appropriation In 1870, le Comte de LautrŽamont claimed: "Plagarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea' (in CAE, 2002: 85); this was later plagiarised by Debord as follows: 'Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to the author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.' (Guy Debord, "Negation and Consumption", in, The Society of the Spectacle, p.145.) This represents a certain resistance to dominant culture's process of recuperation by recycling materials, images, texts, actions and more recently has been characterised as 'recombinant methods in the various forms of combines, sampling, pangender performance, bricolage, detournement, readymades, plagiarism, theatre of everyday life, constellations, and so on.' (CAE, 2002: 85) Authorship is an issue of property - but whose? copyright v right to copy The copyright law says that for the purposes of education and private study you can steal anything (for research purposes as long as you only make one copy, do not make it available to the public). However, part of the agreement of entry into higher education is that students assign their rights to that college, you sign away your copyright. Did you know that all 'your' work is the property of the University. Then the college encourages you to steal these images for the next three years. But it does not tell you that stealing these images in the market place with bring you into conflict with the law. A couple of years ago I was involved in organising a conference of copyright entitled "In defence of the image". It had a very self-conscious handout that I had prepared (see OHP) that attempted to set out some of the issues by merely quoting other texts. I thought It would be appropriate to make a statement by a process of selection and arrangement in the spirit of the debate. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it." One of the speakers Stewart Home, who has previously organised a Festival of Plagiarism, objected to the detail of this. He claimed that the much used quote by Guy Debord was, and has been by others such as Sadie Plant in "The Most Radical Gesture", wrongly attributed. It has been appropriated from the French poet Lautreamont (you know the one who said that anyone can be a poet - dada poetry, etc). He claims that Lautreamont in turn lifted it from somewhere else. In a book of his poems, the translator's notes apparently suggest it is a reworking of the quote: "Old discoveries belong to those who put them to use". This is inVteresting as it implies that someone has appropriated something knowing that the author couldn't object without contradicting the sentiment itself. Stewart Home has reworked it too as: "Progress is necessary. Plagiarism demands it" - a simple reversal that Sadie Plant calls the "inversion of the generative". This is a touchy issue at University with claims of plagiarism being made against students. Is there a difference between the literary and the visual? Walter Benjamin tells us that computer technology like all new technology is predicated on the idea of appropriation (cut 'n' paste). So in whose interests is this worked out? No surprises here where those with the most power are the least generous. For example, let us think about photography. "In general terms, the law gives rights to the photographer over the real. Photography is exercised on a real already invested with property. Each photograph has to be recognised as the result of a particular kind of 'personal vision'. The appropriated real therefore becomes the property of the photographer. In the late '70s, it was argued that the labour of the machine becomes the labour of the subject (that is the photographer). Photography benefits from legal possession on condition that it becomes the mark of the author. What the historical illustration reveals, paradoxically, is how the capitalist mode of production threatens bourgeois property rights and ideology. The history of modern reproduction technologies from the birth of photography are a reminder that mechanical forms of reproduction destroy the exclusivity of art as a commodity. The potential radicality of photography has always been that the images infinite reproducibility destroyed or weakened the commodity form of art. This is Walter Benjamin's argument... which still has a bearing on developments today." (John Roberts, conference paper from, In Defence of the Image, Camerawork, 1995) What did Benjamin say: "Fascism attempts to organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property." (artwork essay, Epilogue) In the age of digital reproduction, copyright now means the right to copy anything until elaborate property laws attempt to stop you. The history of modernity is a history of an attack on the very basic categories of what we consider to be creativity. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity and presence, essential to the ordering discourse of the museum, are undermined. (Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins", in, Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, p.53.) "... the artist invents nothing, that he or she only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has provided." (Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, p.71.) Sherrie Levine, who literally 'takes' (other people's) photographs, as an extreme version of the allegorical capacity of collage as 'readymade' (alluding to the work of Craig Owens). (She)... demonstrates the grammatical writing appropriate to the age of mechanical reproduction in which 'copyright' now means the right to copy anything, a mimicry or repetition which is originary, producing differences (just as in allegory anything may mean anything else)... Post-critics write with the discourse of others (the already-written) the way Levine 'takes' photographs. (notes from "The Object of Post-Criticism", Gregory Ulmer, in, Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press 1983, pp.96-99.) "Sherrie Levine appropriated a couple of photographs by Walker Evans (which he did when he was working for the Farm Security Administration in the states) of a family of migrant farmers outside their homestead. She reproduced these exactly and the Walker Evans Foundation (or whatever it was) objected. However, she was allowed to show the work on the grounds that it was an authentic translation of Walker Evans' work. She argued that on the grounds that whereas Walker Evans was concerned with documenting the social conditions that migrant farmers were living in during the depression, Sherrie Levine was doing a deconstruction job on authorship. She was showing up the limits of the truth value of photography. Although there is an obvious mimetic link between Walker Evans' work and her own, both conceptually and intentionally it is very different. Of course, this doesn't address the question of value (whether the work is any good) but at least we have to acknowledge that intention can transform.' (John Roberts, ibid)