You are currently browsing the daily archive for December 5th, 2007.
As we finish up this semester of discussing appropriation, perhaps it would be timely to discuss an element of our society that has been appropriated and re-appropriated numerous times – to the point where very few people acknowledge the original foundations and contexts: the celebrations surrounding December 25.
For most of us who celebrate Christmas, the idea conjures up a collection of pleasant images. Christmas stimulates thoughts of family gathered around a decorated tree, of music and light and the comforting smell of a special dinner cooking on a snowy winter day. Carolers at the door, sleigh rides, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and sugar plums also come into play, although almost no one today experiences any of these.
It has become commonplace for religious and other specialists to criticize what they consider the poisoning of Christmas with commercialism. Such people usually call for a return to the “real meaning” of Christmas, either as a Christian celebration of Jesus’ birth or as a spiritual celebration of “family values.”. These critiques speculate a Christmas observance from which we have fallen, in which they assume that Christmas was once a religious holiday into which the shopping mall has worked itself.
It’s interesting to remember that before the Roman Empire was “Christianized”, the holiday was not celebrated. In order to appease the communities being overthrown, Church leaders appropriated the traditional pagan celebrations around the time of the winter solstice. While there was absolutely no scriptural basis for celebrating the birth of Jesus at all, let alone in December, this presented itself a convenient vehicle by which the Church could use a pagan holiday for Christian motive.
During the early settlement of the United States, the celebration of Christmas was actually banned by the Puritans who took offense to the excessive drinking, and gluttony of the adults, and permitted begging by children that were associated with the holiday’s pagan roots.
So as we head home to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or whichever groups appropriation of the atmospheric phenomenon of the shortest days of the year we subscribe to, let us not forget what it is that we are indeed celebrating…
now, what is it that we are celebrating again?
happy holidays!
jennifer
In class we learned that parody uses humour and satire to construct a new image or idea by retaining or using elements of a pre-existing cultural artifact.
I think that General Ideas Shut the Fuck Up is a great example of parody:
http://videoart.virtualmuseum.ca/artist.php?id=11§ion=clip
The clip on the right is the example that I will be speaking of in this blog entry. In this clip, General Idea uses elements directly related to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries de l’Epoque bleue (Anthropometries of the Blue Period) in Klein’s original piece, the Monotone Symphony was performed while Klein had three nude models cover themselves in blue paint and affix their body prints on the white papers, laid out on the gallery walls and floor.
After ‘setting the stage’ with what has been constructed to appear as a news report of Klein’s work, General Idea’s response to this work uses symphonic background music, the copywrited ‘International Klein Blue’ and large white canvasses to generate a critique of the legitimacy of hype surrounding the arts.
I think that this example serves as an illustration of the distinction between appropriation and stealing that we discussed in our last class: the humour of General Ideas work is directly dependant on the audience’s knowledge of Klein’s work and the propaganda surrounding it.
As with much appropriation; if you are unaware of the elements that have been appropriated and their independent history the joke doesn’t make sense. General Idea’s use of Klein’s work is not intended to result in their being given credit for the monotone pieces. Conversely, they perhaps are looking for the recognition of Not being the artist who came up with the idea 
.
Jennifer
Cover versions are an interesting breed… How much more of an example of direct appropriation can exist than one artist literally using another’s words? I had a slightly challenging time trying to decide what type of cover to use in this reflection – then I realized that perhaps the variations in covers are part of the ‘point’.
In My opinion, (and really, what else is a blog??), I think that cover versions performed at a concert, never to be released are the most ‘legitimate’ version. For example; at a David Usher concert I attended in 2003, he performed Pink’s “I’m Coming Up” to the tune of Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train (a double appropriation?). Concert venue covers that are never recorded present a fun, ephemeral offering to the crowd – a token memory for the people who shelled out the time and cash to go see the artist perform, as opposed to staying home and downloading from thepiratebay.com .
An example of cover version appropriation that I love to hate is The Nylons. For those of you who don’t know, The Nylons are a Canada’s longest running (yes, that is a pun) a cappella group. Most of The Nylons 29 year discography is in the form of a-cappella rework of pre-existing music. In this case, the appropriation is not used as parody or critique; it is just what they do. This specific example seems problematic, as although they do not attempt to reference the music as their own, understanding of the performance does not rely on knowledge that the songs are in fact someone else’s.
Finally, Alanis Morisette’s cover of The Black Eyed Peas “My Humps” seems to demonstrate what we as a class have acknowledged to be suitable use of appropriation; use of another’s content for social critique. Morisette uses not only the lyrics of the original but also the basic elements of the video to construct a criticism of females in popular music. It is also interesting to note that Morisette’s video was released directly to youtube, thereby using the platform’s reputation of independence and analysis to increase the authority of her own offering.
Alanis Morisette – My Humps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W91sqAs-_-g
Black Eyed Peas – My Humps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbZc7j6A230
(and for those of you who have never seen The Nylons)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfR9okzLcE
Jennifer
Richard Prince
Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy) 1989, Ektacolor print, 50 x 70 inches fgsd
“There wasn’t really a plan. I’ve never been included in any photography based survey, museum show, photo magazine. I’ve heard that Peter Galassi hates my work. That he would never acknowledge it in the photo department at MoMA. I think he’s wrong. I think my photo work is all about photography. But there was never an idea about where the work was going at the beginning when I started to re-photograph images. When you don’t have any training in a particular medium you can bring something to it that hasn’t been brung (sic). I “brung” the sheriff and I shot him. I killed photography. Maybe they hated that.. I always look for my name in Photography mags but I never see it. Maybe I should have “rescued” photography.” –Richard Prince from an on-going unpublished email interview with Brian Appel, Sept, 26th, 2005, www.artcritical.com
Richard Prince is an American artist best known for his re-photographed photograph Untitled (Cowboy), 1984. The original photograph was part of a marketing campaign for the “Marlboro Man”, a character recurring for many years in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes. His works have often been the subject of debates within the art world for both their obvious use of appropriation and for the numbers the fetch at auction. In fact, Untitled (Cowboy) was the first photograph to raise more than one million at auction when it was sold at Christie’s New York in 2005.
Prince has also created controversy by re-photographing four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times, and as with the art of Sherri Levine, anytime you are photographing photographs, controversy and dialogue concerning authorship and authenticity are bound to fight their way into the spotlight. Prince has also found himself in the center of many legal battles around photographic copyright issues.
Dara Birnbaum
Dara Birnbaum is an American video artist who is perhaps most famous for her provocative and influential contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and popular culture. Through video works and multi media installations, Birnbaum subverts, critiques and deconstructs hegemony of mass media images and gestures to confront the mythologies of culture and history. If we define appropriation as an act that takes possession of another’s imagery or idea, often without permission, then Dara Birnbaum fits the bill.
[Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79, video, Electronic Arts Intermix, NY.]
In her video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, Dara Birnbaum created one of the first examples of appropriation imagery from mainstream television, something that is now quite common. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, features, as one might expect, Wonder Woman, the main character of the prime-time television programm of the same name which was based on an action-adventure comic book. Using actual sceans from the series, Birnbaum “plung[es] the viewer headlong into the ver experience of TV- unveiling TV’s steriotypical gestures of power and submission, of male and female egos.” – http://www.eai.org/eai/artist.jsp?artistID=430
Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moments of the ‘real’ womans transformation into superhero. In doing so, Birnabaum is subverting its meaning within the television context. She is also appropriating televison filming conventions to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of televisions structural codes, she uses these to anayze the syntax and gestures of what Birnbaum calls “TV treatmeant”.
On Birnbaum’s “TV treatmeant” in, General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating, 1980, 6 min, colour: “in this case, the cross-cut and the reverse shot. The “cross-over” in an Olympic women’s speed skating race is juxtaposed with daytime drama General Hospital’s “whites” in reverse angle shots. A couple tries to reach an understanding. Skaters continuously return to the starting line. Frustration and exertion combine with originally scored soundtracks of disco, rock and jazz. The female soap opera character’s emotional stress, her gestures and rhetoric of paranoia and self-doubt are countered with the pure physical performance of the female sports figures.” -http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=2713
candace
