Culture
Stealing beauty
by Peter Calder
What comeback do artists and designers have when their work is appropriated for commercial gain?
If imitation really were the sincerest form of flattery, Auckland sculptor John Radford would be feeling very flattered indeed.
Radford is an established artist whose projects included Transplastic, in which motor vehicles and an inner-city Victorian pub were daubed with malleable clay until they looked like life-size models of themselves.
He was also behind a more obviously pointed series of sculptures that, like children’s toys cast aside, artfully litter the green expanse of Western Park at the city end of Ponsonby Rd in Auckland. The sculptures, collectively and tellingly entitled TIP, comprise chunks of three buildings, orphan ornamented cornices that protrude, as if from burial in a landslide. Installed in 1998 at a cost of $380,000, they are a visually witty and striking contribution to the cityscape at the same time as being a sly commentary on the wanton destruction of Auckland’s architectural heritage during the development boom.
It’s worth noting, given what has happened since, that these are original works. If Radford had simply reproduced facsimiles of actual buildings that had become rubble, it would have accomplished his intention. But his sculptures are generic rather than mimetic. Like Peter Siddell’s Mt Eden landscapes, they are images of something that never existed, but might have. Thus, they conjure an even greater sense of loss: as objects of invention rather than models of real buildings, they are doubly remote from us.
Passers-by were not the only ones impressed by the TIP sculptures. They caught the eye of the menswear retailers Hallensteins, which incorporated an image of one of them on a T-shirt released at the beginning of last summer. Radford says he was gutted when he first saw the shirts.
“The damage to my reputation as an artist to have my work displayed on a cheap T-shirt is immeasurable,” he told the New Zealand Herald.
Hallensteins screen-printed an unspecified number of shirts with a degraded black-and-white photograph of the public sculpture adorned with an eagle and the logo of Planet 8, one of the chain’s lines of clothing. Radford told the Listener that he approached Hallensteins as soon as he saw the T-shirts.
“I tried to impress on them how disastrous it would be for my career to have any number of these random billboards walking around on people’s chests with low-grade images of my work.”
But, he says, he was fobbed off when he sought an offer of compensation and that Hallensteins offered only to stop selling the shirts and give him the remaining ones – though they would not tell him how many there were – if he signed an agreement to pursue the matter no further.
Lawyers for Radford have now filed a claim in the District Court at Auckland alleging infringement of his copyright and moral rights. Hallensteins managing director Cliff Kinraid has declined to comment on the matter while the action is pending.
Radford’s suit also alleges a secondary infringement that is a copyright equivalent of a claim for punitive damages. In essence, Radford’s barrister Peter Andrew says, he is asking the court to find that Hallensteins did not, as they claim, make an innocent mistake.
Depending on the length of the clothing retailer’s corporate memory, he may have a point. In the 1990s, fashion designer Doris de Pont had a run-in with Glassons – a sister company of Hallensteins since 1985 – when a garment based on a print she had produced appeared in Glassons stores.
The insult may have been aesthetic, but the injury was commercial. “My T-shirt cost $200 and theirs cost $29.95,” she says. “That’s because I used better-quality fabric and I have to pay for the cost of the design. They didn’t pay anything for their design.”
De Pont says the matter was “resolved, but not very satisfactorily. They agreed to stop doing it and paid us enough to pay our lawyers.” She hastens to admit that the failure was by her printer who had kept the screen and used it in a pitch to the larger firm. But the fact that the experience didn’t alert Hallensteins to the need to check the provenance of images used in their design may suggest carelessness at least, and perhaps even cavalier disregard for the artists.
“What happens in the fashion industry in New Zealand,” says de Pont, “is that people knock off whatever they can find. Generally, people have the decency to go overseas and buy samples there and knock those off, but occasionally they make the mistake of knocking off a New Zealand design and they get caught.”
De Pont suspects that large chains find it is more economical to pay off complainants than monitor what they are doing and play fair by negotiating payments. “It’s prohibitive for small players to take infringements to court, especially if you’re a small business and self-employed.” But it galls her that small players play by ethical rules that industry giants may ignore with impunity. She has an agreement with artist Paul Hartigan, whose distorted Tui beer bottle caps inspired a range of her fabric. Ironically, perhaps, Hartigan needed no permission from the brewer since he modified the original design.
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