ToP Workshops: Uncreative Practise

AIM:

‘On Appropriation, Collage and Collecting’

The Artist and the Collector

TASK:

1. COPY: using any technique along the continuum from straightforward to manipulated; make a copy
2. COLLECT: gather, accumulate and organise , consider how presentation figures in the endeavour
3. COLLAGE: Bring various object together, you are unlimited as tot he objects and materials from 2D to sculpture, from time based to performance

Images as a source of inspiration or purely as source material and the weird middle in-between

Bibliography:

• ****Kenneth Goldsmiths: Uncreative writing, Managing Writing in the Digital Age (2011); http://www.veramaurinapress.org/pdfs/Kenneth-Goldsmith_uncreative-writing.pdf
•  ****Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction (2007)
• Walter Benjamin’s: Archive (2007) tans by Ester Leslie (Arcades Project) – 1000 pages project
• Bourriard, N: Post Production; Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2007) – Relational Aesthetics
• ****Monroe, Ian: Where Does One Thing End and The Next Begin; Monroe, Ian., Where Does One Thing End and the Next Begin?, 2008 http://syntheticzero.net/2014/01/20/where-does-one-thing-end-and-the-next-begin-ian-monroe/
• Barbican: Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (2015)

LOOKING AT: An extended notion of art practise across themes and genre within contexts, not traditional seen as Fine Art; Archiving, collecting and collage

Douglas Huebler
Duchamps L.H.O.O.Q (1919) – The Object Trouv’e; cheap postcard reproduction of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title

 

• Appropriating an image through reproduction

Goldsmith: “Penalised for showing creativity and revered for plagiarism and stealing…unsurprisingly they survive”
The slightest art manipulation becomes art practise
“Act of choosing and refraining tells us as much about us as a story of our mothers…its just that we are never taught this”

Jonathan Lethem : The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism

Defence and History of plagiarism in Literary (free sharing of information and symbols)

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/

a link to 2007 Jonathan Lethem essay in Harper’s titled, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”

• Unconsciously absorbing another’s idea
• Ideas either Appropriated or re-transcribed
• The essay as a work of appropriation about appropriation: An unusual paradox
• Plagiarism in (literary) academia [especially] as a crime, but in Fine Art it is seen as mere appropriation of a creative practise used for self expression

An acknowledged kind of reference – moving images, symbols and language from one place to another and its context is content. How it is presented is what it’s about. It’s entire function

Transformation: it’s all in context (Jeff Koons example)

The notion of transformative: the Artist (initiates the transformation) and the viewer (perceives the transformation)

Bathes, R: The Death of the Author: incorporating the intentions (of the work) in critiquing the text; artist (person who transformations) are not allowed to factor-in what the work initially intended/its purpose

The notion of being able to trace something back it is origin…. and the other hand we have the issue of ‘rights’ and ‘exploitation’
Sherry Levine (After Walker Evans): Problem or degradation of imagery

ACTIVE APPROPRIATION

–‘PICTURES GENERATION’ – a group of artist who worked with Appropriation and Photography (USA 70s-90s)

The Pictures Generation was both the name of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (April 29 – August 2, 2009) and a means to an end in being the first formal labeling of a group of artists exhibited around their appropriation of images from the consumer and media saturated age in which they grew to maturity artistically.

 

The exhibition, curated by Douglas Eklund (with an accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press) in his museum debut, featured prominent art stars from the nineteen eighties such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger Louise Lawler, Robert Longo, David Salle, Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine, as well as their artistic predecessors such as John Baldessari, and artists who emerged with them in the New York art world who needed to be put back on a level playing field with their compatriots again such as Troy Brauntuch and Michael Zwack. Basically this orbit of artists emerged from two sources, the diaspora of Cal Arts and the founders of the Hallwalls non-profit gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Source 2:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcgn/hd_pcgn.htm

Young artists who came of age in the early 1970s were greeted by an America suffused with disillusionment from dashed hopes for political and social transformation to the continuation of the Vietnam War and the looming Watergate crisis. The utopian promise of the counterculture had devolved into a commercialized pastiche of rebellious stances prepackaged for consumption, and the national mood was one of catatonic shell-shock in response to wildly accelerated historical change, from the sexual revolution to race riots and assassinations. Similarly, the elder generation of artists seemed to have both dramatically expanded the field of what was possible in the field of art while staking out its every last claim, either by dematerializing the aesthetic object entirely into the realm of pure idea or linguistic proposition as in Conceptualism, or by rivaling the cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world itself as did the so-called earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, who died in 1973.

What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or a prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva that were just beginning to be made available in translation. Among these thinkers’ central ideas was that identity was not organic and innate, but manufactured and learned through highly refined social constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship. These constructions were embedded within society’s institutions and achieved their effects through the myriad expressions of the mass media. Barthes infamously extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto “The Death of the Author,” in which he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.

The famous last line of Barthes’ essay, that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,” was a call to arms for the loosely knit group of artists working in photography, film, video, and performance that would become known as the “Pictures” generation, named for an important exhibition of their work held at Artist’s Space in New York in 1977. The image-scavengering of these artists was not restricted to the child’s play of popular culture: Louise Lawler stalked the corridors of power in search of hidden treasure, while Sherrie Levine shot over the shoulders of photography’s founding fathers not as a dry Duchampian gesture, but in order to create something akin to musical overtones—a buzzing in the space between their “original” and her “copy” that effaced the distance between objective document and subjective desire.
Warhol: Recontextualisation; A rejection against Abstract Expressionism
No heroic transcendence travelling through the Artistwhen making the work, instead inspiration coming from the every day.

Walter Benjamin: Useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art

• Any choice mad (in art) has politics behind it
• Since art is/was removed from the ritualistic in the Modern Age, what is it in the service of…in the service of politics
• Reproduction is nothing new…we are just must better at
• Reproduction causes a loss of aura (unique existence), but a semblance of its aura can trove further, being looked upon by those unable tot travel to the object and witness is aura (it uniqueness in place and time) – Pro and cons of reproduction
• Reproduction had turned ritual into process (the process itself being the ritualistic element of the art object)
• Reproduction in analog activity

Increasing inter-relationship/blurring between man and machine
(Pistorious) Prosthetic use of machines to engage with the human body

Hijacking or shifting ones attention: the main aim of appropriation works

Copy:

• Appropriation is still a copy
• Performative action of taking that original work

Collect:

• Emphasis on unprofessionalism
• Gerhard Ritcher’s Atlas
• Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project) – fragments of mostly appropriated texts, sketches and notes for a unrealised project

Collage:

• Matt Sibler, The Untitled Project; Untitled #1, 2002-10. (Removes Text)

Features urban scenes with all traces of text stripped away and reconstructed in a separate frame, shooting a number if scenes around  North America, Europe, and China over the course of  nine years. In the reconstructed text frame of the previous photo of “The Untitled Project” by photographer Matt Siber The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.

Slides:

The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add anymore –

conceptualist artist Douglas Humbler, 1969

Jasper Johns Flag (1954-55) – “a painted flag or a painiting of a flag”; attempt to copy the feeling (symbolism) of the flag

Flag, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood,1954-55

Created when Johns was 24, two years after he was discharged from the US Army Johns was attracted to painting “things the mind already knows”. Critics were unsure whether it was a painted flag or a painting of a flag; Johns later said it was both.

Issues of Copyright – what are the boundaries?

Richard Prince Graduation (2008); Collage, inkjet, and acrylic on canvas
72 3/4 x 52 1/2 inches (185 x 133 cm)  – transformative and fair use of the appropation lead to the jury ruling in Prince’s favour over his ownership of the images. Similar case involving Jeff Koons

This work was part of what became the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the photographer of the images Prince used as the basis for the work. Initially ruling against Prince, the courts eventually found in his favor on appeal, stating that Prince’s use of the photographs in 25 works was transformative and thus fair use, citing an earlier case involving artist Jeff Koons. Five less transformative works were sent back to the lower court for review. The case settled in 2014.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram-photos-copyright-law-fair-use

Kienard and Picton Phillips; Photo Op., 2006; pigment ink print on 308 gms cotton rag paper and is part of a signed limited edition of 750, issues of appropation and user context

 

Sherry Levine’s After Walker, 1981 (Let Us NowPraise Famous Men) – with no manipulation to the original images (apart from the physical degradation of the image due to the process of reproduction), this piece in particular regards copyright infringement; work as the hallmark of the post-modern movement. The Estate of Walker Evans saw it as copyright infringement, and acquired Levine’s works to prohibit their sale.

Warhol Canned Soup (1968)– use of semi-mechanised processes and non-painterly style  and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work’s blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism (at the time period was not held not only to ‘fine-art’ values and aesthetics but also to a mystical inclination.) This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol’s motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day.

Simon Morris; Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, 2010: Re-transcribing Jack Kerouac‘s famous novel in its entirety. (a day a page completed over the period of a year) ; an exercise on ‘automatic’ writing. Subsequently published by Information as Material, available for £8.99

Kenneth Goldsmith Day (2003); The Figures, 836 page book, 10 x 6 x 2 in. Systematic prose writing. September 1, 2000 New York Times, letter by letter, word by word, left to right, top to bottom

http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-kenneth-goldsmith-uncreative-writing

http://www.veramaurinapress.org/pdfs/Kenneth-Goldsmith_uncreative-writing.pdf

 

Prose writing of a famous magazine publication, inc;. adverts and small subtext. Although intelligible, it is similar to the sort of automatic writing described in On the Road by  Jack Kerouac.

Jim Shaw Thrift Shop Collection – collection of painting collected (mostly anonymously) from charity shops by amateur artists; Shaw describes them as something between horror and inspired. Some material or aesthetic quality that doesn’t allow Shaw to throw them away.

Arman – used collection as the art object; teetering on obsession or OCD. Incorporates collection into collage-type outcome

Richters Atlas – varied collection of materials spanning a 50 year career (since mid-60s) arranged onto loads of sheets of paper

“In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away.

 

Sarah Charlesworth, series called Modern History (1977–79),
Photographed, at actual size, the front pages of 29 American and Canadian newspapers and blanked out everything except for their photographs and mastheads