NARRATOR: This is a
photograph by Walker Evans.
And this is a photograph
by Sherry Levine.
Walker Evans' photograph
dates from 1936,
when he was hired by the
Farm Security Administration
to document the American
South in the wake of the Great
Depression.
Sherry Levine's
was taken in 1981
from a reproduction of
the Evans photograph,
as part of a series titled
yes, "After Walker Evans."
Credit where credit is due,
but if forgery is not at issue
here, what is?
Evans' photographs are iconic
and indisputable documents
of the Depression.
They show us its face.
But what exactly do Levine's
photographs show us?
Recent art is full of copying
of all kinds and degrees.
Art that borrows,
steals, pilfers,
or poaches existing images.
Some of them iconic, others not.
Are these confessions
of creative inadequacy,
bald opportunism
masquerading as concept?
Are these cries for help
as we drown in an image
saturated world,
or the death rattle
of the great
pictorial tradition?
How are we supposed
to distinguish
this kind of copying from
a long history of art
full of allusions, influences,
and innumerable instances
of visual sampling,
long before hip hop
spread the sonic version
of it coast to coast.
A sample after all is just
one part of a whole song.
But what if the
copy is the artwork?
This is the Case for Copying.
Artists, of course, have been
copying since time immemorial.
In fact, the earliest Western
traditions of aesthetic thought
defined art as mimesis, or
imitation of the visible world.
But artists don't just
imitate the world,
they imitate each other.
Copying in order
to train their hand
or demonstrate
stylistic innovation.
They copy to signal the
influence of other artworks,
to claim the prestige of
a particular heritage,
or to rework a stock artistic
subject for their own time.
Working from existing
imagery and traditions
can also suggest new
ways to navigate history.
Rafael's intimate portrait
of Pope Julius the Second
became a model for Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent
the 10th, which in turn inspired
Francis Bacon to make over
45 versions of his
own, each portrait
transgressive in
its own time for how
it exposed psychological
depths of the man
at the seat of the
church's power.
Velazquez's Las Meninas
was also metabolized
by Pablo Picasso,
who additionally
made numerous versions of "le
Dejeuner sur l'herbe" painted
by Edward Manet in 1863.
Manet's "Dejeuner" in turn
borrowed its composition
from a Raimondi engraving
of Raphael's "Judgment
of Paris" and its subject
from "Le Concert champetre."
But it's Manet's "Old
Musician" that establishes him
as the modernist mix master.
Though it might look
like a genre painting,
the "Old Musician" is in
fact a composite image
with an extravagant
number of citations.
"A painted phrase," as the
art historian Carol Armstrong
called it, that reads, "'after
Watteau,' 'after myself
and Murillo,' 'after Le Nain,
and Velazquez,'" and so on.
Manet's painting is not a
window onto another reality,
but a cluster of
representations, each one
like a song that can be
sampled again and again.
Manet's mashup, moreover,
stares back at us.
The "Old Musician"
personifies the way
that all pictures, so
to speak, regard us.
Images aren't just neutral
depictions of the world.
They're instruments
influencing how we
perceive ourselves and others.
This awareness inspired a number
of artists in the late 1970s
to make art that foregrounded
representation itself.
Art historians refer to this
work as Appropriation art.
In 1977, art critic Donald Crimp
curated an exhibition titled,
"Pictures," bringing
together artists
who shared an interest
in understanding
the picture itself.
Artists of the
Pictures generation,
as they came to be called,
plundered existing images
for their own work.
Jacques Goldstein's film
"Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer"
loops the familiar
MGM lion's roar,
suspending us between the
pleasure of anticipation
and the frustrating deferral
of the feature film.
Dara Birnbaum's technology
transformation, "Wonder Woman,"
fragments and repeats
clips from the TV series
to draw out the relationship
between technology
and sexual objectification.
By isolating and
manipulating images,
these artists direct our
attention toward their subtexts
and demonstrate how they
get their meanings, not
through our actual experience
with lions or superheroes,
but through our associations
with other pictures like them.
In her series of film
stills, Cindy Sherman
photographed herself in
the poses and scenarios
of generic feminine personas
that evoked stock narratives,
so that each version
of Sherman seems
overdetermined from the start
by our expectations for her.
As Crimp wrote, "We are not in
search of sources or origins
but of structures
of signification--
underneath each picture, there
is always another picture."
These artists certainly
weren't the first to use images
from pop culture.
The aptly named Pop
Art movement built
upon the work of artists
including Jasper Johns
and Robert Rauschenberg, who
made bronze casts of mass
produced objects or incorporated
newsprint and rubbish
into their work.
Art historian Leo Steinberg
described this work
as belonging to the
Flatbed Picture Plane,
borrowing the term from
the flatbed printing
press that had flooded the
post-war world with mass media
images.
As Steinberg saw
it, paintings were
no longer doorways to imaginary
worlds, evoking our visual.
Experience they
were like tabletops,
strewn with papers
and objects, that
simulated how we
look at pictures
in newspapers and magazines.
Not incidentally Andy
Warhol began his career
in advertising.
Warhol explained that he chose
the subjects of his paintings,
from commercial
products to celebrities,
precisely because everyone
already liked them.
The artist's job,
so Warhol claimed,
was not to offer up
new images of beauty,
but to reproduce what
society had already approved.
This authorized him
to appropriate images
of mass produced objects, and
to turn them out in the studio
he called The Factory,
blurring the distinctions
between artist and
factory worker,
and between commodity and art.
In more recent years,
Richard Prince,
who may sit atop the
high throne of copydom,
described his interest
in copying this way.
"Advertising images aren't
associated with an author.
They look like they have no
history to them, like they
showed up all at once.
They look like what art
always wants to look like."
Yet, of course, Prince,
Warhol, and other pop artists
certainly didn't fade
into the woodwork.
On the contrary, a
Campbell's Soup can
is almost synonymous with the
name Warhol, a single blown up
cartoon frame with
Roy Lichtenstein.
Pop art held up a mirror to
the ubiquity of mass media.
But a mirror is often the
weakest form of critique.
After all, that other thing
that looks like it showed up
all at once without
history, that's
the mass produced commodity.
Perhaps it's no surprise then
that the art market quickly
embraced Pop Art as
one more luxury object.
Appropriation art
on the other hand,
had a very different
relationship
to popular imagery.
More like certain strands
of Dada and Surrealism,
Appropriation art sought to
understand how images around us
inform our psyche and provide
a basis for collective life.
Martha Rosler's
"House Beautiful--
Bringing the War
Home" used a technique
similar to surrealist
collage, inserting photographs
from the Vietnam War into scenes
of American domestic life.
Both sets of images were
taken from copies of life.
Rosler just reassembled what
was already bound together
in the magazine, and what
only a serious threshold
for cognitive
dissonance holds apart.
Appropriation art also hearkened
back to the "Readymade"
by highlighting how an
artist's gesture of selection
could confer value on
the most mundane object.
Like the "Readymade,"
Appropriation
drew attention to the
institutions whose operations
depend on ideas of
exceptionality and originality,
even and especially in the
face of total unoriginality.
Appropriations by
Sturtevant, who
made perfect copies of artist's
work-- in the case of Warhol,
actually borrowing
his silk screens
to get the job done-- as well
as those by Sherry Levine,
compel viewers to question
just what kind of value
is added by a signature,
and more importantly,
what kinds of people
have historically
been authorized to sign
works in the first place.
Hint, hint-- they've
usually looked
more like Walker
Evans and Duchamp
than Sherry Levine
or Sturdevant.
Indeed, countless creative
achievements in our museums
are considered anonymous, many
of them seized from regions
and social groups that have
been denied recognition
and representation.
This is to say nothing of
conventionally unauthored
cultural contributions
from quilts, to recipes,
to folk or blues songs.
In his essay, "The
Death of the Author,"
the theorist Roland
Barthes argued that writing
contains many layers
of association
that can only be unified in the
reader's experience of a text.
This meant that the author
had no particular authority
over the meaning of a book,
because anything she wrote
existed in a web of connotations
and cultural significance.
To interpret a
book or an artwork
was therefore not to
decode it, or to identify
its definitive meaning, but to
demonstrate how it functioned
in this web of significance.
Michel Foucault
followed with his essay,
"What is an Author?",
which argued
that an author is actually just
an organizing principle that
allows us to group
together a certain number
of cultural objects.
More importantly,
it clarifies who
did not make the work, impeding,
rather than helping along,
the free circulation
and inventiveness
of creative output.
No less of a paradigm
for the artistic genius
than Pablo Picasso once
said, "Good artists borrow.
Great artists steal."
This is often taken to mean
that great artists transform
their influences into their
own authentic and original
inventions.
But Appropriation art turns
this meaning on its head.
Appropriation art
asks us to recognize
that so-called great artists
managed to convince us
that their works are authentic
and original because society
has already given them the power
to be authentic and original
for reasons that have little
to do with genius and a lot
to do with the structures
of power that concerned
Foucault. Yes, there are people
who have done amazing things
and gotten credit for it.
And we're grateful
for their work.
But copying shows that the idea
of the original originating
genius is a myth.
It shows that this
myth is linked
to the power of
images themselves
to determine what kinds of
representation, visual as well
as political, are made
available in our societies.
Appropriation art, while
sometimes confounding and often
contested, helps us see
that the context of pictures
is absolutely integral
to their meaning.
It reminds us that pictures
don't just have histories,
they exist in history.
A copy, no matter
how perfect, is never
really the same as the original,
since its context is always
shifting.
And since we exist in
history, our perspective
is always shifting, too.
When artists copy, we
recognize that they're
making fresh meanings through
their interaction with signs
and symbols and
bits of information
already out in the world.
And that this work is never
done, not for them, and not
for us.
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