Spring2016-Danner
Spring 2016 - The Photographic Apparatus
Hyper-Awareness of the Apparatus(es): Richard Prince's New Portraits
Patrick Danner
Richard Prince’s ouvre demonstrates a self-awareness in the face of what Vilém Flusser would describe as the apparatus, which for Prince can be read as the non-human agencies of the camera (or other means of creation) and the legal apparatus surrounding his artistic production.1 The legal vista seen through Prince’s work is evident, particularly when one considers, in the wake of the Cariou v. Prince case,2 the increased public scrutiny of Prince’s artistic persona. An article in The Observer placed Prince’s work in the context of other cases surrounding artistic expression and copyright infringement:
The Prince case goes beyond this, though, and begins to enter the realm of technical support in the artist’s bizarre refusal to defend his works on a basic level, which, regardless of Mr. Prince’s intent, makes a curious statement about them at a time when the courts have, in some instances, become a place for artistic expression.3
Taking Duray at his word, we have in this instance an artist who, to read Flusser faithfully, has exercised some degree of interpretive control beyond the hard apparatus with which he created the reinterpretations of Cariou’s work in Canal Zone. Going further, we see here a description of an artist who also self-consciously contends with both distributive and legal apparatuses that this work (and the reception of it) is informed by. In other words, to say that Prince extends “artistic expression” to the courtroom is to uncover a new possibility found in Flusser’s central thesis: that the artist is bound by the present limits of the apparatuses at their disposal. In other words, Flusser’s artist works within the limits set by a string of apparatuses, both “hard” apparatuses like the camera itself and “soft” apparatuses like cultural and social forces that surround the artistic act.4 These apparatuses, for Flusser, inform and define each other through the process of the “feedback loop,” through which developments to technology inform cultural expectations of the artistic product itself, and vice versa. As such, to call the courtroom a new arena through which the artist acts and produces is to remove the buffer between the apparatus and the artist; Prince can now act upon several layers of apparatus directly, informing each without relying on the technology of the feedback loop.
Prince’s recent work, an installation titled New Portraits, does much more to collapse and expand what we read as spheres of apparatuses, informing and containing each other, in Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Not only does Prince find himself back in court in the wake of his latest work, but the work itself re-photographs—that is, reintroduces the image to the hard apparatus—already produced and circulated photographs of others. Specifically, Prince has dedicated much of his exhibition to the re-photography of Instagram photos. According to Lizzie Plaugic, writing for The Verge, the most recognizable “modifications” to the Instagram images “are the slightly sleazy comments Prince leaves under the photos. Under one of Ferreira in a red car: ‘Enjoyed the ride today. Let's do it again. Richard.’”5
The “soft,” legal apparatus that surrounds Prince’s repetitive court appearances is quite clearly in play in the production of his photography. That is to say, Prince himself seems keenly aware of the manipulation of that apparatus in clearing himself of legal responsibility. Flusser himself recognizes that the know-ability of the functioning of the apparatuses at play. In a telling hypothetical, Flusser writes,
As photographers know that only those photographs that fit into the newspaper’s program will be published, they attempt to fool the newspaper’s censorship by surreptitiously smuggling aesthetic, political or epistemological elements into their image. The newspaper on the other hand may well discover these attempts to fool it and publish the photographs anyway because it thinks it can exploit the smuggled elements to enrich its program.6
In this instance, Flusser illustrates how the photographer’s knowledge of the soft apparatus of distribution and publication that surrounds photographic production works to the advantage of the would-be political provocateur. Manipulating the camera-as-apparatus itself allows for the inclusion of “aesthetic, political or epistemological elements” that the editor of a paper would have to approve (knowingly or otherwise). Conversely, Flusser also illustrates how the distributive apparatus—the paper—could then very well appropriate those elements to “enrich its program,” to make room for such elements can or cannot be produced, according to the soft societal apparatus that makes up the newspaper’s readership.
Prince’s New Portraits presents an extreme extension of the politicized photograph in a newspaper. Taking the above photograph, we find in this instance that much more supple apparatuses are at play, and the collapsing of the space between them is the very subject taken up. If the function of the feedback loop is, as Flusser says, to allow societal reception of photographs to inform the photographic apparatus, then Prince’s work, it seems, collapses the distance between the two. Yet there is a fine-grained distinction worth making; in fact, it isn’t terribly clear whether it is Prince’s work, or just the figure of Prince himself, that complicates a read of these apparatuses.
In the above image, the various programs of apparatuses inflecting Prince’s work are seen quite clearly. In the first instance, this is Prince’s re-photography of an Instagram photo.7 That is, the original Instagram photo, as a product of a certain photographic, distributive, and “soft” societal apparatuses, was appropriated by those apparatuses through which Prince viewed, then photographed, the image. We can read Prince’s work as portraying the limits of the programs inflecting the original, then. The lighting available during the production of the Instagram photo, the celebrity apparatus that informs the production of a certain type of photograph, the social apparatus that anticipates the production of a feminine photo, a particular type of feminine photo circumscribed by the fashion industry,8 and, perhaps foremost for Prince’s purpose, the distributive apparatus of Instagram that situates the photograph above a string of comments, and among a bevy of timestamps.
Prince’s re-photograph interacts with these apparatuses at many points. A strong read of Flusser would suggest that the hard apparatus of the camera itself, the affordances of its programs, is reproduced and magnified through Prince’s work. It not only highlights the program of the original hard apparatus—the lighting, resolution, and so on, in the original Instagram photo—but reframes it through the parallel program of his own camera. Yet this is a subtle reconfiguration of programmatic features. Unlike his appropriative work with Yes, Rasta, Prince here appears to limit the trace of his own camera. The original shadow of the Instagram photo remains starkly visible; it is likely the most prominent detail left by the hard apparatus at play in the original. Indeed, Prince’s true intervention comes at the level of the digital, distributive apparatus, where he has wiped the original comments and included his own: “On The Beach meets Fail Safe meets 28 Days Later meets Lord Of The Flies meets The Road,” and “Clear Path Foul.” These non sequiturs seems to exist as a secondary feature of Prince’s work; they are nowhere near as prominent to the viewer as the original image itself. By consciously reflecting the limits of copyright law, however, they do work in a legal sense: they are nods toward the soft, legal apparatus where much of Prince’s work thrives.
To revisit an earlier point, we still wrestle with Duray’s thesis, that Prince is, in fact, “using the legal system as a medium.” And if the purpose of photography is to provide information for the feedback loops among the apparatuses at play (here, the camera itself, the distributive apparatus, the digital apparatus of Instagram, the social apparatus receiving and responding to both the original and Prince’s appropriation) then we must acknowledge the following from copyright attorney John Arsenault, re-quoted in Plaugic’s essay on Prince’s recent exhibit: “When I first saw it, I thought it was cut and dry [....] But then I looked again and saw what was captured specifically, and the commentary under it, then it creates a question. A silly question, especially given that he has sold these for money, but there you go.”9
The re-drawn commentary under the photo most prominently draws attention to the ‘silliness’ of the legal apparatus; similarly, it draws the viewer’s attention to the role Prince himself plays in the production of the work—the reach of a uniquely digital and participatory apparatus at play in our contemporary artistic moment. Such a positioning of the human agent serves to collapse what, in Flusser at least, appears to be clean boundaries between apparatuses, and in doing so this positioning of the human raises the visibility of the soft(er) apparatuses that, in most photography, often seem to disappear.
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Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Trans: Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion. 1983. 2014. 83.
Cariou v. Prince took up Prince’s exhibit Canal Zone, wherein the artist took photographs from Patrick Cariou’s book, Yes, Rasta, overlaid them with small amounts of paint, and in some instances took cues from collage form. For example, in one image Prince pasted a photo of a guitar into the hands of one of Cariou’s subject. According to The Observer, Prince’s defense of that piece in court was “Hey, this guy is playing the guitar” (“Court Jester”).
Duray, Dan. “Court Jester: Is Richard Prince Using the Legal System as a Medium?” Observer May 29, 2012. Web.
More of this definitional work can be found in Wysocki’s essay in this volume.
Plaugic, Lizzie. “The story of Richard Prince and his $100,000 Instagram art.” The Verge May 30, 2015. Web.
Flusser 55.
To be sure, from the perspective of our readership, this is actually a photograph of Prince’s re-photograph of the Instagram photo. For our purposes the reader should assume, however, that we are looking at the thing itself.
Candace Swanepoel, the subject of the Instagram photo, is a supermodel most known for her work with Victoria’s Secret.
Emphasis mine.