the need for narrative

Reality TV has been moving towards greater unreality. The first two seasons of Real World, as Shields himself points out, were much more “real” than subsequent seasons. The writers, cast members and directors of reality shows have increasingly opted for more scripted and constructed realities. Look how quickly we turned from “regular” human beings to B-list entertainers—people raised in the art of creating false personas—to star in our reality shows. Strange Love is a long way from Candid Camera. Perhaps these shows have only retained the label “reality” out of inertia.

Will anyone watch old seasons of these reality shows in thirty years? And yet I have little doubt that people will still be watching and analyzing The Wire, Seinfeld and The Sopranos for decades.

The old saying that you read nonfiction for the facts and fiction for the truth still rings true. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that narrative and characters connect you to the truth in a more powerful and emotional way. I would argue that The Wire will teach you about the failures of modern American institutions in a more memorable way than a social studies textbook.

But the second, more interesting, fiction, but not non-fiction, gets to suggest instead of tell. Fiction’s power is in its ambiguity. Christianity would have died out centuries ago if the Bible was a series of lists and essays instead of stories and parables whose meanings are both elusive yet powerful. Anyone who has studied literature in school knows that Shakespeare’s plays can be interpreted in infinite ways.

And ultimately, isn’t narrative fun? People enjoy reading interesting plots and following compelling characters, whether real or invented. Entertainment and enlightenment are not necessarily at odds.

We have heard the cries of the death of the novel for so long that even pointing out how many times we have heard it feels cliché. In a world where Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling are the best-selling authors, Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time and the biggest broadcast TV disaster occurred when NBC tried to push aside scripted dramas for an inexpensive talk show, speaking of societies hunger for reality over fictional narratives feels a little premature.

- Lincoln Michel

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."

collage as reality, not narrative

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though—standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night at us—flies at us in bright splinters.

Life does not have a “plot”. It is a collage.

Story/narrative seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farm, you do a sort of bricolage. Bits of string and wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.

The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material—how do you go about arranging it?

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.

we are all plagiarists

When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to "match" a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else's idea. But had we "matched" any of the Times's words, the most banal of phrases, could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. Trial by Google.

The evolution of copyright law has effectively stunted the development of sampling, thereby protecting the creative property of artists but obstructing the natural evolution of human creativity, which has always possessed cannibalistic tendencies. With copyright laws making the sampling of popular music virtually impossible, a new technique has evolved in which recordings are made that mimic the recordings that the artists would like to sample. These mimic recordings--not nearly as satisfying as sampling the original record--then sampled and looped in the same way that the original would have been. We don't want a mimic of a piece of music, though; we want the actual piece of music presented through a new lens. Replication isn't reproduction. The copy transcends the original. The original is nothing but a collection of previous cultural movements. All of culture is an appropriation game.

A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table talk is presently believed to be his own.

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.

authenticity vs performance

We live in a "cut-paste" culture enabled by technology.

- Lawrence Lessig

The concept of "academic integrity" presupposes wholeness, oneness, "ownness," an identity between the writer and what she or he has written, but this value is not dominant among today's youth. Moral judgments of plagiarism, as we shall see, depend on even more fundamental views of personhood and the relations among selves.

Those motivated by the ethic of "authenticity" insist that their words are theirs alone and that all utterances derive from their own, their singular, their individual, integral truth. Nothing could make them pronounce what is not intended as an expression of their own thoughts and feelings. These authentic selves would never plagiarize because they believe to their core that all they say should be theirs and theirs alone. Their key concepts are own, genuine, essence, integral, means, undivided.

By contrast, those motivated by the ethic of what I call "performance" accept that their behavior is mutable, depending on circumstances. All that matters is the effect of their actions, including their speech and writing. Thus they are not wedded to the notion of a singular relationship between their inner feelings and thoughts and their outer expression. They will say what is expected, whatever suits the occasion, whether it is their personal truth or not. Performance selves say and write whatever works for their practical purposes; it need not belong to them alone. They don't feel a tight connection between their words and their inner being, so they don't sweat it if others use their words or if they use the words of others. For them the notion of "self" is multiple rather than singular and unified. Their key concepts are efficacy, nimbleness, comfort, circumstance, ends, goals.

Technology plays a role in the generational transformation that has occurred between the emphasis on authenticity and the emphasis on performance, but it is not an entirely causal one. The shift from authenticity to performance—with all the accompanying desires for play and so on—has in turn led to the development of certain technological innovations.

The authentic self celebrates uniqueness, individual contribution, essence, fixity, and authorship. It is inner-directed. Its words are its own, and are always meant and sincerely believed. The performance self celebrates collaboration, incorporation, fluidity, appearance. It is goal-oriented. Its words are derived from many different sources and may be spoken or written in earnest or in jest, with conviction or just to get along.

- Susan Blum

performativity

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

- Madonna

Since the 1980s, a new ethos has been arising, associated with a concern for achieving set goals and constant consideration of observers' reactions. The "performance" ethos refers to young people's emphasis on goals and outward behavior, a meaning I draw from ordinary usage, industry and business, and anthropology and other human sciences. In literary, cultural, and queer studies a kindred term, "performativity," points out that social categories are enacted in behavior rather than following from preexisting, abstract realities. "Performance selves" focus on knowing what the expectations are in particular contexts and are adept at meeting those expectations. It is insufficient to learn a single role, or even a sequence of different roles along one's lifespan, because contexts may vary from moment to moment. This ethos is often an anxious one, for the performance self must constantly worry about the judgments of others, must constantly wonder if a given set of actions is the most effective, or is even appreciated, and what the consequences will be of her or his actions.

In terms akin to postmodern understandings of literature and science, the performance self does not regard itself as possessing the sole truth but rather sees itself existing in and with multiple truths, multiple roles, multiple purposes. The performance self is exemplified by an artist such as Madonna, who changes her style and appearance with great frequency. When asked whether they would dye their gray hair when they got older, many students said they hoped they would not but probably would. Whereas an authentic self might regard aging as the natural condition of life and accept the accompanying changes in appearance as inevitable and genuine, a performance self seeks to improve her appearance, no matter what the biological reality. Performance emphasizes change, embracing methods such as plastic surgery. Performance selves, male and female, are often sleek, toned, tucked, decked out in synthetic materials with no concern for practicality. What matters is the result, if only an image.

- Susan Blum

identity

an amazon wish list as identity

a collection of quotes as identity

an iPod playlist as identity

a set of clothes as identity

sampling, remixing....

an iPod playlist as identity

There is creativity and self-expression--uniqueness—in pastiche, a concept quite different from the traditional academic value of originality in thought and expression. A Facebook "Favorite Quotations" section, consisting entirely of other people's words, supposedly displays the uniqueness and creativity of the compiler. And though an instructor might disagree, so would a composition made up nothing but a string of quotations.

When we asked students about tracing the origins of amusing quotes in conversation and whether the quoter has ownership of the lines, one insightful person responded, "You don't own it, you own the quickness of mind to associate" the lines with the situation. The prevalence of this attitude toward pastiche or collage is evident in the collections of songs that students compile on their iPods. One student claimed that his playlist essentially defined him. Like wearing clothing emblazoned with corporate logos as an expression of personal taste, the selection of songs, none of which the student composed, defined his identity: "When it comes to the iPod, I think your personal little soundtrack is almost representative of who you are and where you come from and what you're doing and where you're gonna go."

- Susan Blum

footnote

Footnotes persuade the reader that the author has done an acceptable amount of work, enough to lie within the tolerances of the field...

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

Marshall McLuhan

copyleft