Abstract
This theoretical examination focuses on the
idea that recombinatory practices commonly found in new media constitute
a challenge to traditional author/viewer conventions. Placing this
view in both a historical perspective and in relation to the suggestion
advanced by Umberto Eco that these works assume a principle of “variation
to infinity”, it is possible to recognize that instead of challenging
or critiquing traditional author/viewer conventions, recombinatory
practices serve to reify those positions and assert an authoritarian
role for the original source material. The idea that these practices
challenge authorship is thus a form of false consciousness.
Essay
There is an approach to making “new” art that
begins by taking existing reproductions of other art—whether images,
sounds, movies or text—and then recombines these in some fashion,
using this pre-existing material as the source for a new work. This
action has been called by various names—sampling/appropriation/cut-up/mash-up/remix/collage/montage—and
each of these names refers to one of its many historical incarnations.
Without the associated technologies of distribution, reproduction
and mass marketing, the recombinatory work as it emerged in the
twentieth century would be unimaginable. It is an aesthetic form
that has recurred almost identically with each ‘new' technology
becoming readily available. This reassembly from reproductions is
characteristic of artistic responses to the emergence of technological
reproduction over the course of the twentieth century and extends
into present uses of digital technologies without any sign of abatement.
While recombination of existing works into new
ones has origins in folk art and elsewhere before the twentieth
century, historical discussions of this approach often begin with
Pablo Picasso who combined reproductions with his cubist paintings
in the 1910s; the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov who experimented
with wax recordings to make “remixes” in the late 1910s and early
1920s 1 . Soviet montage itself
owes its existence to experiments with the reassembly of existing
film materials. Surrealist Max Ernst cut up engravings to make “novels”,
and Joseph Cornell re-edited Hollywood films with other movies to
create his own work Rose Hobart . The author William Burroughs
created “cut ups” with audio tape.... As new technologies of reproduction
became available, new artists performed some kind of recombination
of those materials. The listing of these artists and their works
could easily continue. This approach is so common it could be called
“typical” when artists confront a new technology.
But what is most striking about the repeating
pattern of artistic reuse is the increasingly strident claim that
this approach constitutes a “questioning of authorship,” especially
evident in the later forms that appear at the end of the century
around the idea of “appropriation art.” 2 It
is against this background that the reappearance of these forms
(with new names like “mashup” and “sampling” and “database”) in
computer based media art— new media —should be considered.
Their historical continuity with work by the
historical avant-garde suggests these approaches (whatever their
name) have become banal rather than disruptive since popular entertainment
can successfully redeploy these approaches. Acknowledging this fact
raises a basic question about how these recombinatory practices
challenge traditional author/viewer conventions, as well as why
this approach continues to make fundamentally the same claim that
these actions constitute a “questioning of authorship.”
By examining the belief that recombination “questions
authorship,” it becomes apparent that these approaches constitute
a means to avoid the potential shocks each new technology implies
by an assertion of traditional roles for audience and viewer. Thus,
their repetition takes on a dual character: at the level praxis
where it appears through the reuse of reproductions (the “raw” material
of the work), and at the conceptual level as the specific procedure
of adoption and reassembly.
These repetitions, instead of disrupting conceptions
of authorship, (and originality, etc.) serve as a means to assert
these values through the principle of “variation.” Umberto Eco has
noted that viewers, aware of the rupture in appropriated or quotational
works (and sampling cannot be anything but quotational) is aware
of their nature as a repetition. What is of interest to the viewer
is the way the new work reconfigures the old:
The real problem is that what is of interest
is not so much the single variation as “variability” as a formal
principle, the fact that one can make variations to infinity. Variability
to infinity has all the characteristics of repetition, and very
little of innovation. But it is the “infinity” of the process that
gives a new sense to the device of variation. What must be enjoyed—suggests
the postmodern aesthetics—is the fact that a series of possible
variations is potentially infinity. What becomes celebrated here
is a sort of victory of life over art, with the paradoxical result
that the era of electronics, instead of emphasizing the phenomena
of shock, interruption, novelty , and frustration of expectations,
would produce a return to the continuum, the Cyclical, the Periodical,
the Regular. 3
With the shift to “variability”, the more explicit
the quotation, the more the audience may be expected to recognize
it, and thus the more directly it plays the new instance against
the original one. Variations imposed by the artist become the critical
focus in relation to the original work. Instead of eliminating the
authorship, or even critiquing it, the remix/appropriated work emphasizes
the role of the author precisely because it is the differences (if
any) that matter: the role of artist-as-author is not minimized
here, it is maximized. The artist reestablishes traditional positions
for both artist and viewer: the artist dominates, transforming an
existing work into something “new.”
This image of artistic domination over materials
is familiar—it is the traditional view of “genius” in a different
guise. The coupling of such a traditional view of authorship with
a consistent artistic practice whose name mutates, (but whose procedures
vary only slightly), imposes a specific conclusion about the recombinatory
procedure: that instead of challenging traditional notions of authorship,
it tends to assert them while inviting the audience to (un)critically
engage the work using their encyclopedic past knowledge of the sources
for the “new” work. The audience is active in their engagement with
the work, but such “activity” is a potential in any viewing situation
and should not be regarded as unique to recombinatory works.
At the same time, this engagement with a “critical”
or “active” audience is only superficial. The “activity” is one
of comparing the new instance to established forms. This action
assumes the prior authority of the existing work. The recombinatory
actions exist in parasitical relation (as variations) to their source
materials. By drawing together existing materials in new ways, the
“variability to infinity” Eco describes comes into the interpretation,
creating a false consciousness of challenge to authority and the
conventional role of the viewer: the repetitions inherent to remixing
existing materials escape the psychological dangers unheimlich
works may pose through a reliance on established expertise
and the implicit understanding of the “rules of the game” involved
in appropriations.
To claim the recombinatory practices commonly
found in new media—sampling, appropriation, remixes, mash-ups, etc.—challenge
traditional author/viewer conventions can not be accepted as true.
As Eco has noted, these practices constitute a shift to a pre-modern
convention set where the traditional established work that is the
subject of the transformations is elevated in status, and the artist
appropriating serves to reify that status, while viewers, aware
of the conventionalized variability at the heart of appropriation,
recognize in the artist's actions an assertion of authorial dominance
over the original work as well as a (paradoxical) subservience to
that work.
-----------------------------------------------
Notes
1
Petric, Vlada. Constructivism in Films: The Man with a Movie
Camera, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); see
also: Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
, ed. Annette Michselson, trans. Kevin O'Brien, (Berkeley:
Universiy of California Press, 1984).
2
There are many sources for this claim, but it figures prominently
in Douglas Crimp's “Appropriating Appropriation,” in On the
Museum's Ruins , (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995) pp. 126-136.
3
Eco, Umberto, “Interpreting Serials,” in The Limits of Interpretation
, (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994) pp. 83-100 |