C101
Article
Makers
and Takers: Art and the Appropriation of Ideas
What's
wrong, or right, with using other people's ideas? Here Henri McKervey
and Declan Long investigate the originality - quoting - appropriating - plagiarism
continuum.
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Gillian
Wearing: from Signs that say what you want to say and not
signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-93,
on aluminium, 40.5 x 30.5 cm each; courtesy Gorney
Bravin + Lee, New York and Maureen Paley Interim Art, London
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In
his essay In Defence of Plagiarism, Christopher Hitchens
offers an amendment to an established definition of artistic 'theft':
A
good rule of thumb for young plagiarists starting out in life might
be the one set down by George Moore. 'Taking something from one
man and making it worse is plagiarism'. To 'making it worse' one
could add 'or leaving it exactly the same'.
Given
that there has been a number of high-profile 'appropriations' of
ideas in recent times - instances in which creative thinking has
been duplicated with a suprising degree of openness - it is instructive
to examine what exactly the implications are when an artist or a
writer cries "theft."
Hitchens, after giving examples of occasions when he himself became
both accuser and accused (the latter instance being resolved to
his satisfaction, although, he adds "I still wake up whimpering
about it"), approaches the matter of definition with extreme caution:
"If you think you know what plagiarism is, you are making a very
large claim - the fact that you know originality when you see it."
In order to illustrate his point, Hitchens provides several "relatively
shattering" examples of occasions when originality came into question
- even such canonical standards of literature and oratory as T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land and Martin Luther King's momentous
'I Have a Dream' speech are shown to have relied, rather heavily
in part, on certain unattributed 'source material'. Science too,
Hitchens notes, has not been immune:
Sir
Isaac Newton ...took great credit for propounding a law of planetary
motion . This was to the outrage of his rival Robert Hooke, who
maintained that Newton had drawn on his work as well as that of
others...Newton made no direct admission, but did tactfully say
that 'if I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants'.
Unfortunately
for Newton this memorable mitigating aphorism had itself appeared
thirty years before in a collection of proverbs by George Herbert
(remarkably, Herbert too had 'borrowed' the phrase from another
source).
The point of Hitchens's observations, nevertheless, is not (or is
at least not primarily) about challenging reputations; rather,
his key question becomes "what would our culture be without borrowing,
adaptation and derivatives?" In the area of visual art, such a question
has taken on additional relevance given the extent to which appropriation
and the recycling of pre-existing materials have become crucial
factors in contemporary practice. While the possibility of originality
is a persistent theme in contemporary art, the re-use of images
and ideas does not always take place without controversy, particularly
when concepts from visual art are re-applied by creative teams from
the advertising world.
Among the most controversial of recent cases in which material has
been relocated from art to advertising has been the artist Gillian
Wearing's disputes with two separate advertising firms over their
unattributed use of her ideas. Difficulties began for Wearing when
an ad for Volkswagen directly copied the style and idea of her 1992
photographic work Signs that say what you want
them to say not signs that say what someone else wants you to say.
In this piece, members of the public were pictured holding placards
on which they had written short statements describing their inner
feelings. In one image , for instance, a young man in a business
suit held a sign which read "I'm desperate"; in another, an individual
holds in front of him a card inscribed with the startling statement,
"I've thought about being a gigolo but I'm worried about the health
risks." Volkswagen's made-for-TV version used a different selection
of people (presumably actors in this case) and new, less intriguing,
statements - a security guard, for example, held a card with the
word 'sensitive' as a contrast to his tough appearance - but without
question, the principle remained the same.
At the time of the advertisement being broadcast, Wearing did not
pursue any legal action against the advertising agency or the car
manufacturer, though her decision did not come about as a result
of any satisfactory arrangements being made with either. Rather,
there was some problematic recent precedent in that another advertising
agency had been challenged by a young film-maker, Mehdi Norowszian,
for similarly alledgedly borrowing one of his ideas for a Guinness
commercial, a case which resulted in Norowszian being ultimately
liable for £200,000 in costs - a figure which even Gillian Wearing,
one of Brit Art's biggest young stars, could not afford to lose.
Unfortunately, difficulties were to arise again when the idea behind
another artwork by Wearing, 1997's 10-16, turned up in an
advertisement for Sky Digital. This time, the case had an added
dimension of controversy in that the commercial clip had been made
by the ad agency of Charles Saatchi, Brit Art's primary benefactor
and the owner of an edition of 10-16. Wearing's response,
when interviewed by the Observer newspaper at the time of
the disagreement, was to ask "how could an ad agency do something
so unethical?" To one Observer reader who had worked in advertising,
Wearing's query exposed her as either naive or disingenuous:
I
worked in advertising for 17 years and hardly ever saw an original
idea. What I did see was clever appropriation of creative ideas
from movies, TV, art and literature...Advertising agencies are practised
plagiarists.
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John Paul
McAree:Sack of Balgriggan, painting, 2002; courtesy
Ormeau Baths Gallery
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In
relation to the practise of plagiarism in literature, Christopher
Hitchens borrows a line from Robert Benchley: "great literature
must spring from an upheaval in the artist's soul. If that upheaval
is not present then it must come from the works of any authors which
happen to be at hand and easily adapted." Whether or not advertisers
can be said to have souls, it is feasible that the latter part of
Bentley's formulation could apply to much of their craft.
Yet,
as Hitchens's examples from literature make clear, strategies of
appropriation are not merely developed by those operating outside
the realm of the fine arts. In visual art, borrowings and unattributed
referencing might in fact be said to move more often in the opposite
direction as artists re-use material from advertising, popular culture
or even other contemporary artworks as a key part of their individual
art language. Steve McQueen's 1999 Turner Prize-winning video work
Deadpan, for example, featured an image of a falling house
which had been famously first used in a 1928 Buster Keaton film
Steamboat Bill Junior (more recently the idea has been re-used
again, appearing in the video for the Chemical Brothers' single
The Test). 'Appropriation art' is even a genre all of its
own in the history of modern art. Turner-shortlisted artist Glenn
Brown, for instance, a Sensation peer of Wearing's, has gained
a reputation (and even occasionally run into trouble) for his direct
appropriations of other artists' styles. Brown's paintings, as David
Barrett has noted, "appropriate well-known works and reconstruct
them in a painstakingly hyper-real manner"; in one, Brown might
'impersonate' a Frank Auerbach painting, in another his work becomes
a 'cover version' of the garish cover-art for sci-fi novels. A more
politically charged version of such painterly appropriation might
be the work of John Paul McAree, recently shown as part of the Ormeau
Baths exhibition Appropriations. Similar to Brown's relentless
pastiche in that it derives its 'style' from the established, canonical
styles of painters such as Auerbach, Yeats and even Gerhard Richter
- who himself has extensively appropriated imagery from advertising
- McAree's work nevertheless adds context to his copyist plays on
style, the seemingly nostalgic scenes of his works in fact portraying
the aftermaths of infamous incidents of conflict in Irish history.
While
in each of these cases the question of artistic originality is being
quite deliberately problematised, legitimate doubts remain for many
about the history of 'appropriation' more generally - it is arguably
a process which, as the critic Robert Hughes has acerbically commented, "sounded more dynamic than just 'quoting' someone else's art and
more respectable than merely 'plagiarizing it'."
The nature of copyright law as it exists in the UK is determined
by the Copyright Designs and Patents Act and allows for no real
restrictions on the re-using of any particular 'idea'; instead it
is the expression of an idea which is subject to legal protection.
While perhaps this has meant that an artist such as Gillian Wearing
can be faced with difficulties over the unattributed re-application
of her work, the law also could be said to give artists a relative
amount of freedom to take and re-use material in any number of subtly
different ways without the spectre of plagiarism remaining ever-present.
In a work such as Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, for instance,
there is in one sense very little of the artist's 'own' work (Hitchcock's
classic thriller being merely re-played at a radically slowed-down
pace) yet Gordon's intervention makes for a powerful, transformative
artistic statement. The question of "knowing originality when you
see it" is almost beside the point in cases such as this: artists'
strategies of appropriation prompt questions of originality to become
thematically intriguing on, one level, while also being critically
irrelevant and, on occasion, inappropriate, on another.
Henrietta
McKervey is a copywriter. Declan Long is a writer and
Education Manager at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin.
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 101, Autumn 2002,
pp. 32-35.
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