Plagiarism or Appropriation?
This is in relation to this year’s Turner Prize:
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From: timothy comeau
To: arts_online@scotsman.com
Subject: Plagiarism or Appropriation?
Date: Thursday 30 November 2000 6:02 PM
Plagiarism or Appropriation? I smirk at this case, because I see it from both sides of the argument. One the one hand, it appears to be flagrant plagiarism. One could not reproduce a text changing a few words here, and the punctuation, and make a claim to be original.
But Duchamp brought in the readymade. In *choosing* an object, he exercised artistic decision making – the process being defined as such: 1. I’m an artist, that is, I have been trained to see the world in a special way, I have “heightened aesthetic sensibility”. 2.I see a shovel, I think, wow, that looks pretty cool, we don’t have anything like over in France 3. I think the art world is too stuffy, all those boring glossy paintings, I’ll exhibit this in a gallery 4.I’ll give it an ironic, humorous title, “In advance of the broken arm”.
When I was in art school, I wanted to produce cinematic picture books, but because I was in a small town at the edge of the ocean, and because I was only a poor art student, the only way I could get access to certain pictures was to borrow them. I took photographs from the TV, from movies etc, in order to get photographs that would have been impossible for me to get otherwise. For example, I could never schedule a photo shoot with Albert Einstein, since he’s been dead for forty-five years.
I would present these books to my studio group, and I asked my studio advisor about this act of appropriation. He pointed out that there are thousands of images in a film, and to choose one or two is an artistic act in line with the history of the readymade. (One should ask, why did I the creator of this piece choose these images when I had thousands of frames to choose from)?
I also argued, that we live in a landscape dominated by created images. There was a time in the past when an image was expensive to produce, and this kept the presence of media down, but in this day and age, the cost of producing media is inconsequential. I argued that representing images from the media is similar to painting a landscape. Does God own the copyright to that view? Do all the Sunday painters of the past who have also painted that area have a say? We think nothing of looking at paintings of landscape, we think it’s interesting for example, to compare the photographs of Atget from 100 years ago to photographs taken from the same vantage point today, in order to see the changes that a century brings.
Since there seems to be an image wherever you look today, whether it be golden arches or blank faced models or sci-fi book covers, it seems almost impossible to represent contemporary reality without including what some would consider a copyright violation.
In the case of Glen Brown, its unfortunate that he wasn’t more upfront about the source, that it wasn’t clear from the beginning that this painting was his remix of that 70s song.
TIMOTHY COMEAU
Toronto, Canada