I.5 Appropriation After Appropriation, Part 1
Sat Oct 29 / 9:00 – 10:30 / Music Room, rm 2006, Hart House
chair /
- Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Appropriation took centre stage within particularly the artworlds in both Canada and the USA. While acts of borrowing, taking and stealing were always part of the history of art, such strategies became the core focus of artistic production. From Stan Douglas’ slidework Mime (1983), in which he takes a recording of Preachin’ Blues and made his own lips sing it, to Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of the photographs by historical photographers Walker Evans and Edward Weston, the emphasis on acts of appropriating opened up questions about the relationships between people and images in the contemporary world. This panel invites papers that explore strategies of appropriation that have developed after the Appropriation movements. This may include overviews of practices (for example, related to video art or in NFTs) or focused analyses of specific creators or works.
keywords: appropriation, modern and contemporary art
I.5.1 General Idea’s © and XXX (blue) Mark the Spot: Luminary ‘plagiarists, intellectual parasites’ who ‘occupied images’
- Cristina S. Martinez, University of Ottawa
Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the animated character that AA Bronson has avowed he relates to the most. On 1 January 2024, less than two years from now, the 1928 copyright for the earlier version of Mickey Mouse (as it appeared in Steamboat Willie) is set to expire and enter the public domain. Concerns and debates over the duration and extension of copyright protection are not new and have subsisted since the Engravings Act of 1735, the first legislation to grant copyright protection to an image. General Idea, known for their occupation of images, would become interested in subverting notions of copyright. They were self-declared ‘plagiarists, intellectual parasites’ who remorselessly appropriated the copyright symbol itself, which under their spell becomes a target of mockery, an object of contemplation and a subject of reflection. This paper looks at the different ways in which the Canadian trio explored and manipulated (often tongue-in-cheek) copyright, leaving the matter unresolved. It celebrates their creative spirit by laying emphasis on their playful appropriations of trademarks, the International Klein Blue colour and footage from Yves Klein’s performances as well as excerpts from television series such as Batman and its villain, the Joker. It draws on Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite and his fable of the city rat and the country rat to establish comparisons with the American artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Dennis Oppenheim and others for their seductive absorption of Mickey Mouse, the most famous of the rodents, an appropriation at times transpiring into legal action. General Idea’s insistent and clever jostling with copyright continues to provoke, inform and amuse the viewer with the powerful questioning it instills.
keywords: appropriation art, copyright, Canadian art, General Idea, Michel Serres
Cristina S. Martinez is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa and a faculty member of the International Summer Institute for the Cultural Study of Law, University of Osnabrück, Germany. She holds a PhD in Art History and Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is interested in graphic satire, the history of copyright and encounters between art and law.
I.5.2 Appropriating Cinema: Eminence and Posthuman Resonance in Janice Gurney’s The Newspaper
Émilie von Garan, University of Toronto
In this presentation, I ask what a film theory approach to art which appropriates cinema can reveal about both the works themselves and the practice of appropriation more broadly. Using the film studies concept of suture (primarily via the work of Jean-Louis Comolli, Stephen Heath and Kaja Silverman), I look to Janice Gurney’s body of work, focusing on The Newspaper (1991) an artwork composed of three images and text, and Red Desert (1964)—the Antonioni film from which the central image of the work was taken. I move through their entanglements and propose suture theory as a strategy to think about the works and, more generally, the appropriation of cinema in art. What I offer in this presentation is a brief intervention into the work of Janice Gurney, arguing for a consideration of her practice of appropriation as a critical praxis whereby creative appropriation is conceived of as not only the re-use of ‘already-authored’ work but as both a continuous process akin to the cinematic concept of suture.
Émilie von Garan is a bilingual Toronto based critical writer and researcher exploring the intersection of the body, technology, and architecture in film and moving image art. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the instability of the gaze in post-war Italian cinema through the works of filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Dario Argento.
I.5.3 The Derivative Avant-Garde: Self-Appropriation and the Recursive Readymade in Marcel Broodthaers' Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus - Art or the Art of Selling
- M. Curtis Allen, Western University
If appropriation art finds its earliest incarnation in the readymade with Duchamp's Fountain (1917), responding—as Stiegler (2017) notes—to the serialized production of mass industrial manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century, then appropriation enters into a new, ‘post-industrial,’ financial phase in the work of Marcel Broodthaers. In 1972, Broodthaers produced an exhibition entitled, Tractatus Logico–Catalogicus (L’Art ou l’art de vendre). This exhibition included as its centerpiece a large-scale, single page, screen-print reproduction of a catalogue from his own earlier exhibition of 1970 (the prosaically titled L’Exposition à la galerie). The new print was positioned upside-down and in negative, sharing the title of the new exhibition. For this presentation, I argue that Broodthaers is engaging in a form of self-appropriation, one which deliberately plays on the recursive logic of reproduction and language in order to mirror the way in which the formalism of the financial derivatives market derives value not the from the goods of the real economy but solely from speculation on the volatility of price differentials themselves. Just as the derivatives hoist themselves from their material base in order to generate exponential profits from the second-order dynamics of price, so too Broodthaers sardonically offers its reflection in the volatilization of aesthetic value determined by the second-order exhibition value of the catalogue, substituting the primary cult value of the sensuous art object. As his own title suggests, he thereby interrogates the economic logic at work in the heart of the contemporary art production—appropriation art in particular. In order to elaborate this reading of the work, we will bring criticism of appropriation art together with the sociology of contemporary art alongside theories of aesthetic value and financial capital (using Douglas Crimp, Sturtevant, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Suhail Malik, Elie Ayache, AA Cavia, and others).
keywords: appropriation art, financialization, Marcel Broodthaers, capitalism, contemporary art
M. Curtis Allen is an interdisciplinary theorist with an arts background whose research intersects the philosophy of language, aesthetics, and media/cultural theory. He currently teaches at OCAD and NSCAD Universities in Canada. He is completing doctoral work in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University (Canada) on the concept of ‘sense’ in Deleuze and Wittgenstein. He is also interested in current rationalisms and their relation to contemporary art and the critique of political economy, as well as the philosophical and cultural consequences of computation. He was Head Editor of Chiasma: A Site for Thought, and has published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (forthcoming), Open Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, WOPOZI, and elsewhere.
