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DGR |
I'm sure that Anya Hulbert, the organizer of a day on The Art and Science of Vision at the British Association's 1995 Annual Festival of Science never intended to mislead anyone. In practice, though, the real theme of the day seemed to be "Artist Envy." Here's an example. Professor Richard Gregory from the University of Bristol began the day by asking The Question: "Does it demote art to attribute optical effects [such as those produced from Bridget Riley's work] to science rather than more lofty sources? I'm not going to try to answer." He wouldn't but I will: Yes, absolutely. Now let's put on our lab coats and examine that anecdote. I am an artist with only a minimal understanding of science in general and the scientific method in particular. Nevertheless I can give a definitive answer to a complex question without giving any proof, citing any precedents, et cetera. Just as something is art because I say it's art, an aesthetic truth is an aesthetic truth because I say so. You might say I'm wrong. You might be right. But that doesn't matter, because art is about ideas and opinions, not provable facts. And thus is it any wonder men and women who spend their entire lives attempting to prove things are jealous of artists? Tom Stoppard said it best: "What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist." Artist envy was repeated frequently by other speakers. Patrick Cavanagh from Harvard interrupted his facinating presentation on The Art of Perceiving Contour with the observation that "These are things all artists know, but that we scientists have to work out." And artist sitting next to me appeared bored during a presentation by Doctor Andrew Parker from Oxford University. My friend responded to Dr. Parson's diagrams that a subject is illuminated by indirect as well as direct light by jotting "Reflected light illuminates shadows! What a concept!" (In fairness, it should be noted that Dr. Parson went on to cite the example of 19th century photographer Fox Talbot's use of reflectors as a precedent.) Although the scientists seemed jealous of artists' license to say "It is thus because I say it is thus," the reverse was not true. Professor Heinrich Bülthoff from the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany gave an interesting talk about Recognition and Navigation in Virtual Realities.To examine how humans perceive three-dimensional space, graduate students were asked to identify shapes on a computer monitor. The same experiment was repeated on monkeys, who reportedly were more perceptive than the humans. Professor Bülthoff introduced yet another spiffy three-dimensional graph by mentioning almost in passing that his colleagues at Baylor University then "did something they couldn't do with graduate students; they attached electrodes directly to the monkeys' brains." This apparent "fact" left many of the artists confused. Why can scientists attach electrodes to monkeys and not graduate students? Did the coauthor of some of the research, Shimon Edelman from the Weizmann Institute in Israel feel as comfortable with performing science experiments on living sentient beings? And anyway, hadn't vivisection been widely discredited as a tool of psychological inquiry? Artist envy aside, there are times when it's intellectually easier to be a scientist. That's true because I'm an artist and I said so. |
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Paul C. d'Charmmér |
You're at the entrance to an art gallery. It doesn't look like a gallery entrance, though; it looks like a few zillion other Internet sites circa autumn 1995. It looks like a computer monitor. That's life; your curator is playing with the cards science and industry have dealt. The initial incarnation of e.missive [an early online gallery, now closed] didn't include any art work. Instead, this site featured a short essay asking questions about the relationship between the arts and technology, especially the relevance of the Internet to artists. Will new distribution channels reach new audiences? Does the Internet represent freedom from censorship? Does the Internet offer new opportunities for collaborations? Will the Internet result in a new history of art? Is the Internet a new art medium? My quick answers are yes, yes and no, yes, maybe, and yes. I arrived at the last answer almost by accident. I began looking for interesting Internet art using the normal curatorial practice: I asked my friends what they were doing. Unfortunately, their work seemed to be a microcosm of What's Wrong with the Internet. Some pieces were poorly designed, with graphics too large to be seen on my relatively small 640 pixel wide monitor. Others were elegantly designed, but for a medium other than the Internet. For example, I visited a site related to a photographic exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. It felt fittingly somber and subdued ... or at least some of it did. Since the large images took too long to s-l-o-w-l-y trickle onto the screen, I gave up waiting after the first two images. The site was yet another failed attempt to do a slide show over a narrow bandwidth Internet connection. A lot of old ideas don't work very well in this new medium in its present crude state. In addition to the limitations of the 1995 version of the Internet, some sites were just poorly programmed in keeping with the all too common Internet practice of publishing work today and proofing it later. (Maybe.) Several artists incorporated Internet features in their work. A few used uninspiring variations on the surrealists' exquisite corpse. The most common implementation of "interactive art" was to provide an option for visitors to leave their comments. In Jenny Holzer's piece Please Change Beliefs viewers could fill out a survey indicating which of her statements they agreed with. Thus a visitor could, with a calculator, discover that almost eight times as many people agreed that "A single event can have infinitely many interpretations" than agreed with the statement that "People who don't work with their hands are parasites." In addition, visitors to the site could also write their own beliefs in the Internet equivalent of a guestbook. These comments ran the gamut from clever variations on Holzer's clever variations to schoolboy graffiti, e.g., "286'S ARE OBSOLETE PENTIUMS RULE." Reviewing the survey and reading the comments were as compelling as reading a public opinion poll or leafing through the comments in an old-fashioned analog guest book. Yawn. After reviewing some of the best art on the Internet, I started to conclude that the Internet was an art medium in the same way walking is an art medium. Although a few tenacious individuals can make the medium of walking work, it seemed like Internet art would become as widely used as, say, the hologram. I kept wandering throughout the Internet looking for brilliant art work, but without much notable success. I kept hoping to find some art sites as enjoyable as some of the other sites I enjoyed visiting. Just as I was giving up, though, I had a revelation: art on the Internet is different than other media. At the same time I was criticizing artists for not using the Internet as a new medium, I was hypocritically looking for art that looked and felt like the contemporary art I'd grown to love. It took me a long time to recognize art on the Internet for two reasons: it didn't look like art and often wasn't called art. Had some of my favorite sites been labeled as "Internet installation art" or "Internet performance art" I probably would have experienced my modest epiphany sooner. One of my favorite "pieces" is The Useless Pages. Although the site's de facto curator doesn't call it art, it certainly feels that way. Oscar Wilde opined that "All art is quite useless;" this is a rare case where the reverse is true. Most artists earn my admiration from their overall bodies of work instead of a few heroic "masterpieces." Similarly, the Internet sites I enjoy are greater than the sum of their components. Barton's Den of Iniquity is such a site. The creator never called it art, but it certainly felt that way. As Mojo Nixon said, "It's just a matter of inflicting your own personality on the material." Spoonman also exemplifies the aesthetic of persona as art. Spoonman's best work is just being Spoonman, an act he's successfully pulled off on the Internet. Seven by Nine Squares, with its Postmodern Dissertation Generator and Death Mauses Meat Pieces is one of the few art sites I visited that called itself an art site and delivered the goods. The fifth site included I've included is The Burning Man. This isn't an art piece per se, but rather more conventional documentation of art in a variety of non-Internet media. I suppose this really shouldn't be here in that e.missive is supposed to be "art that uses the Internet as an art medium," but what's the use of being a curator if you can't break your own rules? If you don't like the cards you're dealt, burn 'em. |
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Cocksucker Blues at Robert Franks [sic] House Mick Jagger |
The Royal Mounties knocked on Roberts front door, armed with seven different search warrants. |
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Ladies and Gentlemen: England's Most Famous Censor DGR |
Mick Jagger's 14 words on the Robert Frank film don't tell us much about why he commanded an army of lawyers to bury Cocksucker Blues, the 1972 film he originally commissioned Frank to make. On the other hand, 14 words may be the most the most England's most famous censor has said about the 90 minute film in the last two decades. (We're still investigating.) The heavy-handed approach worked. The only way--or at least, the only legal way--to see Cocksucker Blues is to have Robert Frank present it personally. In Jagger's defense, it can be argued that his Draconian action has at least kept a reclusive artist in circulation: Frank is legally obligated to show up at his well-earned retrospectives. If you came here to examine another facet of the Rolling Stones' thinly gilded façade, stick around. In addition to featuring writing by much more interesting musicians such as the members of Negativland, there'll be an essay about Robert Frank and the world's greatest rock and role corporation in a future edition of Stare. |
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Negativland |
As Duchamp pointed out many decades ago, the act of selection can be a form of inspiration as original and significant as any other. Throughout our various mass mediums, we now find many artists who work by "selecting" existing cultural material to collage with, to create with, and to comment with. In general, this continues to be a direction that both "serious" and "popular" arts like. But is it theft? Do artists, for profit or not, have the right to freely "sample" from an already "created" electronic environment that surrounds them for use in their own work? The psychology of art has always favored fragmentary "theft" in a way which does not engender a loss to the owner. In fact, most artists speak freely about the amount of stuff they have stolen at one time or another. In the realm of ideas, techniques, styles, etc. most artists know that stealing (or call it "being influenced" if you want to sound legitimate) is not only OK, but desirable and even crucial to creative evolution. This proven route to progress has prevailed among artists since art began and will not be denied. To creators, it is simply obvious in their own experience. Now some will say there is a big difference between stealing ideas, techniques, and styles which are not easily copyrighted, and stealing actual material, which is easily copyrighted. However, aside from the copyright deterrence factor which now prevails throughout our law-bound art industries, we can find nothing intrinsically wrong with artists deciding to incorporate existing art "samples" into their own work. The fact that we have economically motivated laws against it does not necessarily make it an undesirable artistic move. In fact, this kind of theft has a well-respected tradition in the arts extending back to the Industrial Revolution. In the early years of this century, Cubists began to attach found materials such as product packaging and photographs to their paintings. This now seems an obvious and perfectly natural desire to embody or transform existing things into their own work as a form of dialogue with their material environment. And that "material" environment began to grow in strange new ways. Appropriation in the arts has now spanned the entire century, crossing mediumistic boundaries, and constantly expanding in emotional relevance from beginning to end regardless of the rise and fall of "style fronts." It flowered through collage, Dada's found objects and concept of "detournement," and peaked in the visual arts at mid-century with Pop Art's appropriation of mass culture icons and mass media imagery. Now, at the end of this century, it is in music where we find appropriation raging anew as a major creative method and legal controversy. We think it's about time that the obvious aesthetic validity of appropriation begins to be raised in opposition to the assumed preeminence of copyright laws prohibiting the free reuse of cultural material. Has it occurred to anyone that the private ownership of mass culture is a bit of a contradiction in terms? Artists have always perceived the environment around them as both inspiration to act and as raw material to mold and remold. However, this particular century has presented us with a new kind of influence in the human environment. We are now all immersed in an ever-growing media environment--an environment just as real and just as affecting as the natural one from which it somehow sprang. Today we are surrounded by canned ideas, images, music, and text. My television set recently told me that 70 to 80 percent of our population now gets most of their information about the world from their television sets. Most of our opinions are no longer born out of our own experience. They are received opinions. Large increments of our daily sensory input are not focused on the physical reality around us, but on the media that saturates it. As artists, we find this new electrified environment irresistibly worthy of comment, criticism, and manipulation. The act of appropriating from this media assault represents a kind of liberation from our status as helpless sponges which is so desired by the advertisers who pay for it all. It is a much needed form of self-defense against the one-way, corporate-consolidated media barrage. Appropriation sees media, itself, as a telling source and subject, to be captured, rearranged, even manipulated, and injected back into the barrage by those who are subjected to it. Appropriators claim the right to create with mirrors. Our corporate culture, on the other hand, is determined to reach the end of this century maintaining its economically dependent view that there is something wrong with all this. However, both perceptually and philosophically, it remains an uncomfortable wrenching of common sense to deny that when something hits the airwaves it is literally in the public domain. The fact that the owners of culture and its material distribution can claim this isn't true is a tribute to their ability to restructure common sense for maximum profit. Our cultural evolution is no longer allowed to unfold in the way that pre-copyright culture always did. True folk music, for example, is no longer possible. The original folk process of incorporating previous melodies and lyrics into constantly evolving songs is impossible when melodies and lyrics are privately owned. We now exist in a society so choked and inhibited by cultural property and copyright protections that the very idea of mass culture is now primarily propelled by economic gain and the rewards of ownership. To be sure, when these laws came about there were bootlegging abuses to be dealt with, but the self-serving laws that resulted have criminalized the whole idea of making one thing out of another. Our dense, international web of copyright restrictions was initiated and lobbied through the congresses of the world, not by anyone who makes art, but by the parasitic middle men of culture--the corporate publishing and management entities who saw an opportunity to enhance their own and their clients' income by exploiting a wonderfully human activity that was proceeding naturally around them as it always had--the reuse of culture. These cultural representers--the lawyers behind the administrators, behind the agents, behind the artists--have succeeded in mining every possible peripheral vein of monetary potential in their art properties. All this is lobbied into law under the guise of upholding the interests of artists in the marketplace, and the U.S. Congress, with no exposure to an alternative point of view, always accommodates them. That being the case, there are two types of appropriation taking place today: legal and illegal. So, you may ask, if this type of work must be done, why can't everyone just follow the rules and do it the legal way? Negativland remains on the shady side of existing law because to follow it would put us out of business. Here is a personal example of how copyright law actually serves to prevent a wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerged out of our reproducing technologies. In order to appropriate or sample even a few seconds of almost anything out there, you are supposed to do two things: get permission and pay clearance fees. The permission aspect becomes an unavoidable roadblock to anyone who may intend to use the material in a context unflattering to the performer or work involved. This may happen to be exactly what we want to do. Dead end. Imagine how much critical satire would get made if you were required to get prior permission from the subject of your satire? The payment aspect is an even greater obstacle to use. Negativland is a small group of people dedicated to maintaining our critical stance by staying out of the corporate mainstream. We create and manufacture our own work, on our own label, on our own meager incomes and borrowed money. Our work is typically packed with found elements, brief fragments recorded from all media. This goes way beyond one or two, or ten or twenty elements. We can use a hundred different elements on a single record. Each of these audio fragments has a different owner and each of these owners must be located. This is usually impossible because the fragmentary nature of our long-ago random capture from radio or TV does not include the owner's name and address. If findable, each one of these owners, assuming they each agree with our usage, must be paid a fee which can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars each. Clearance fees are set, of course, for the lucrative inter-corporate trade. Even if we were somehow able to afford that, there are the endless frustrations involved in just trying to get lethargic and unmotivated bureaucracies to get back to you. Thus, both our budget and our release schedule would be completely out of our own hands. Releases can be delayed literally for years. As tiny independents, depending on only one release at a time, we can't proceed under those conditions. In effect, any attempt to be legal would shut us down. So OK, we're just small potato heads, working in a way that wasn't foreseen by the law, and it's just too problematical, so why not just work some other way? We are working this way because it's just plain interesting, and emulating the various well-worn status quos isn't. How many artistic prerogatives should we be willing to give up in order to maintain our owner-regulated culture? The directions art wants to take may sometimes be dangerous--that's the risk of democracy--but they certainly should not be dictated by what business wants to allow. Look it up in the dictionary: art is not defined as a business! Is it a healthy state of affairs when business attorneys get to lock in the boundaries of experimentation for artists, or is this a recipe for cultural stagnation? Negativland proposes some possible revisions in our copyright laws which would, very briefly, clear all restrictions from any practice of fragmentary appropriation. In general, we support the broad intent of copyright law. But we would have the protections and payments to artists and their administrators restricted to the straight-across usage of entire works by others, or for any form of usage at all by commercial advertisers. Beyond that, creators would be free to incorporate fragments from the creations of others into their own work. As for matters of degree, a "fragment" might be defined as "less than the whole," to give the broadest benefit of the doubt to unpredictability. However, a simple compilation of nearly whole works, if contested by the owner, would not pass a crucial test for valid free appropriation. Namely: whether or not the material used is superseded by the new nature of the usage, itself--is the whole more than the sum of its parts? When faced with actual examples, this is usually not difficult to evaluate. Today, this kind of encouragement for our natural urge to remix culture appears only vaguely within the copyright act under the "Fair Use" doctrine. The Fair Use statutes are intended to allow for free appropriation in certain cases of parody or commentary. Currently these provisions are conservatively interpreted and withheld from many "infringers." A huge improvement would occur if the Fair Use section of existing law was expanded or liberalized to allow any partial usage for any reason. (Again, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" test.) If this occurred, the rest of copyright law might stay pretty much as it is (if that's what we want) and continue to apply in all cases of "whole" theft for commercial gain, e.g. bootlegging entire works. The beauty of the Fair Use Doctrine is that it is the only nod to the possible need for artistic freedom and free speech in the entire copyright law, and it is already capable of overriding the other restrictions. Court cases of appropriation which focus on Fair Use and its need to be updated could begin to open up this cultural quagmire through legal precedent. Until some such adjustments occur, modern societies will continue to find the corporate stranglehold on cultural "properties" in a stubborn battle with the common sense and natural inclinations of their user populations. Please address any comments to: Negativland |
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Dr. Science |
It was a rainy spring morning in Paris when Georges Fotograf unveiled his new machine. His wife Iris was out shopping, but she had already made her contribution. Georges held the print of her ample posterior to the light and examined it closely. "A perfect likeness!" he exclaimed to his cat Dektol. Quite accidentally Iris had sat on an engraving Georges had been preparing with a new chemical bath. When she got up, an exact image of her had been left on the engraving. Fotograf was an engraver by trade, but a lazy one, and had been working on a chemical process that would create a self-engraving engraving. "But who will pay for pictures of derrieres?" Georges wondered. A decent, upright man, he could not predict one of modern photography's most important and lucrative uses. Fotograf knew he must take his process one step further. "I must find a way to make the self engraver operate without having to be sat upon. But how?" Dektol meowed and stared at him with one of her typical inquisitive stares. The cat's eyes glowed red and that gave Georges an idea. "Of course, a lens instead of a derriere!" The deep red glow in the cat's eyes continued to hold him in their hypnotic grip. "And a parallax infrared autofocus system!" It was all coming easy now. Within a few hours Fotograf had put together the worlds first autofocus, auto film advance, auto rewind camera. His wife returned from her shopping trip and Georges began to take pictures of her at a frantic rate. It took him a few weeks to develop the pictures, because he had to invent both the developing and printing processes. Fortunately, he had been doing some engraving in his greenhouse and had accidentally spilled many gardening chemicals into a vat of engraving paper. Serendipitously, the paper became sensitive to light. Fotograf had the bad fortune to have his pictures found by the police during a routine inspection. The hundreds of pictures of his wife's derriere so outraged both judge and jury that they sentenced the unlucky engraver to life in prison. Georges Fotograf died penniless and insane in prison, acknowledged only by his wife Iris and his cat Dektol as the father of modern photography. |
Stare. (Visual Information
Inquiry) |