User:Lbattich/Essay on method - drafts & notes
On appropriation and “uncreative” practices
Some early conceptual art practitioners felt that their art, being 'dematerialized', would escape the usual restrains of the art market. This proved misguided. (See, for instance, Lucy Lippard, Six Years...) Conceptual artists, within a mere three to five years, were as 'marketable' as artists working on the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture. Documentation and sketches took over the place of 'dematerilized' artworks, and the aura of the artists (as brand) replaced the aura proper to the physical presence of the artwork. Several early appropriation artists (during the early 1980s) claimed that they were challenging "ideas of competence, originality, authorship and property." (Barbara Kruger) While they certainly challenged some strands of traditional thought on those ideas, at the end this also proved misguided to a degree. They became (and always were) subsumed by the powers granted by the 'originality' they set to challenge. Notions of the original, authorship and propriety, in this case were shifted from a skill-based craft, to an intellectual-based practice, but they changed little otherwise.
Similarly, 'uncreative' and 'conceptual' writing during recent years, is meant to do away with traditional ideas of originality, creativity and authorship. And it is doing a great job at that. But at the same time it repeats the cynical reasoning of early appropriative art. Not surprisingly, given that 'uncreative writing' is basically a form of appropriating, less in the manner of quotations and citations, and rather in the manner of appropriative art of the Pictures Generation. It shifts long held problems in the visual arts to literature. The author is not so much the one that 'writes' the words ex nihilo, so to speak, but one that appropriates them and arranges them in different configurations following a certain plan or logic. And yet, for all that, authorship here is no diminished. As in the previous shift from objects to ideas in the artworld, this notion of authorship just makes a move from the words-as-objects to the creative authority of the author's plan or logic for the work. This fact is made evident in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing (2007), which appropriates and builds upon Sol LeWitt’s 1967 influential text on conceptual art. To say that Kenneth Goldsmith’s works are subverting the concept of authorship means to dangerously ignore the developments of art (and literature) during modernism, and especially in the second half of the twentieth century.
What my practice is not about – or how does authorship fit into my practice:
Although I am highly interested in the concept of authorship, most of my works do not attempt to address this directly, or at least it is not my intention to subvert of challenge traditional notions of authorship – in the footsteps of the Picture Generation artists. Regarding authorship, in my work I want to draw attention to the fact that that authorship is nevertheless present even in acts of appropriation. In signing my works I do not aim to reclaim the appropriated texts and images as my own, or to question the (authorial) authority of the original material, but rather, in the manner of contemporary conceptual writing, and paraphrasing Joseph Kosuth, the source material is rearranged or transformed – however slightly – into a new text or paragraph, as Kosuth puts it, and it’s that paragraph I claim authorship of.
These issues may show that it is not entirely correct for me to easily situate my work within the discourse of appropriation art – especially if we consider appropriation art in the wake of the Picture Generation artists. Although much of my practice concentrates on this, it would be best to say that my work utilizes appropriative tropes for its own ends. And these ends vary from work to work and project to project.
My works, in their attempt to use citation and quotation – terms which I prefer to ‘appropriation’ – serve as well as homages to the source texts, images and cultural objects. In this sense, they are tinged with nostalgia. Most of my works that utilize appropriative means are not primarily designed to subvert the source objects, but to present them in a different context, or utilize their aura as content for different aims, which includes treating the material in a metaphorical sense. This use of appropriation remains in stark contrast to other historical uses associated with appropriation, especially to the notion of détournement employed by the Situationist International, which refers to the practice of reusing ‘preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble.’ For the Situationists détournement implies a devaluation of the appropriated material.[1]
Rather than devaluation or subversion, my works attempt a recontextualisation, perhaps more in the manner of homages.
Retrograde Chapbooks:
Retrograde Chapbooks, for instance, proposes a literal “going-back” movement to the power of early avant-garde manifestoes. The intention here is neither to criticise the original texts, nor to question their authorship, but rather to present a concept or desire by means of a metaphor. The resulting altered manifestoes are presented as metaphors for a nostalgic desire.
- ↑ See ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude,’ (1959), in Ken Knabb, ed. Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 67.