copyright

Titian - Venus of Urbino (1538)

Edouard Manet - Olympia (1863)

context matters

Original

Parody

art in an age of mechanical reproduction

"What's appropriation art? It's when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotation."

appropriate and remix

Elaine Sturtevant, an American artist born in 1930 in Lakewood, OH, has achieved recognition for works that consist entirely of copies of other artists’ works. Warhol, Stella, Gonzalez-Torres, etc. In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. Nearly all of the artists she has chosen to copy are now considered major artists.

A literary equivalent would be along the lines of "creative translation" such as Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, in which Pound picked through the elegies of Propertius, translated them, cut them up, and reassembled them in a fashion he deemed entertaining and relevant. Examples from other forms: Thelonius Monk Plays Duke Ellington, in which Monk takes great liberties with Ellington’s songbook. Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comic book art. Picasso’s use of newsprint, among other media, in, say, Composition with Fruit, Guitar, and Glass. Paul’s Boutique: The Beastie Boys, Dust Brothers, and Mario Caldato, Jr., sample from more than 100 sources, including Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, James Brown, and Sly & the Family Stone. Steve Reich’s "Different Trains," which incorporates audio recordings about train travel by Holocaust survivors and a Pullmanporter. Musique concrete instance, John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4," written for 12 radios, each played by 2 people (one to tune the channel and one to control volume and timbre). A conductor controls the tempo; the audience hears whatever is on the radio in that city on that day. Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Offertium,” which mutates themes from Bach’s “Musical Offering” until they’re beyond recognition. In “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major” by Johann Pachelbel, Brian Eno bends and twists Pachelbel.

In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.

Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.

appropriation art

copyright quotes

Genius borrows nobly (Emerson)

Good poets borrow; great poets steal (Picasso)

Art is theft (Picasso)

What's appropriation art?

It's when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context, you change the connotation.

authentic copy

I reproduce the work of important artists not as best as I could because that implies something different, as close as I could without copying it. When you copy something it becomes something else.

- Elaine Sturtevant

Elaine Sturtevant - Warhol diptych (1973)

appropriation art

Night Ripper

Girl Talk - Night Ripper (2006)

We’re living in this remix culture. This is a time where any grade-school kid has a copy of Photoshop and can download a picture of George Bush and manipulate his face how they want and send it to their friends. And that’s just what they do. Well, more and more people have noticed a huge increase in the amount of people who just do remixes of songs. Every single Top 40 hit that comes on the radio, so many young kids are just grabbing it and doing a remix of it. The software is going to become more and more easy to use. It’s going to become more like Photoshop when it’s on every computer. Every single P. Diddy song that comes out, there’s going to be ten-year-old kids doing remixes and then putting them on the Internet.

But why is this good?

It’s good because it is, in essence, just free culture. Ideas impact data, manipulated and treated and passed along. I think it’s just great on a creative level that everyone is so involved with the music that they like…You don’t have to be a traditional musician. You get a lot of raw ideas and stuff from people outside of the box who haven’t taken guitar lessons their whole life. I just think it’s great for music.

- Gregg Gillis

Prosumer

Candice Breitz - King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) (2005)

This work is based on a pretty simple premise: there are enough images and representations of superstars and celebrities in the world. Rather than creating more images of people who are already overrepresented, rather than literally making another image of a Madonna or a John Lennon, I wanted to reflect on the other side of the equation, on what goes into the making of celebrity.

The idea is to shift the focus away from those people who are usually perceived as creators so as to give some space, some room, to those people who absorb cultural products—whether it’s music or movies or whatever the case may be. And to think a little bit about what happens once music or a movie has been distributed: how it may get absorbed into the lives into the very being of the people who listen to it or watch it.

Even the most broadly distributed, most market-inflected music comes to have a very specific and local meaning for people according to where it is that they’re hearing it or at what moment in their life they’re hearing it. What goes hand in hand with the moment of reception is a dimension of personal translation.

In African and other oral cultures, this is how culture has traditionally functioned. In the absence of written culture, stories and histories were shared communally between performers and their audiences, giving rise to version after version, each new version surpassing the last as it incorporated the contributions and feedback of the audience, each new version layered with new details and twists as it was inflected through the collective. This was never thought of as copying or stealing or intellectual property theft but accepted as the natural way in which culture evolves and develops and moves forward. As each new layer of interpretation was painted onto the story or the song, it was enriched rather than depleted by those layers.

This process of making meaning may be more blatant in the practice of certain artists than it is in the practice of others. Artists who work with found footage, for example, blatantly reflect on the absorptive logic of the creative process. But I would argue that every work of art comes into being through a similar process, no matter how subtly. No artist works in a vacuum. Every artist reflects—consciously or not—on what has come before and what is happening parallel to his or her practice.

- Candice Breitz