yes, Rasta by two white artists fighting over the use of the depictions of black bodies.
Greg Allen’s exhaustive compilation in two volumes contains the most important documents and exhibits from the court record, but organized into a clearer, more readable format and augmented by the Canal Zone series paintings, installation shots from the Eden Rock hotel in St. Barth’s, Prince’s short story “Eden Rock” that ended up in his paintings, and Cariou’s detailed comparison of his photographs with Prince’s. In this way, Allen’s publication also demonstrates the transformative gesture of appropriation and remediation itself by turning bad scans, copied documents, and PDFs back into a printed book. An Amazon buyer of the first volume complains: “Plus is that it collects many of the court case documents in one bound edition. Minus is that the book is comprised of photocopied PDF documents at about 50 percent reduction in size, making it extremely difficult to read.”
The complete title on the cover of Allen’s publication is an exhaustive description of the book’s content: Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al, including 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 Received By The Hon. Judge Deborah A. Batts, as compiled and revised by Greg Allen for greg.org in April 2011 (front cover).
However, as a note on the back cover states, this book is not meant to be “a comprehensive or authoritative documentation of Cariou v. Prince et al. Instead, it is intended to serve as an art historical and critical resource, filtering relevant primary information about Prince’s biography, practice and work from the voluminous, largely inaccessible public record. But it also offers a fascinating, if at times exasperating, discussion of art, appropriation, creativity and originality.” Because Prince usually denies any explanation of his work, the artist’s 7-hour testimony in front of court is “the most exhaustive interview Prince has ever done” (back cover).
The initial publication was available as a hardcover on CreateSpace (no longer available), shortly followed by a slightly expanded softcover version, whose cover was made with the default settings for annotations in Apple’s preinstalled PDF-viewing software Preview.
In 2013, Allen published a second volume documenting and annotating the appeals phase of the case called Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA 2: The Appeals Court Decision in Cariou v. Prince, et al., Also The Court’s Complete Illustrated Appendix. The book covers the court’s revision, deciding that the appropriations by Richard Prince are in fact to be considered fair use. Most of the book is taken up by a reproduction of an illustrated appendix: a collection of poorly made photocopies confronting in detail all cases of appropriation in opposition to the original photographs.
Our copy, a gift from the author, was stamped, signed and dated by him.
