Appropriation in the arts - the adventure continues

From here: Damien Hirst's work has been being 'ripped off' by a group of artists who want to make a point about the multimillionaire's stringent use of copyright law. Their action follows Hirst's decision to threaten to sue a 16-year-old designer who used an image of the skull in a collage to sell on the internet.

'For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.2'. An exact copy of Cartrain's collage, painstakingly recreated and improved by James Cauty from random pixels found on the interweb. 30.5cm x 42cm giclee (inkjet) print on enhanced matt art paper. Numbered Edition of 13. Signed with a very poor imitation of Cartrain's signature in silver ink on the front and by the real artist on the back. To see all of the works offered for sale go here.

Also of note is the recent news of Shepard Fairey, a street artist famous for his red, white and blue "Hope" posters of President Obama being arrested last week on warrants accusing him of tagging property with graffiti.

A lot of my works involve appropriation from existing photographs to create paintings. It is interesting to see how the case against Shepard Fairey and the action taken by the artists against Damien Hirst will unravel.

The essay "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem is a classic in this realm as are works by Joy Garnett.

More on appropriation in the arts in this blog can be found here and here.

Appropriation in the Arts

As I continue to understand appropriation in the arts, I ran into a great write-up on poet Lewis Hyde and his philosophy on copyrights and copylefts. It is a great read for those exploring the realms of creative commons and believe in the virtues of sharing their creative output…

Despite Ben Franklin’s notorious talents of self-promotion, he was explicit that his inventions were not and should not be his to claim as property. Offered an exclusive patent on the Franklin stove, he refused on the grounds that the invention was based on previous innovations — specifically, on theories of heat and matter articulated by Isaac Newton and the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave. “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” Franklin wrote in his “Autobiography,” “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

Of course, you might say, this was an easy position for Franklin to take: he was rich. People need their copyrights to live. But that’s exactly Hyde’s point: copyrights are utilitarian things. They generate money to pay a mortgage and buy groceries and continue working. Extended too far beyond their practical usefulness, copyrights not only contradict their original intent; they also wall creators off from the sources of their inventiveness. Genius, Hyde believes, needs to “tinker in a collective shop.”

Appropriation in art: Redux

In my quest to find answers to appropriation in the arts, here is a quiz: Is the image below by the Austin based artist Baxter Orr a twisted parody, an example of creative appropriation or just blatant plagiarism of the original artwork by Shepard Fairey (on the right)? Full article here. You decide.

Baxter was ordered by the court to stop making this class of art (a class that involves deriving from existing artwork made by the famous graffiti artist Fairey). Appropriation is a funny thing – the legalese in the court order that orders Baxter to cease and desist states that ‘as you have neither asked for nor received permission to use the work as a basis for the artwork, I believe you have willfully infringed our rights – blah, blah…”.

I cringe when I hear that people cannot ‘use other works as a basis’ (at least as idea founts with an aim to creating works of their own). Of course, ‘as a basis’ should not mean an outright copy with minor cosmetic modifications, but should accomodate for developing ‘appropriate derivatives’ that merits enough meaning to stand on its own – now defining that will take time and effort and will need to be assigned to that austere circle of artists and lawyers working out common ground together (something like the GNU GPL), but using blanket threats of ‘cannot even use the work as a basis’, will not do good for either of the parties involved…

Left: Baxter's 'Dope'; Right: Shepard's 'Hope' (Image ripped from here)Disclaimer: I read about this first on Fecalface

Joy Garnett at the Winkleman gallery

27th street, West of 10th avenue in Chelsea, NY is a funny neighborhood. Next to a nudie Scores club with pictures of nubile girls looking for more clothes, you have a swank Lamborghini dealership abutting art galleries past 10th avenue. The point may be that for someone who might want to satisfy a majority of their hedonistic fantasies, you have some if it here - fast cars, women and great art. Funny, I did not spot a wine store, but what the hell, I guess one gets it at Scores. The objective of this post was to talk about the art aspect and not about the other facets of hedonism. Joy Garnett is showing at the Winkleman gallery and I had gone by to see the offerings. I had been drawn to Joy's works ever since she painted the Molotov Man and from listening to her arguments on appropriation and augmentation of found images at Columbia University. A lot of my paintings also have been worked from images that I ‘found’ (I know that some of you might find umbrage with that) on the internet and I remember striking a chord with her approach early on (blogged here, here and here).

This show consists of four large scale oil paintings done in a very expressionist style (unlike some of her previous works that have a tendency to lean towards the representational). The aspects of internet based image appropriation are largely absent. Although, in retrospect, only talking to her and understanding the motivations behind this current crop of paintings would one clearly understand her current creative drives. The brochure hints at the motivations in the following sentence “The images Garnett paints are culled from digital mass media outlets and then archived for sometimes months at a time, permitting their context to evaporate. Returning to the image with a fuzzy at best memory of what it reportedly documented, Garnett’s process highlights the role misremembering plays in this new dubious "reality."

The brochure also tells us that these paintings were of images taken of places at about the same time spanning different corners of the globe on the same day. A cityscape in China, the rubble of the World Trade Center, a South American seascape and the high noon painting of an unidentified place is what the show is all about.
While ‘Morning in China’ and ‘Noon’ are superbly executed, the painting of the seascape (‘Harbor’) and the dark imagery evoked by the ruins of WTC (‘Night’) could have done better (just my view). I did stare at ‘Noon’ for such a long time that the gallery assistant (a great and an interesting individual named Max) came by to check out on me and see if all were OK. Put together, the paintings complement each other very well with the stated theme – images of different aspect of the marks of our existence on the disparate global locations. No question, definitely worth checking out.
The show opened yesterday, but the reception is slated for next Thursday, 21st February (might be a good chance to meet Ms. Joy and the effervescent Mr. Winkleman whose blog is a must read).

Morning in China, oil on canvas

Night, oil on canvas

Harbor, oil on canvas

Noon, oil on canvas

Detail of Noon