Clinton Fein (born 1964 in South Africa) is an artist, writer and activist, noted for his company Apollomedia and its controversial website
Annoy.com
Clinton Fein (born 1964 in South Africa) is an artist, writer and activist, noted for his company Apollomedia and its controversial website Annoy.com and its Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, United States Attorney General, regarding the c ...
and its
Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
victory against
Janet Reno,
United States Attorney General, regarding the
constitutionality of the
Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case ''Reno v. ACLU'', the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck ...
in 1997.
This victory, a landmark for
First Amendment rights, won Fein's right to disseminate his art. Fein won another federal First Amendment lawsuit to remove a government-imposed
gag order. As recognition, Fein received a nomination for a
PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in 2001. Fein now presides the board of First Amendment Project, a nonprofit organization that protects and promotes freedom of information, expression, and petition.
Early life and career
Born and raised in
Johannesburg, South Africa, Fein graduated from the
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1986, with a Bachelor of Arts in
Industrial Psychology. After living in New York for a couple of years, Fein moved to Los Angeles, where he began reporting directly to the President of
Orion Pictures
Orion Pictures (legal name Orion Releasing, LLC) is an American film production and distribution company owned by Amazon through its Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) subsidiary. In its original operating period, the company produced and released films ...
, as part of the creative team for numerous films, among them Academy Award-winning ''
Dances with Wolves'' and ''
The Silence of the Lambs''.
From the outset, Fein's work has led him into some high-profile confrontations. In 1994, his
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...
''
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military'', based on the book by renowned investigative reporter
Randy Shilts that examined the issue of gays in the military, used digital technology as an art form. When the US Navy unsuccessfully attempted to block its release,
it became the first CD-ROM to triumph under First Amendment protections. ''Conduct Unbecoming'' won the
Critic's Choice Award
The Critics' Choice Movie Awards (formerly known as the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award) is an awards show presented annually by the American-Canadian Critics Choice Association (CCA) to honor the finest in cinematic achievement. Writ ...
, was praised by
Wired Magazine as "a tantalizing peek at the potential of CD-ROM publishing," and dubbed "evolutionary" by
Rolling Stone Magazine.
Art and law
Fein was the first South African-born American to challenge government restrictions on technological communications when he filed a federal lawsuit 30 January 1997. Fein, represented by Michael Traynor of
Cooley Godward LLP
Cooley LLP is an American international law firm, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices worldwide. The firm's practice areas include corporate, litigation, intellectual property, fund formation, public markets, employment, life s ...
and by
William Bennett Turner
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Eng ...
of
Rogers, Joseph, O'Donell and Phillips, filed a lawsuit against Janet Reno, former United States Attorney General, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
The CDA made the communication of anything "indecent with the intent to annoy", a felony punishable by a fine and up to two-year imprisonment. President
Bill Clinton signed the CDA into law in February 1996. Fein filed the lawsuit, ''Apollomedia v. Reno'', the same time he launched his Annoy.com web site. A three-judge panel in
made a divided decision on the lawsuit. Fein filed a
Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
appeal, which he won in 1999.
In June 1999, the U.S. government sent Fein an order to reveal a user of Annoy.com's
e-card service.
Earlier, in April 1999, the
University of Houston tried unsuccessfully to obtain the website's records. The government later ordered Fein to stop discussing details of this investigation, its existence or its application. In
United States v. ApolloMedia', Fein argued that this gag order violated the
First Amendment and the statutory requirement that it have a definite duration.
The case moved from a Texas
magistrate court to the
United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas and then to the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit granted the appeal. The District Court then unsealed the website's records and all related proceedings and lifted the gag order.
Art, politics and censorship
As an artist, Fein is represented b
Toomey Tourellin San Francisco an
Axis Galleryin New York, and his shows have been dogged by controversy. In 2001, Fein was scheduled to open a solo exhibition, Annoy.com, (based on his critically acclaimed web site of the same name), in San Francisco in October. After the
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial ...
,
Artforum Magazine pulled an advertisement for Fein's show from their October issue. The advertisement displayed a
imageof a purse-lipped former New York mayor,
Rudy Giuliani
Rudolph William Louis Giuliani (, ; born May 28, 1944) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 107th Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He previously served as the United States Associate Attorney General from 1981 to 198 ...
, sitting naked in a urine-filled glass, referencing the technique used by artist
Damien Hirst, in which animate objects are soaked in formaldehyde and encased in a glass containers. Fein's advertisement, designed to link Mayor Giuliani with mayoral candidate
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner, co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. He was Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was a ca ...
, incorporated imagery from the exhibition ''Sensation'' that resulted in mayor Giuliani withholding funding from the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
. Clutching a crucifix with a nod to artist
Andres Serrano
Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950) is an American photographer and artist. His work, often considered transgressive art, includes photos of corpses and uses feces and bodily fluids. His '' Piss Christ'' (1987) is a red-tinged photograph of a ...
and with another Giuliani targeted work, Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary forming the backdrop, copy on the top of the image reads: "Mike for Mayor" and at the bottom, "Start Spreading the News."
Artforum Executive Editor
Knight Landesman stated that the magazine was understaffed and that the editors did not feel comfortable publishing a disparaging image of Rudy Giuliani.
In October 2004,
Palo Alto-based printing company
Zazzle destroyed two of Fein's giant images. just before the opening of a solo exhibition at Toomey Tourell Gallery. The first of the images, reviewed at Chelsea's Axis Gallery by ''
The New York Times Ken Johnson, was described as "an American flag with the stars and stripes made from the text of the official Abu Ghraib report ... accompanied by fifty representations of the iconic image of a hooded man teetering on a box with wires trailing from his arms comprising the stars." The other depicted President Bush on a crucifix and was entitled "Who Would Jesus Torture?" The printing company told
San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker that it had "destroyed the images"; company spokesperson Matt Wilsey claimed the image might "offend Christians," and threatened to sue Fein for defamation if Fein publicly criticized the company's actions.
"Who Would Jesus Torture?" was published in ''Art of Engagement, Visual Politics in California and Beyond,'' by Peter Selz, released in November 2005, an
exhibitedat the Katzen Arts Center at American University in 2006. (Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum, and a former curator of New York's
Museum of Modern Art.) In November 2006, "Who Would Jesus Torture" accompanied an article about Fein i
American Protest Literatureby author and Harvard University lecturer Zoe Trodd, published by
Harvard University Press. It was this interview that Fein cited as a catalyst for his exhibitio
Torture which opened at Toomey Tourell gallery in San Francisco in January 2007, featuring gigantic, high-resolution photographs that reenacted infamous scenes from
Abu Ghraib prison
Abu Ghraib prison ( ar, سجن أبو غريب, ''Sijn Abū Ghurayb'') was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison with torture, weekly exe ...
in Ira
Fein's Torture series was exhibited in Beijing in September 2007 and in London in October 2007. A review in the December 2007 issue of
Art in America
''Art in America'' is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world in the United States, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It i ...
magazine, summed up the impact of Fein's Torture series, stating: "Torture of detainees or their rendition to countries with even more abusive torture regimens has become semi-legal under the Bush administration. Fein reminds us, however, that these practices can never be anything less than intolerable."
Fein is the current editor of First Amendment Project's web log and writes a blog, Pointing Finger
for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
References
External links
Bibliography
Clinton Fein Official Web SiteClinton Fein at Toomey Tourell GalleryClinton Fein and the Art of Political ProtestBy Deborah Phillips
Clinton Fein is not afraid to make a statementBy Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
Articles
The Horror of Torture, Reinterpreted through ArtBy Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle
Precision StrikeBy Michael Leaverton, The San Francisco Weekly
The Bigger Picture 'Torture'By Reyhan Harmanci, The San Francisco Chronicle
By Molly Freedenberg, Ventura County Reporter
As Nov. 2 nears, artists get in their last licks, sending up Bush and company on center stageBy Steve Winn, The San Francisco Chronicle
Surface Magazine
By Michelle Goldberg, Metropolitan Magazine
By Steve Silverman, Wired
By Pamela Mendels, The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
U.S. court protects 'annoying' online speechBy Elinor Mills, CNN
A very confusing decisionKRON TV
News
Corporate Policy Leads to Political CensorshipBy Molouk Y. Ba-Isa, Arab News
2 of Clinton Fein's political works run afoul of his printer's policiesBy Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle
By Paul Festa, C, NET
By Kresta Tyler Johnson, Artthrob Magazine
Publications
American Protest Literatureby Zoe Trodd, from Harvard University Press, 2006.
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyondby Peter Selz, from University of California Press, 2006.
Art, editorials and writing
Annoy.comClinton Fein at Redroom.comPointing Fingers on SFGateThe First: First Amendment Project Blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fein, Clinton
1964 births
Living people
People from Johannesburg