TRAMPALULL es un mini-ciclo de cine, música y mágia diseñado por LABORATORIUM en el C.C. CAN FELIPA.

CUANDO?: MIERCOLES 21 y 28 de mayo a las 21h (entrada gratuita).
DONDE?: CAN FELIPA -- c/ PALLARS 277 Barcelona -- metro: POBLENOU (línea 4)
+INFO: www.bcn.cat/canfelipa
PROMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hTLPDfwA3E

¿Hasta qué punto uno podría ver las falsificaciones que hizo Van Meegeren de Vermeer como un acto apropriativo? Y más aún cómo ilustración del uso de la apropriación en la práctica creativa?
To which extend can one see Van Meeegeren falsifications of Vermeers painting as an appropriative act? And even more as an illustration of the use of appropriation in creative practice?
Los proyectos que formarán el centro neurálgico de la octava colección están finalizando el recorrido. Un recorrido que ha interfencias de distinta índole y en diferentes momentos - algunos mucho más álgidos que otros. Llegamos a un momento de culminación y reflexión, de entender las próximas etapas, los próximos movimientos. El diálogo se ha dado a diferentes escalas, algunas más transparentes que otras y también con diferentes intensidades. Como comisarios hemos fomentado el debate y el diálogo hasta cierto punto, pues no se trata de interrumpir el proceso creativo de cada individuo, sino de entenderlo y de promover, en la medida en que sea posible, un estado bullente. Ahora toca un trabajo de gestión, cerrar y publicar la colección, incluyendo otras propuestas que traigan nuevas miras sobre el tema desarrollado. Generar resistencia, darle sentido a la colección a través del discurso. También procurar desorganizar.
La apropiación es un tema que preocupa e interesa al arte desde siempre. la manera en que lo ha hecho ha ido variando y hoy en día podemos vincularnos más a las prácticas realizadas desde la década de los sesenta que cualquier intento anterior. Como comentó Sandra Gamarra en una de sus publicaciones, hoy quizá deberíamos hablar de adopción y no tanto de apropiación. Adopción de toda esa marea de imágenes que conforman un saturado archivo visual. Imágenes que quedan en orfandad por el siemple hecho del inabordable volumen y por la cantidad de capas de significado que uno puede adjudicar. Aunque la publicidad sea el principal vehículo de generación de discurso a partir de las imágenes que produce, distintos niveles de significado se yuxtaponen y los contextos se multiplican. El comisariado en sí tiene algo de apropiacionista al seleccionar y alterar el significado y sentido de las obras.
Las últimas publicaciones de Nashla Abdelnour son una serie de dípticos de fotografías apropiadas y en caada caso hay una imagen a color y una en blanco y negro. El trabajo de Nashla consiste en seleccionar y presentar un nuevo sentido al contenido al exhibirlo fuera de su contexto. La dialéctica de esas imágenes está en éxito de la conjunción de las dos imágenes. En algunos casos la narrativa que se produce parece más evidente que en otras. El espectador tiene que hacer un esfuerzo para que la obra quede concluida y este es un punto también interesante que queda en evidencia. El imaginario propuesto por Nashla nos invita a cerrar una historia mínima (o no) sobre lo que vemos y el hecho de que el material proviene de diversas fuentes y que su origen es desconocido no es importante. El anonimato como algo a lo que podemos relacionarnos. En el caso de Sandra Gamarra, vemos la construcción de un gran archivo que evidencia la apropiación/adopción en la práctica creativa. Las imágenes de las publicaciones artist using photography y the curious case of women conceptual artist hacen alusión a esa noción de adpotar y es casi como si adoptase la manera en que uno se apropia de algo y la manera en que uno trabaja. Haciendo obvio el proceso, también se hacen evidentes las herramientas que usamos y que no siempre tienen visibilidad. Y la última publicación varieties of conceptual art (visitando una posible exposición) - que me recuerdan al trabajo de Kirsten Pieroth cuando pidió prestada la cartela de la Giocconda al Louvre para exhibirla en un museo inglés - lleva el tema de la apropiación a nuevos niveles. Cuestionando la práctica curatorial y la museografía. Tocando el tema sobre lo que hace a una obra, en este caso conceptual, y los diferentes tipos de presentación y aproximación. ¿Qué tipo de vínculos de credibilidad se pueden crear entre el arte (exhibido?) y el espectador? ¿Se puede hablar aún de una identifiación en un mundo globalizado? y ¿el artista sigue representando lo local? ¿qué tipo de circuitos de convicción pueden producir el crítico de arte y el comisario para el espectador?
Hoy en día el mercado se ha apropiado de los procesos de legitimación de la crítica de arte y parte de la culpa la tiene la deformación del trabajo del comisario. La propuesta del comisario generalista (H. Szeemann) se ha desbordado y hace falta que la crítica y el comisariado vuelvan a trabajar de la mano para proveer significado y reductos de resistencia actualizados. Hace falta tambiñen definir el marco de lo artístico y de los roles del negocio del arte.
En este sentido, el trabajo del comisario en una colección como esta, con un tema tan amplio y tan adjudicable a cualquier cosa, es de buscar una coherencia entre las obras y el tema y nuestra propia opinión para hacer de mediadores entre eso y el público.
Es interesante también ver las últimas publicaciones de Scott MacLeod se van haciendo más esenciales o quizá abstrayendo más. Speech y Betaville. 02.17.08 son dos fotogramas que cuestionan la credibilidad del texto y del discurso - la palabra. La apertura al debate a partir de estos fotogramas apropiados es interesante también porque lo generan dentro del contexto que Scott a conseguido. En su descontextualización y recontextualización dentro de Betaville, las fotogramas capturados de las películas, donde precisamente se muestra el momento en que alguna de los personajes insinua un cuestionamiento sobre el lenguaje, plantean una meta- narrativa dentro de la hiper-textualidad de Betaville. Es casi como si él mismo estuviera cuestionando todo su trabajo, cuestionando la veracidad, poniendo al lector en una situación de duda y al mismo tiempo, reafirmando su propio papel como escritor. capacidad de generar opinión sin decir nada, sin hacer nada, sólo prresentando circunstancias o - aunque no es el caso - hechos. Una aproximación deconstructivista al propio material con el que trabaja.
La apropiación colaborativa de Peter Wilson y Gill Robinson también tiene algo de archivístico encerrado en un humor un poco hermético quizá. Tieene algo de cabinete de curiosidades, al mismo tiempo que tiene algo de la contemporaneidad del blog pero con recursos primarios. La correspondecia está completamente cerrada, el juego es entre ellos dos y el resto espectamos - intentamos contemplar, no hace falta entender como antes se creía. hay arte para todos y de todo tipo y en todas partes. Quizá hay demasiado, ddemasiadas bienales y demasiadas exposiciones, pero también empieza a haber más interés por una actualización del discurso crítico, por cuestionar y hacer nuevos planteamientos. Quizá el trabajo de Gill y Peter responde a la saturación visual y tiene más que ver con una visión del artista que trabaja introspectivamente, las claves de desciframiento no están tan asimiladas.
El caso es que tenemos que encontrar bajo qué tipo de instancias ha operado la apropiación en los difrentes proyectos que conforman y confromarán la octava colección. Extraer un sentido y una serie de recorridos y proveer ese canal de credibilidad desde donde se puede formular crítica, opinión y reflexión.

A sign spotted outside a church on the south coast of England, just after breakfast. I found myself wondering about how I couldnt really place the exact boundaries of the appropriation - whether it was a specific design that had been borrowed, or some unplaceable combination of elements coalescing into a memory jogger.

In 1935 Phyllis Pearsall walked 3000 miles around London’s streets to design the London A-Z map. This remains one of the most ingenious examples of 20th Century mapping and one of the most common uses associated with the technique. On the Map examines through craft and design, the concept of mapping, exploring what a map is, what can be mapped and how it can be used and manipulated. It challenges the perceptions of the conventional notion of mapping and demonstrates the extent to which it can be stretched and utilised.
On the Map looks at mapping as the creation of simple links or more complex networks of links through various techniques, from physical maps of geographical representations to more abstract responses by contemporary craft and design makers. It explores the manipulation of conventional maps, non-geographical mapping and mapping in different formats. On the Map demonstrates how different craft and design techniques can be applied to the process of mapping, illustrating diverse approaches to the subject.
Regarding Posavec:

The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject.

via kottke & notcot, which has some stunning images. See also A Chirograph

“Hoy los artistas necesitan ser más claros respecto a sus posiciones” **
Entrevista a Liam Gillick
Aimar Arriola
"Writing has always been central to my artwork as is evidenced by the extended role that the written scenario has taken in the work since the commencement of “McNamara” in 1992, through to the current project "Construcción de Uno" (2004 onwards), but it was the pressure to write to deadlines that enabled me to make the written word a crucial component of my art. (....) I am not an academic nor am I schooled in theory. The writing reflects my interests and involvements and is replete with errors of analysis and misapplied theory." (Liam Gillick, preface “Proxemics. Selected writings (1988-2006)”)
Publicado en Arte Nuevo y la entrevista originalmente fue hecha por Aimar Arriola

- Tu trabajo se dio a conocer internacionalmente a principios de los 90, un momento que te sitúa en Francia en sintonía con una más amplia corriente de resonancias minimalista y conceptuales. Recientemente te has referido a ese periodo como el “contexto adecuado” en el que uno podía “ser artista al margen de hacer obra”. ¿Cuales son los condicionantes de producción que han cambiado desde entonces?
Liam Gillcik: Ese fue un tiempo en el que nuestro trabajo ya venía desarrollándose bajo lo que claramente podríamos denominar “condiciones postmodernas”; un tiempo en el que la idea de proyectarse hacia un hipotético futuro, decidir cómo podría ser ese futuro, o saber cómo se podría desarrollar el trabajo de uno en el futuro no era clara. La idea de operar en el contexto del arte careciendo de producción estaba conectada a esta idea, al hecho de que uno podía funcionar en el presente en diferentes tiempos.
Esto fue importante a principios de mi carrera, porque significaba no tener que actuar de la misma manera ante situaciones diferentes. Hay un aspecto que no se ha considerado lo suficiente con relación al contexto francés de esa época, y es esa espacie de estado de “trabajo suspendido” en el que operábamos, un sentimiento que nos llevó a crear un entorno de posibilidades, sin pensar demasiado en términos de arte y producción. Las cosas han cambiado bastante, el mercado condiciona en exceso, y a menudo hoy los artistas necesitan ser más claros respecto a sus posiciones.
- Otro de los aspectos por los que ese momento de principios de los 90 fue tan decisivo fue la emergencia de una nueva línea de comisarios de su misma generación. ¿Cuál es tu consideración actual hacia la práctica del comisariado?
LG: En efecto, gran parte del debate de la época giraba en torno a la cuestión del comisariado, sus límites y posibilidades. Desde entonces no es suficiente hablar de la división del trabajo o el reparto de responsabilidades en términos de oposición, y en la situación presente no podemos pretender que la responsabilidad de la mediación quede relegada a ciertas formas de práctica curatorial. Hay que ser muy cuidadosos con las generalizaciones, porque ya no existe un modelo de comisariado válido para todas las situaciones. Sigo trabajando con comisarios, incluso de generaciones posteriores, pero en muchos casos mi participación es requerida más allá de la producción o cesión de obra; se trata de situaciones en las que mi función es la de crear una estructura (intelectual). A menudo, esta colaboración con comisarios más jóvenes se materializa bajo la forma de una conferencia, o en la propuesta de una visión general, y no necesariamente en ser parte del contenido de sus proyectos. Este modelo de colaboración, que ha sido el caso en Rekalde, me sigue interesando mucho. Hoy gran parte de los comisarios de mi generación se han embarcado en una especie de viaje en constante búsqueda de lo nuevo, por lo que siento que ya no compartimos la misma información, y cada vez nos separa una mayor distancia.
- Una parte significativa de tu trabajo se desarrolla a través de la escritura. ¿Qué papel juega esta práctica dentro de tu obra en un sentido más amplio? ¿Ha variado tu relación hacia la forma textual a lo largo de los años?
LG: Te confieso que he estado trabajando en un nuevo libro los últimos tres años y he decidido suspenderlo de forma casi permanente. Estoy en un momento en el que cada vez escribo menos, en el sentido clásico de sentarse y enfrentarse a una página en blanco, y aunque sigo publicando textos, en la mayoría provienen de la forma oral. De pronto me di cuenta que había empezando a generar un cierto estilo con el que no me identificaba, por lo que comencé a utilizar más mi propia voz, literalmente, a transcribirla y editarla posteriormente convirtiéndolo en una nueva forma de escritura. Como forma de experimentación, también he tratado de escribir en francés, y aunque mi limitado vocabulario en esa lengua le dio cierta claridad a mi escritura, tampoco funcionó del todo. El problema es que si pretendes mantener un papel crítico a través de la escritura, tienes que encontrar un espacio propio, ser constante y trabajar de forma continuada. Y digamos que en la actualidad estoy disfrutando más con esta otra vía de escritura, que proviene directamente de mi voz.
- Tu práctica artística de los últimos diez años ha corrido paralela a tu labor como docente. Además, este año has participado en alguna experiencia como United_Nations_Plaza (UNP) --surgida en Berlín a partir de la suspensión de la Manifesta 6-- que planteaban una alternativa a estructuras académicas más tradicionales. ¿Cómo valoras la experiencia?
LG: UNP surge de la idea de involucrarse en algo colectivamente, de intentar construir “algo” entre todos (una comunidad, una nueva estructura social, etc.). A veces es positivo parar para simplemente discutir y hacer efectivas diferentes posturas. Veo ejercicios como este como momentos de “suspensión”, como un encuentro político o una reunión estratégica donde un grupo de personas plantean una postura sobre un tema, para que otra gente la desmonte. Por otro lado, este tipo de iniciativas responden a una situación de la que somos testigos desde hace ya quince años: que en realidad seguimos operando bajo postulados herederos del 68, de las semi-revoluciones de finales de los 60, en los que las preguntas siempre van dirigidas al estudiante, y creo que ya es hora de darle a esto la vuelta. Estamos en un momento en el que son los maestros (el poder) quienes deberían de ser claros a cerca de sus posturas y asumir responsabilidades, y esto es algo que se intentó ensayar en UNP. Pero también estructuras académicas más tradicionales puede ofrecer oportunidades; recientemente he desarrollado un proyecto con estudiantes universitarios en Nueva York en el que hemos tratado de definir, entre todos, las condiciones necesarias para lograr una “escuela perfecta”, un entorno “ideal” para el estudio, el pensamiento y el trabajo. Una especie de predicción sobre el futuro que no sabemos si se cumplirá.

(**) Mi entrevista con Liam Gillick tuvo lugar el 29 de noviembre de 2007 en Bilbao, horas antes de la conferencia que ofreció en la Sala Rekalde en el marco de la exposición colectiva "Arqueologías del futuro" (comisariada por Peio_Aguirre y ya clausurada). Su participación, a modo de “evento paralelo”, aportó una visión complementaria a la muestra y permitió aproximarse a algunas de las claves de su trabajo. Originariamente publicada en Mugalari.

A number of things come to light this morning via the curatorial tag over at del.icio.us - starting with this excellent post on the notion of curating and curators in a digital age:

Heres the thing, I think its fair to say that the term "curator" may not be used, even metaphorically, unless there is some "keeping," "collecting," "conserving" involved. Its not clear to me that digital curators have anything to do with keeping [...] dont say that the new curators leave an archival record. Everyone leaves an archival record. And real curators dont just leave a record. They assiduously build their collections, so that each new entry is made in full knowledge of its predecessors and with a deeply thoughtful anticipation for what comes next. These collections vibrate like a spiders web with each new entry.

Whether or not this use of the term is fair brings one face to face with the large-scale Google Emotional Index at the Helen Pitt Gallery: "in a subtle act of co-option, this interactive project utilizes and alters the Google image search engine to provide an ever-evolving database of images associated with the full spectrum of human emotion [...] the GEI interface allows the participant to conduct searches for words indexing emotions far beyond our more general categories—happy, sad, angry or depressed—to help locate points of personal reflection." The what of the curating act is at stake far more than the how, and yet it is exactly the how that we had looked at above - "Real curators think with their collections. The collections are intelligence, memory, conceptual architecture made manifest [...] thats not what I see the new curators doing. "
Via the British Journal of Aesthetics comes the fine view of Fashion Seen as Something Imitative and Foreign: "the figure of the foreigner that recurs in philosophical remarks about fashion only makes sense given a reading of fashion as imitative uniformity. The foreigner becomes a deus ex machina accounting for the newness in fashion that the imitative model renders otherwise inexplicable." Requiring a subscription, sadly I am left to make do with the abstract; here we could perhaps cast the figures of local versus foreign - as each appropriates and recovers fashion and style across border and cultural gap, which is the curator - and which the curated?

In fascinating (and sometime hilarious) news this morning I have learned about the discovery of a sound recording which predates Edisons by nearly two decades. What is fascinating to my mind about this is the forward-looking (and simultaneously blind) vision of the inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: "The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered."
Further:

"Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.”

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”

via The Guardian and kottke

”P2P Art - The aesthetics of ephemerality.”

Art made for - and only available on - the peer to peer networks.
The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it.
After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it.

The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist.

”Theres no original”

A project from Swedish artist Anders Weberg.

Feel free to dont or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately.
The aesthetics of ephemerality.
via Kottke

Further to the previous post on Werner Herzog and Grizzly Man, its worth mentioning the other film produced in the same year, The Wild Blue Yonder, which also uses found footage, together with purpose-filmed linkages, to very different effect. It is a very strange film - Herzog employs sequences from NASA space missions and equipment convoys, as well as material collected by Henry Kaiser from beneath the ice of antarctica, in order to construct what he calls a "science fiction fantasy". It is the way that the images have formulated the narrative which seems to hold the interest most prominently - there is a ambivalence concerning the degree to which this shifting lead (images leading story) that continues throughout the film. Footage of a shuttle crew is appropriated into a narrative that can only be tangentially supported by the images, yet which nevertheless is just upheld by the viewer, mainly through the careful pacing of the film and the manner in which the shots are fitted together. Its a curious thing to be presented with sequences of images in this way, supported as it is with a kind of affected commentary - a commentary that is somehow upfront in its artifice, yet manages to feed into the flow of imagery in a way that is oddly compelling.

Divers surfacing back through a hole cut in pack ice are transformed into voyagers embarking on a journey through a time tunnel - their dissolution into particles, then pure light, and their subsequent reformation on Earth, are almost confirmed by the beauty of the shots. Ice shards, the swelling air bubbles from aqualungs that gather at the ice ceiling, the camera overloading with whiteness, all combine to support, even suggest, such an imaginative interpretation. Watching those sequences, it is possible to imagine Herzog gleefully constructing the arc of the story, joining the dots with a simple acceptance, prodded onward by the images he discovers in the archives. The process seems like the fleshing out of many a passing association - catching hold of loose threads on a flashing image, allowing it to unravel into contiguity, much like the series of gravitational slingshots that the featured mathematicians put forward as a means of travelling across incomprehensible distances.
All this seems like a very ambitious project, and it isnt 100% convincing, but the fact that we might accept, however tenuously or insincerely, that we are witnessing a planet covered with ice, astronauts navigating in liquid helium, and somehow this imaginative leaps are strangely supported by what we are watching, says a great deal about the poetry of images and Herzogs courage as a filmmaker. He knows the limits of images. The creatures under the ice are indeed sufficiently strange that they may well be from another planet; the gestures of the divers are sufficiently ambivalent (are they hostile, cavalier?) for us to be always on the verge of transportation into other imaginative realms. The fact that we arent fully taken away is perhaps the very area of concern in which the film deliberately operates - within a kind of undecidability. Its interesting that the slippages in the narrative - the gaps in the poetic, so to speak - are filled by presentations of scientific theory, with equations sketched out on boards, computer simulations, etc. Many reviews have discussed the films soundtrack, which is indeed extraordinary, and Herzog himself suggest that the work is a kind of "requiem in space", but the film seemed to me to be very much about the evocative capacities of all images - something that the paradoxical, continuous dislocation that Herzog manages to sustain throughout the film (an uncertain blur between image and text; the impending collapse of the whole premise) seems to emphasise. In the end credits Herzog explicitly thanks NASA for their "sense of poetry", and it is this sense of the openness of images, their innumerable, inexhaustible combinations, that seems to come through.

In the context of appropriation, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris chat about the idea of verité and the found footage he had of Timothy Treadwell which became the basis of Grizzly Man:
WH: I would be cautious about verité. Verité comes in at certain moments when he is in the Starsky & Hutch mode and he’s wearing his bandanna, the sexy camouflage bandanna. And he jumps away on the little path and disappears. And he disappears for twelve seconds, which is a long time in the film and footage. Disappears for twelve seconds and reappears. But what is in between—all of a sudden you see reed grass, long stems, and… wind bending the grass.

EM: That’s an amazing sequence.

WH: Yes, and everybody overlooked it, and I had the feeling that this is verité. That’s a verité element. Yes, there is cinema verité in it, and I declared my brand here. You have your own way of approaching it. And we’ll never grasp it anyway. Speaking of truth, we have to touch it with a pair of pliers, anyway, because we’ll never even get anywhere close.

via The Believer

According to their website, www.pompompress.com publishes "poems that engage with work published in previous issues, with the aim of making the magazines contents the property of many" - a fascinating self-reflexive process, working on itself. Makes one wonder what the first issue was like...

The Charms of Wikipedia, by Nicholson Baker, a man who knows a thing or two about arcane knowledge and losing, but not entirely hopeless, causes (via me-fi). But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission... So I kept on going. I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed cell phone with a soft earpiece for elder callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police; and Sara Mednick, a San Diego neuroscientist and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life; and Pyro Boy, a minor celebrity who turns himself into a human firecracker on stage. And on it goes. His Deletopedia proposal is an interesting one, a temple to the worlds truly arcane knowledge, deemed somehow unknowable, or not significant enough.
We would then, presumably, be faced with the prospect of editors from the real encyclopedias, knocking at the Deletopedias door, begging for knowledge to be released to them.
via things magazine

Lindsay Lohan and Bert Sterns recreation of his famous Marilyn Monroe "Last Sitting" pictures in New York Magazine last week brought over 20,000,000 viewers to the mags website - making it the most viewed picture spread in the world.
The Year in Pictures - an outstanding daily image blog - picks up on the theme of homage (or, indeed, appropriation) with a clip from Jean-Luc Godards "Le Mepris" featuring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli.
Chanel has put together an homage - in this case Stern seems more guilty of ripping himself off than Chanel does of Godard, where their upfront commercialism and the phallic mischief of the product placement make for a surreal mix of art and business.
Original:

Remake:


via The Year in Pictures

"Information as Material was formed in 2002 to publish work by artists who use extant material - selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings - and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things."

Sucking On Words, a film by Simon Morris on the work of Kenneth Goldsmith is available through the site, as well as being viewable on www.ubu.com

Following on from Davids earlier post on Be Kind Rewind, the Onion AV Club published an interview with Michel Gondry that talks about the movie and the notion of creativity. His take on appropriation is that it contains creativity - but not as much creativity as starting from scratch.
On the other hand, his take on YouTube is more forgiving: "I think the tools were always available, for decades and decades, to make your own film and be creative. I dont think [people had] to wait for YouTube to do this type of small project. YouTube, I think its great. And actually, Im going to do something for them. Theyre going to give me a camera and Im going to shoot Sundance. And I do post my stupid little things, my solving a Rubiks with my nose, or whatever. But its very vain. Because I know if I do something smart, Im going to have a lot of hits. And I have this idiotic satisfaction. And I think theres a bit of that in YouTube. You share, true, but its centralized, and its already sort of controlled. Im more for something thats not a centralized medium. Like doing your own film and screening it yourself. You cannot control people doing that."
Read the full article here (via kottke)

As evidenced in various ongoing discussions running through Dispatx we are always seeking ways to open up the creative method to further scrutiny, as well as questioning how it might actively generate new work. In relation to specific processes at work in a number of projects in the current edition, as well as to the creative method in general, a recent encounter with texts by the American artist Robert Morris might be of interest. Connections with certain projects in the Appropriation in Creative Practice edition are obvious – such as the shared appropriation of a theoretical text in Aiden Boulders Building on a Country Path – but there are other, less obvious commonalities too, not least in Scott MacLeods Betaville project, where acknowledged gaps, lulls and obstacles in our engagement with the creative process place the work on a fertile border between openness and impenetrability.

Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings, an extended series of works started in 1973, together with references to texts published in relation to them, might offer a perspective on the complex exchanges between author, work and audience. The fourth installment of Morris’s series is subtitled Drawing with Davidson, in reference to Morris’s appropriation of the work of the American philosopher Donald Davidson. Several extracts from Davidson’s writing, which the author himself says are concerned with the “general nature of action,” are presented alongside Morris’s own texts and the “blind” drawings themselves. The Blind Time series involved the artist (though not exclusively) carrying out a set of formal instructions, usually using graphite on paper, whilst being blindfolded and timed. Each resultant drawing is accompanied by a descriptive text outlining an account of the intended action, as well as clearly stipulating a ‘time estimation error’.
Both Morris and Davidson published articles about the work in the journal Critical Inquiry (Summer 1993), with Davidson’s text having been included in an exhibition catalogue the previous year. Morris, writing for the most part in the third person and with a wry inflection to his voice, openly questions what was happening in Blind Time IV and asks what Davidson’s texts, "excerpted and out of context," were there to do. Morris offers simultaneous claims for rational and irrational processes at work here, granting them equal weight and validity whilst at the same time making clear that such reasons aren’t, so to speak, reason enough. “We will never find reasons both sufficient and necessary for actions,” he writes, before going on to simply state that “reasons for actions are not always easy to locate." Davidson, in his article The Third Man, makes clear that he “does not know what (Morris’s) reasons were,” before offering his own explanations for “what he was doing there.”

Beyond the “prepared narrative” that Morris claims he has ready when asked about the series in general –summed up as “a desire to find a basis for drawing other than straightforward representation or nonrepresentation,” moving through constraints on the body before leading (unreasonably?) to drawing blind – Morris asserts that any assumed renunciation of control and judgment in the work is related more to a resistance against the privileging of the visual and its dominating presence in the language of understanding. Morris, it seems, hopes to insert a wedge into this kind of equation by blocking off the faculty entirely and leaning the oddly ‘unmoored’ action that then unfolds against different registers of accompanying text. He seems to posit another kind of “scheme of interpretation” to account for what might be happening in the lapse he has introduced into the process – a constraint that forces the mechanism to jar somehow, like a bubble of water injected into an oiled machine.
By working blindly in what he calls an “underworld of darkness,” Morris’s concern would seem to be to force the establishment of a subterranean register of complexities behind events and actions – a frame of reference that can be compatible with, or can accommodate, what he calls “dark reason,” perhaps beyond definitions of rationality and irrationality. The juxtaposition of Davidson’s philosophy with both Morris’s own statements and the darkness of his visual marks seems to constitute something of a combinatory trace concerning intention, disruption (of events, desires and beliefs) and outcome. The enforced swing toward a privileging of the unseen is, therefore, toward an action that is attested to without the mediation of the visual, aiming at the bypassing that well-trodden path. The question is put forward as to how the logic of why do we do what we do (even the resolute logic of irrational desire) can be located, disrupted, examined and reused. The demand, it seems, is to be open to any search for reasons and causes – where, of course, Morris is careful to posit the search for “causes that are not reasons,” as well as acknowledging the necessity for “reasons that are causes.” However, all this effort scrabbling around in the dark is ultimately refuted when the drawings are subsequently selected or rejected by the artist with his blindfold removed – in the cold light of day and in the brightness of doubt.


The explorations undertaken by Morris in these sightless exercises – where an isolated period of time for the artist, so to speak, is put forward – would seem to be concerned with an attempt to postulate an indexical cross-referencing between intention and outcome, between expectation and reception. What is alluded to are the delicacies of what is ‘learned’ through a given durational experience, as well as what is ‘lost” through the sieves and blockades inherent to and embedded in the temporal process of an action’s execution. There are no doubt connections here to numerous aspects of the creative process – as if Morris were holding a magnifying glass up to it and allowing us to speculate on its discontinuities – as well as to the foregrounding of the creative method and its documentation. It also brings to mind Robert Smithson’s insistence on the interest in the way the artist thinks, irrespective of any tangible result, and the sustainable validity in following ‘blind alleys’.
It may be a connection too far, but it’s tempting to make correlations to the period of development that takes place in Dispatx Make, where there are similarities in some of the referential structures set in place (here I’m thinking about the crosses and targets that Morris occasionally uses in order to somehow anchor his blind efforts). There are inevitably certain constraints on the methods used to present work in progress on the Dispatx site, but these formatting systems offer opportunities for practitioners to force them to reverberate with and serve their own work. Furthermore, the inevitable gaps in what is shown as creative method attest to the irresistible, perhaps inexhaustible array of actions and thoughts, both with and without supporting reasons (& here I can recall something I heard the British artist Keith Tyson say at an artist’s talk, which for some reason has remained in my memory… at last I can stick it somewhere: “…behind every thought is a sponsoring thought…”).

Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning a kind of impersonality that seems to be present in Morris’s work – an impersonality that is arguably present in both Betaville and Building on a Country Path, though in slightly different ways. The appropriative methods and materials used in both projects immediately set up an exchange mediated at another remove – an extra layer of padding that may prevent a certain sharpness of articulation (in terms of getting a sense of an underlying armature of cause/reason), but which might conversely offer an altogether different sense of scale, proportion or form of the project. It does seem clear that, given the amounts of material that have been presented so far, the absorption of the artists’ temporal process is of importance. A substantial investment of time and labour, one that can be half-measured in the allusive content itself, is intertwined throughout these layered stacks of material and is further emphasized by the systematic processes that are being followed.
Davidson’s comment that Morris’s Blind Time drawings set up a kind of measure of error and success, or truth and falsity, through which the viewer might “triangulate” himself, testifies to his assertion that a common conceptual space can be opened up in the interstices of imagery and text – again relating strongly to Dispatx’s emphasis on the creative method. For Davidson, the drawings “bring the act of their making into the works themselves” in a particularly rich and complex way, but, beyond that, they also present fundamental questions concerning the how distance between intention and outcome might be evaluated or engaged with. The richness of this question is testament to the potential of the creative and reflexive exploration we all hope to encourage at Dispatx. When Davidson claims that Morris has “put his viewers in a position to triangulate with him the location of his creative acts,” it also can be read as an indication that the demands on the Dispatx platform, if it is to fully undertake a sustained inquiry into the creative method, seem enormous – we clearly have a lot more work to do. All manner of reasoning – rational, irrational or otherwise, both dark and light – is already sown throughout the projects stored on the website, and this will continue to expand as more input and variety of approach are brought into its orbit.
The two articles mentioned above are as follows:
Robert Morris – “Writing with Davidson: Some Afterthoughts After Doing Blind Time IV: Drawing with Davidson” Critical Inquiry, 19 (Summer 1993), pp.617-627
Donald Davidson – “The Third Man” Critial Inquiry, 19 (Summer 1993), pp. 607-615

Michel Gondrys new film Be Kind Rewind explores an interesting take on appropriation. The website (which is all Im going on, not having seen the film yet) goes into detail about the plot, etc. and what it calls the practice of "Sweding" - remaking or replacing a missing (erased) version of something. Whether this process is only invoked when the original has been lost (what do we call it otherwise?), with the particular demands of replacement, is quite interesting.
Gondrys own Sweding of his films trailer is certainly great fun, and perhaps points to the potential infinite regression always available in the search for something new.

[galibier designs quattro turntable]

One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.

How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?

It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.

I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art” and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.

Once I graduated, I started to teach theory and art classes, mainly new media courses in Los Angeles. During this time, I found that I liked theory, more than I realized, and after a couple of years I began to think of other options for my career. A good colleague of mine, Tina Takemoto, was actually a big inspiration and role model. She is an artist, theorist and art historian now teaching at CCA, in San Francisco. And I never thought I could do what she did. She is so smart and I thought that I simply didn’t have brains like her to do so many things; but then after getting to know her a bit, and with her encouragement, I began to think outside of the usual models already in place in the arts. And I said, why not?

FULL TEXT

The Appropriation Art Coalition, a Canada-based coalition of over 600 artists, curators, educators, writers, associations and organisations, focuses on "copyright policy for artists" and what it calls the "future of Appropriation Art." It has recently sent a letter to various Canadian Ministers, asking to be consulted prior to any changes in copyright legislation. A fuller description of the coalitions aims follows, taken from their website:
"The concern that is being brought forward to the government focusses on artists who use appropriation in their work. These artists are neither protected nor supported by the copyright laws that are meant to protect all artists. Yet they win national and international awards, their work is described in the pages of national and international art books and art journals, and they are exhibited and collected across the country and around the world.
Many artists today work with a contemporary palette. This palette can seem unfamiliar to the viewer. Artists now often work from within popular culture. The materials they use comes from such diverse sources as film, television, radio, advertising, news, text, character etc. It can be referred to as appropriation, collage, multi-media, cast off material, found material, borrowed material etc. It always involves Artists using already-existing source material and transforming this material into new work, with new interpretations and new meanings.
The coalition that has come together to express their concern are asking the government to consult again with artists and those in the cultural sector. The coalition wants the law to accurately reflect and support these valid and important forms of contemporary Canadian art. And to protect the artists who make this art."