REMIX THIS ESSAY

The following essay will be published as part of the upcoming ReUse Aloud Programme on basic.fm, March 2013. 

This is the first draft of the essay but another to be published after the programme goes to air....

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REMIX THIS ESSAY

 "…Something has changed, and the Faustian, Promethean (perhaps Oedipal) period of production and consumption gives way to the "proteinic" era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalised interface that goes with the universe of communication…" 

 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication 

 "I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias. I ate him." 

 Oswald de Andrade, The Cannibalist Manifesto 

In 2013, we are all bedroom turntablists. From a World Wide Web of images and ideas we re-post, re-blog, re-tweet, re-pin, re-appropriate, re-contextualise, reshape, resample, quote, borrow, reference and remix. We are all cultural cannibals. But remixing (and cannibalism) are nothing new - since the origins of humanity people have pillaged tools, copied techniques, imitated sounds, inherited stories and gestures, enfolding and reworking these into their own personal lexis of ideas, expressions and values. Humans 'borrow', 'imitate' and 'copy' in order to learn. I recall our first class assignment at art school was to choose a painting from amongst The Scottish National Gallery's collection, observe it in detail, make sketches then return to the studio and produce a copy of the original. Our second task was to do it again… And again… Tirelessly reproducing the originals until we got under the skin of our Titian's, Rembrandt's or Goya's and understood empirically how they were made in order to imbibe - or rather 'cannibalise' - the techniques, skills and knowledge inherent in those Herculean paintings. By copying, adapting, remixing and hybridising 'borrowed' ideas, expressions and materials we extend our literacy from that of passive ('read only') consumers of culture to active ('read write') authors and participants in cultural evolution. As we move further into the 21st Century and towards the pluralistic, interconnected "protean era" what - if any - is the enduring significance of the cultural remix?

Appropriation and the art of remix 

"The force that underlies the belief in the potential of appropriation is the hope that it should be possible to cut a slice out of the substance of this commodity culture to expose the structures that shape it in all their layers. It is also the hope that this cut might, at least partially, free that slice of material culture from the grip of its dominant logic and put it at the disposal of a different use." 

 Jan Verwoert, Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different 

Appropriation in art - that is the deliberate reuse of signs and images - is as old a strategy as art itself. The entire trajectory of art history is founded upon an endless reappropriation and reworking of past images and styles. However, with the turn of the 20th Century artists began to extend their appropriation to gleaning images and materials from the realm of mass-media (especially newspapers and film) not merely as a means for building upon the past but also as a mechanism of social parody, expropriation, deconstruction and critique. The photo montages of Dada and Fluxus in the early 20th Century bear a visual equivalence to the contemporary 'mash-up' video of the 2010's: hoarding ('appropriating') the representations and signs of contemporary visual culture, fragmenting these almost beyond recognition then recompiling them in a chaotic melee which underscores their original operations either as commercial propaganda or hypnotising falsities. During the 1980's Post Modernism emerged as a direct reaction to (and progression from) the cultural hegemony of Modernism and it's tropes of the individual artist hero and the isolationism of 'art for art's sake'. Appropriation in this period was rife and also became a deliberate and self-conscious way of subverting (and/or critiquing) the authority of dominant cultural systems including contemporary art. Artists such as Sherrie Levine - who re-photographed the works of others, memorably Walker Evans' photos of the Great Depression in 1930s America - used appropriation as a means to question and volatise ideologies inherent in 'original' works of art such as the dominance of the white, middle class male in artistic and cultural production. Appropriation became a means for challenging the status quo, not only by mimicking, parodying and plundering the motifs and methods of art but also by mixing the 'high cultural' forms of artistic production with the 'low cultural' mediums of advertising, pop culture and hollywood cinema. Around this time artists like Barbara Kruger and Martha Rosler began appropriating and employing the visual language of advertising in their work. Utilising the vernacular imagery of the press and the overly-dramatised syntax of propagandist advertising, these works were often presented back through traditionally 'non-art' media such as flyers, protest posters, bill boards and the alternative press. These tactics of cultural hijacking sought to undermine the dominance of the press and consumer culture by uncovering the underlying operations of power and desire. Whether by introducing contrary perspectives, voices and statistics or simply 'interrupting' the seamless communication of advertising these tactics are again comparable with the momentum of 'culture jamming' by contemporary groups such as The Billboard Liberation Front, The Yes Men and Adbusters Media Foundation. Many of these movements developed as a response to the 'ownership' of culture by corporations, appropriating and subverting the communications of multinational corporations (including logos, advertising posters, websites and newspapers) both in order to occupy and destabilise those messages but also to interrogate hidden, underlying issues such as environmental impact and social iniquities.

Remix, revolt, evolve 

"The ecstatic consumer of the eighties is fading out in favour of an intelligent and potentially subversive consumer: the user of forms. Deejay culture denies the binary opposition between the proposal of the transmitter and the participation of the receiver at the heart of many debates on modern art. The work of the Deejay consists in conceiving linkages through which the works flow into each other, representing at once a product, a tool and a medium. The producer is only a transmitter for the following producer, and each artist from now on evolves in a network of contiguous forms that dovetail endlessly." 

Nicolas Bourriaud, Deejaying and Contemporary Art 

Although appropriation and the cultural remix has been an artistic strategy for decades, it's effectiveness as a critical or subversive détournement may remain questionable when it operates purely within the paradigms of the art world and a system of production and reception inextricably bound to economies of exchange and value. But the emphasis of the cultural remix today (as opposed to the artistic remix of the past) is often on process over product. Even the 'products' of the remix - the mashup video, the remixed song for instance - are hybridised, ambiguous 'products' which eschew categorisation and domination by undermining the sovereign rights of property, originality and ownership. In the age of the internet and global communication all 'property' is shared* within the public domain. Whilst the remix still offers the potential for critiquing the 'received' products and ideas of dominant cultural paradigms, just as crucially it offers everyone a means to actively engage in cultural production by a constant appropriation, shifting and recontextualising of images, ideas and materials. We are no longer passive consumers of culture but active participants in the distribution and creation of our pluralistic cultural conditions - we don't just watch tv but make it, we don't just receive ideas but deconstruct, add to and evolve them. The appropriation and remix of visual, audio and conceptual material has become a massively democratic process, available to anyone with access to a desktop computer. What is particularly exciting about the potential of the remix today is the wealth and diversity of sources available to the authors of the remix.

Though the remix may be a potent and socially mobilising activity with profound implications for the future of cultural production it's future may well be thwarted by the increasingly stringent Intellectual Property Laws that limit remixers use of 'original' material. In 2011 the artist Richard Prince lost a law suit brought against him by Patrick Cariou of Rastafarians over photographs of Cariou's Prince had reappropriated and manipulated in the series of collages Canal Zone and in 2012 the proto-electronic group Kraftwerk successfully sued the rap artist Sabrina Setlur's production company over a 2-second rhythmic sample Setlur had reproduced from their 1977 track Metall auf Metall. What is worrying about these increasingly high profile law suits is that they may indicate a politically and economically motivated trend towards the end of sampling, reappropriation and remixing within popular culture. This raises the question if we can no longer appropriate, manipulate, remix and build upon existing cultural material then how can we ever progress beyond the ghosts of culture's past?





*'Shared' as in a newly open, shared access though not legally in regards to appropriation.