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NARRATOR: This is a
photograph by Walker Evans.
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And this is a photograph
by Sherry Levine.
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Walker Evans' photograph
dates from 1936,
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when he was hired by the
Farm Security Administration
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to document the American
South in the wake of the Great
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Depression.
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Sherry Levine's
was taken in 1981
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from a reproduction of
the Evans photograph,
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as part of a series titled
yes, "After Walker Evans."
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Credit where credit is due,
but if forgery is not at issue
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here, what is?
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Evans' photographs are iconic
and indisputable documents
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of the Depression.
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They show us its face.
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But what exactly do Levine's
photographs show us?
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Recent art is full of copying
of all kinds and degrees.
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Art that borrows,
steals, pilfers,
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or poaches existing images.
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Some of them iconic, others not.
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Are these confessions
of creative inadequacy,
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bald opportunism
masquerading as concept?
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Are these cries for help
as we drown in an image
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saturated world,
or the death rattle
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of the great
pictorial tradition?
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How are we supposed
to distinguish
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this kind of copying from
a long history of art
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full of allusions, influences,
and innumerable instances
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of visual sampling,
long before hip hop
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spread the sonic version
of it coast to coast.
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A sample after all is just
one part of a whole song.
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But what if the
copy is the artwork?
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This is the Case for Copying.
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Artists, of course, have been
copying since time immemorial.
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In fact, the earliest Western
traditions of aesthetic thought
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defined art as mimesis, or
imitation of the visible world.
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But artists don't just
imitate the world,
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they imitate each other.
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Copying in order
to train their hand
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or demonstrate
stylistic innovation.
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They copy to signal the
influence of other artworks,
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to claim the prestige of
a particular heritage,
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or to rework a stock artistic
subject for their own time.
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Working from existing
imagery and traditions
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can also suggest new
ways to navigate history.
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Rafael's intimate portrait
of Pope Julius the Second
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became a model for Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent
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the 10th, which in turn inspired
Francis Bacon to make over
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45 versions of his
own, each portrait
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transgressive in
its own time for how
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it exposed psychological
depths of the man
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at the seat of the
church's power.
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Velazquez's Las Meninas
was also metabolized
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by Pablo Picasso,
who additionally
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made numerous versions of "le
Dejeuner sur l'herbe" painted
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by Edward Manet in 1863.
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Manet's "Dejeuner" in turn
borrowed its composition
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from a Raimondi engraving
of Raphael's "Judgment
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of Paris" and its subject
from "Le Concert champetre."
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But it's Manet's "Old
Musician" that establishes him
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as the modernist mix master.
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Though it might look
like a genre painting,
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the "Old Musician" is in
fact a composite image
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with an extravagant
number of citations.
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"A painted phrase," as the
art historian Carol Armstrong
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called it, that reads, "'after
Watteau,' 'after myself
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and Murillo,' 'after Le Nain,
and Velazquez,'" and so on.
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Manet's painting is not a
window onto another reality,
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but a cluster of
representations, each one
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like a song that can be
sampled again and again.
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Manet's mashup, moreover,
stares back at us.
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The "Old Musician"
personifies the way
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that all pictures, so
to speak, regard us.
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Images aren't just neutral
depictions of the world.
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They're instruments
influencing how we
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perceive ourselves and others.
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This awareness inspired a number
of artists in the late 1970s
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to make art that foregrounded
representation itself.
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Art historians refer to this
work as Appropriation art.
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In 1977, art critic Donald Crimp
curated an exhibition titled,
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"Pictures," bringing
together artists
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who shared an interest
in understanding
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the picture itself.
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Artists of the
Pictures generation,
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as they came to be called,
plundered existing images
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for their own work.
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Jacques Goldstein's film
"Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer"
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loops the familiar
MGM lion's roar,
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suspending us between the
pleasure of anticipation
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and the frustrating deferral
of the feature film.
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Dara Birnbaum's technology
transformation, "Wonder Woman,"
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fragments and repeats
clips from the TV series
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to draw out the relationship
between technology
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and sexual objectification.
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By isolating and
manipulating images,
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these artists direct our
attention toward their subtexts
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and demonstrate how they
get their meanings, not
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through our actual experience
with lions or superheroes,
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but through our associations
with other pictures like them.
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In her series of film
stills, Cindy Sherman
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photographed herself in
the poses and scenarios
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of generic feminine personas
that evoked stock narratives,
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so that each version
of Sherman seems
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overdetermined from the start
by our expectations for her.
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As Crimp wrote, "We are not in
search of sources or origins
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but of structures
of signification--
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underneath each picture, there
is always another picture."
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These artists certainly
weren't the first to use images
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from pop culture.
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The aptly named Pop
Art movement built
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upon the work of artists
including Jasper Johns
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and Robert Rauschenberg, who
made bronze casts of mass
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produced objects or incorporated
newsprint and rubbish
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into their work.
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Art historian Leo Steinberg
described this work
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as belonging to the
Flatbed Picture Plane,
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borrowing the term from
the flatbed printing
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press that had flooded the
post-war world with mass media
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images.
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As Steinberg saw
it, paintings were
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no longer doorways to imaginary
worlds, evoking our visual.
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Experience they
were like tabletops,
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strewn with papers
and objects, that
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simulated how we
look at pictures
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in newspapers and magazines.
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Not incidentally Andy
Warhol began his career
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in advertising.
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Warhol explained that he chose
the subjects of his paintings,
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from commercial
products to celebrities,
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precisely because everyone
already liked them.
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The artist's job,
so Warhol claimed,
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was not to offer up
new images of beauty,
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but to reproduce what
society had already approved.
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This authorized him
to appropriate images
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of mass produced objects, and
to turn them out in the studio
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he called The Factory,
blurring the distinctions
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between artist and
factory worker,
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and between commodity and art.
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In more recent years,
Richard Prince,
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who may sit atop the
high throne of copydom,
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described his interest
in copying this way.
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"Advertising images aren't
associated with an author.
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They look like they have no
history to them, like they
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showed up all at once.
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They look like what art
always wants to look like."
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Yet, of course, Prince,
Warhol, and other pop artists
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certainly didn't fade
into the woodwork.
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On the contrary, a
Campbell's Soup can
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is almost synonymous with the
name Warhol, a single blown up
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cartoon frame with
Roy Lichtenstein.
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Pop art held up a mirror to
the ubiquity of mass media.
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But a mirror is often the
weakest form of critique.
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After all, that other thing
that looks like it showed up
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all at once without
history, that's
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the mass produced commodity.
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Perhaps it's no surprise then
that the art market quickly
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embraced Pop Art as
one more luxury object.
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Appropriation art
on the other hand,
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had a very different
relationship
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to popular imagery.
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More like certain strands
of Dada and Surrealism,
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Appropriation art sought to
understand how images around us
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inform our psyche and provide
a basis for collective life.
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Martha Rosler's
"House Beautiful--
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Bringing the War
Home" used a technique
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similar to surrealist
collage, inserting photographs
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from the Vietnam War into scenes
of American domestic life.
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Both sets of images were
taken from copies of life.
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Rosler just reassembled what
was already bound together
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in the magazine, and what
only a serious threshold
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for cognitive
dissonance holds apart.
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Appropriation art also hearkened
back to the "Readymade"
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by highlighting how an
artist's gesture of selection
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could confer value on
the most mundane object.
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Like the "Readymade,"
Appropriation
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drew attention to the
institutions whose operations
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depend on ideas of
exceptionality and originality,
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even and especially in the
face of total unoriginality.
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Appropriations by
Sturtevant, who
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made perfect copies of artist's
work-- in the case of Warhol,
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actually borrowing
his silk screens
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to get the job done-- as well
as those by Sherry Levine,
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compel viewers to question
just what kind of value
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is added by a signature,
and more importantly,
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what kinds of people
have historically
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been authorized to sign
works in the first place.
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Hint, hint-- they've
usually looked
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more like Walker
Evans and Duchamp
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than Sherry Levine
or Sturdevant.
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Indeed, countless creative
achievements in our museums
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are considered anonymous, many
of them seized from regions
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and social groups that have
been denied recognition
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and representation.
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This is to say nothing of
conventionally unauthored
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cultural contributions
from quilts, to recipes,
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to folk or blues songs.
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In his essay, "The
Death of the Author,"
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the theorist Roland
Barthes argued that writing
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contains many layers
of association
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that can only be unified in the
reader's experience of a text.
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This meant that the author
had no particular authority
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over the meaning of a book,
because anything she wrote
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existed in a web of connotations
and cultural significance.
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To interpret a
book or an artwork
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was therefore not to
decode it, or to identify
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its definitive meaning, but to
demonstrate how it functioned
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in this web of significance.
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Michel Foucault
followed with his essay,
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"What is an Author?",
which argued
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that an author is actually just
an organizing principle that
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allows us to group
together a certain number
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of cultural objects.
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More importantly,
it clarifies who
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did not make the work, impeding,
rather than helping along,
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the free circulation
and inventiveness
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of creative output.
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No less of a paradigm
for the artistic genius
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than Pablo Picasso once
said, "Good artists borrow.
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Great artists steal."
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This is often taken to mean
that great artists transform
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their influences into their
own authentic and original
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inventions.
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But Appropriation art turns
this meaning on its head.
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Appropriation art
asks us to recognize
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that so-called great artists
managed to convince us
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that their works are authentic
and original because society
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has already given them the power
to be authentic and original
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for reasons that have little
to do with genius and a lot
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to do with the structures
of power that concerned
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Foucault. Yes, there are people
who have done amazing things
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and gotten credit for it.
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And we're grateful
for their work.
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But copying shows that the idea
of the original originating
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genius is a myth.
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It shows that this
myth is linked
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to the power of
images themselves
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to determine what kinds of
representation, visual as well
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as political, are made
available in our societies.
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Appropriation art, while
sometimes confounding and often
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contested, helps us see
that the context of pictures
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is absolutely integral
to their meaning.
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It reminds us that pictures
don't just have histories,
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they exist in history.
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A copy, no matter
how perfect, is never
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really the same as the original,
since its context is always
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shifting.
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And since we exist in
history, our perspective
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is always shifting, too.
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When artists copy, we
recognize that they're
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making fresh meanings through
their interaction with signs
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and symbols and
bits of information
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already out in the world.
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And that this work is never
done, not for them, and not
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for us.
00:10:16
The Art Assignment is funded
in part by viewers like you
00:10:19
through Patreon.com, a
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of a monthly donation.
00:10:26
Special thanks to
our grand master
00:10:27
of the arts, Indianapolis
Homes Realty.
00:10:30
If you'd like to
support the show,
00:10:31
check out our page at
Patreon.com/ArtAssignment.
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