Inferior Quotations

IQ: You can watch The Case for Copying on YouTube.

The Art Assignment: Sampling, appropriating, borrowing, stealing. Whatever you want to call it, artists have been copying since time immemorial. We look into the history of the practice, and share our theories of why it is done, and what it can offer us.

Sarah Urist Green: This is a photograph by Walker Evans, an’ this is a photograph by Sherrie Levine. Walker Evans’ photograph dates from nineteen-thirty-six when ’e was hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the American South in the wake of the Great Depression. Sherrie Levine’s was taken in nineteen-eighty-one from a reproduction of the Evans photograph, as part of a series titled yes After Walker Evans.

Yellow House Script with Tracking: 30 and Yellow Stroke: .0333 Em:
AFTER
WALKER
EVANS

Sarah Urist Green: Credit where credit is duue, but if forgery is not at issue here what is. Evans’ photographs are iconic an’ indisputable documents of the Depression. They show us its face. But what exactly do Levine’s photographs show us? Recen’ art is full of copying of all kinds an’ degrees, art that borrowss, steals, pilfers, or poaches existing images, some of them iconic, others not. Are these confessions of creative inadequacy, bald opportunism masquerading as concept, or-are these cries for help as we drown in an image-saturated world, or the death rattle of the great pictorial tradition. How are we suppose’ t’ distinguish this kind of copying from a long history of art full of allusions, influences, an’ innumerable instances of visual sampling, long before hip hop spread the sonic version of it coast to coast. A sample after all is just one part of a whole song. But what if the copy is the artwork. This is The Case for Copying.

White Arial Black:
the case for
COPYING

Sarah Urist Green: Artis’s of course have been copying since time immemorial. In fact the earlies’ Western traditions of aesthetic thought defined art as mimesis, or imitation of the visible world.

Black Arial Black: mimesis
Black Arial Black Italic (or oblique, inclined, slanted, skewed, what ever): n.
Black Arial Narrow Bold Italic: imitation of the visible world

Sarah Urist Green: But artis’s don’t just imitate the world, they imitate each other, copying in order to train their hand, or demonstrate stylistic innovation. They copy to signal the influence of other artworks, to claim the prestige of a particular heritage, or to rework a stock artistic subject for their own time. Working from existing imagery an’ traditions can also suggest new ways to navigate hist’ry. Raphael’s intimate portrait of Pope Julius The Second became a model for Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent The Tenth, which in turn inspired Francis Bacon to make over forty-five versions of his own, each portrait transgressive in its own time for how it exposed psychological depths of the man at the seat of the church’s power. Velázquez’s Las Meninas was also metabolized by Pablo Picasso who additionally made numerous versions of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe painted by Édouard Manet in eighteen-sixty-three.

IQ: “mayonnaise” stands in for “Manet’s” on a different web site’s transcription of this video. Mayonnaise. Dijonnaise…

Sarah Urist Green: Manet’s Déjeuner in turn borrowed its composition from a Raimondi engraving of Raphael’s Judgmen’ of Paris and its subject from the Concert champêtre. But it’s Manet’s Old Musician that establishes him as the modernis’ mix master. Though it might look like a genre painting, The Old Musician is in fact a composite image with an extravagant number of citations — a painted phrase, as the art historian Carol Armstrong called it —

Yellow House Script with Tracking: 30 and Yellow Stroke: .0333 Em:
A PAINTED PHRASE

Sarah Urist Green: —that reads after Watteau, after my self an’ Murillo, after Le Nain, an’ Velázquez, an’ so on. Manet’s painting is not a window on to another reality, but a cluster of representations, each one like a song that can be sampled again an’ again. Manet’s mash-up moreover stares back at us. The Old Musician personifies the way that all pictures so to speak regard us. Images aren’ jus’ neutral depictions of the world, they’re instruments influencing how we perceive our selves an’ others.

Black Futura Bold Oblique: Your
White Futura Bold Oblique: gaze
Black Futura Bold Oblique: hits
White Futura Bold Oblique: the
Black Futura Bold Oblique: side
White Futura Bold Oblique: of my
Black Futura Bold Oblique: face

White Futura Bold Oblique:
Your body
is a
battleground

Sarah Urist Green: This awareness inspired a number of artis’s in the late nineteen-seventies to make art that foregrounded representation its self. Art historians refer to this work as Appropriation Art. In nineteen-seventy-seven art critic Donald—

Yellow Arial Black: *Douglas

Sarah Urist Green: —Crimp curated an exhibition titled Pictures, bringing together artis’s who shared an interest in understanding the picture its self. Artis’s of The Pictures Generation as they came to be called plundered existing images for their own work. Jack Goldstein’s film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer loops the familiar Em-Gee-Em lion’s roar, suspending us between the pleasure of anticipation an’ the frustrating deferral of the feature film. Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman fragments an’ repeats clips from the Tee-Vee series to draw out the relationship between technology an’ sexual objectification. By isolating an’ manipulating images, these artis’s direct our attention toward their subtex’, an’ demonstrate how they get their meanings, not through our actual experience with lions or super heroes, but through our associations with other pictures like them. In ’er series of film stills, Cindy Sherman photographed her self in the poses an’ scenarios of generic feminine personas that evoked stock narratives, so that each version of Sherman seems over-determined from the start by our expectations for her. As Crimp wrote, We are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification. Underneath each picture there is always an other picture.

White Arial Black:
“ We are not in search of sources or
origins, but of structures of signification:
underneath each picture there is always
another picture. ”
DOUGLAS CRIMP

Sarah Urist Green: These artis’s certainly weren’ the first to use images from pop culture. The ap’ly named—

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POP
ART

Sarah Urist Green: —Pop Art movement built upon the work of artis’s including Jasper Johns an’ Robert Rauschenberg, who made bronze cas’s of mass-produced objects, or incorporated news print an’ rubbish in to their work. Art historian Leo Steinberg described this work as belonging to the flat-bed picture plane, borrowing the term from the flat-bed printing press that had flooded the post-war world with mass-media images. As Steinberg saw it, paintings were no longer door-ways to imaginary worlds, evoking our visual experience. They were like table tops strewn with papers an’ objects that simulated how we look at pictures in newspapers an’ magazines. Not inciden’ally Andy Warhol began his career in advertising. Warhol explaine’ that he chose the subjects of his paintings, from commercial products to celebrities, precisely because every one already liked them. The artis’s job, so Warhol claimed, was not to offer up new images of beauty, but to reproduce what society had already approved. This authorized him to appropriate images of mass-produce’ objects an’ t’ churn them out in the studio he called The Factory, blurring the distinctions between artist an’ factory worker an’ between commodity an’ art. In more recent years Richard Prince, who may sit atop the high throne of copiedom, described his interest in copying this way: Advertising images aren’t associated with an author.

Black Arial Black:
‘‘ADVERTISING
IMAGES
AREN’T ASSOCIATED WITH
AN
AUTHOR.

Sarah Urist Green: They look like they have no history to them, like they showed up all at once.

Black Arial Black:
THEY LOOK LIKE
THEY HAVE NO
HISTORY
TO THEM.
LIKE THEY
SHOWED UP
ALL AT ONCE.

Sarah Urist Green: They look like what art always wants to look like.

White Arial Black:
THEY
LOOK
LIKE
WHAT
ART
ALWAYS
WANTS
TO
LOOK
LIKE.’’
-RICHARD PRINCE

Sarah Urist Green: Yet of course Prince, Warhol, an’ other pop artists certainly didn’ fade in to the wood work. On the contrary a Campbell’s Soup can is almost synonymous with the name Warhol, a single blown up cartoon frame with Roy Lichtenstein. Pop Art held up a mirror to the ubiquity of mass media. But a mirror is often the weakest form of critique. After all that other thing that looks like it showed up all at once without hist’ry, that’s the mass-produced commodity. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that the art market quickly embrace’ Pop Art as one more luxury object.

White Futura Bold Oblique:
I shop
therefore
I am

Sarah Urist Green: Appropriation Art on the other han’ had a very different relationship to popular imagery. More like certain strands of Dada an’ Surrealism, Appropriation Art sought to understand how images around us inform our psyche, an’ provide a basis for collective life. Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing The War Home used a technique similar to surrealist collage, inserting photographs from the Vietnam War in t’ scenes of American domestic life. Both sets of images were taken from copies of Life. Rosler jus’ reassembled what was already bound together in the magazine an’ what only a serious threshold for cognitive dissonance holds apart. Appropriation Art also hearkened back to the readymade by highlighting how an artis’s gesture of selection could confer value on the most mundane object. Like the readymade, appropriation drew attention to the institutions whose operations depend on ideas of exceptionality an’ originality, even an’ especially in the face of total unoriginality. Appropriations by Sturtevant who made perfect copies of artis’s’ work, in the case of Warhol actually borrowing his silk screens t’ get the job done, as well as those by Sherrie Levine, compel viewers to question jus’ what kind of value is added by a signature,—

IQ: What’s’s name’s poop.

Sarah Urist Green: —an’ more importan’ly what kinds of people have ’istoric’ly been authorized to sign works in the first place. Hint hint they’ve usually looked more like Walker Evans an’ Duchamp than Sherrie Levine or Sturtevant. Indeed countless creative achievements in our museums are considered anonymous. Many of them seize’ from regions an’ social groups that have been denied recognition an’ representation. This is to say nothing of conventionally unauthored cultural contributions, from quilts to recipes to folk or blues songs. In his essay The Death of the Author, the theorist Roland Barthes argued that writing contains many layers of association that can only be unified in the reader’s experience of a text. This meant that the author had no pa’ticular au-thority over the meaning of a book, because any thing she wrote existed in a web of connotations an’ cultural significance. To interpret a book or an artwork was therefore not to decode it or t’ iden’ify its definitive meaning, but to demonstrate how it functioned in this web of significance. Michel Foucault followed with his essay What is an Author?—

Yellow House Script with Tracking: 30 and Yellow Stroke: .0333 Em:
WHAT
IS AN
AUTHOR?

Sarah Urist Green: —which argued that an author is actually just an organizing principle that allows us to group together a certain number of cultural objects. More importan’ly it clarifies who did not make the work,—

White Arial Black:
AUTHOR
NOT
AUTHOR

Sarah Urist Green: —impeding rather than helping along the free circulation an’ inventiveness of creative output. No less of a paradigm for the artistic genius than Pablo Picasso once said Good artis’s borrow, great artis’s steal.

White Arial Black:
“Good artists borrow.
Great artists steal.”
Pablo Picasso

Sarah Urist Green: This is often taken to mean that great artis’s transform their influences in t’ their own authentic an’ original inventions. But Appropriation Art turns this meaning on its head. Appropriation Art asks us to recognize that so-called great artis’s manage to convince us that their works are authentic an’ original because society has already given them the power to be authentic an’ original, for reasons that have little to do with genius an’ a lot to do with the structures of power that concerned Foucault. Yes there are people who have done amazing things an’ gotten credit for it, an’ we’re grateful for their work, but copying shows that the idea of the original originating genius is a myth. It shows that this myth is linked to the power of images them selves to determine what kinds of representation, visual as well as political, are made available in our societies. Appropriation Art while some times confounding an’ often contested helps us see that the context of pictures is absolutely integral to their meaning. It reminds us that pictures don’t just have histories, they exist in history. A copy no matter how perfect is never really the same as the original, since its context is always shifting. An’ since we exist in history our perspective is always shifting too. When artis’s copy we recognize that they’re making fresh meanings through their interaction with signs an’ symbols an’ bits of information already out in the world, an’ that this work is never done, not for them an’ not for us.

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