Keywords in Remix Studies

Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough, Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315516394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Keywords in Remix Studies consists of twenty-four chapters authored by researchers who share interests in remix studies and remix culture throughout the arts and humanities. The essays reflect on the critical, historical and theoretical lineage of remix to the technological production that makes contemporary forms of communication and creativity possible. Remix enjoys international attention as it continues to become a paradigm of reference across many disciplines, due in part to its interdisciplinary nature as an unexpectedly fragmented approach and method useful in various fields to expand specific research interests. The focus on a specific keyword for each essay enables contributors to expose culture and society's inconclusive relation with the creative process, and questions assumptions about authorship, plagiarism and originality. Keywords in Remix Studies is a resource for scholars, including researchers, practitioners, lecturers and students, interested in some or all aspects of remix studies. It can be a reference manual and introductory resource, as well as a teaching tool across the humanities and social sciences.

1
Appropriation

Authored in Collaboration with Contributors

This chapter is an act of appropriation. Authors included in Keywords in Remix Studies shared brief thoughts about appropriation, which were then compiled and remixed by the editors. Each author’s contribution is acknowledged in bold type in the endnotes. The chapter is written with the aim of letting the authors’ voices come through as much as possible while the essay as a whole forms a critical reflection on the act of appropriation by putting into practice the act, itself. A tension may well develop in which the authors’ voices may be on the threshold of moving past what each originally meant. This may happen even if not much was adjusted in each contribution in order to fit into a specific narrative due to the fact that each reflection has been reframed into a pluralized view on appropriation that at times may deliberately contradict itself. If anything, such tension is part of the reflections on appropriation in direct relation to authorship and the possibilities of plagiarism and stealing.

Good artists copy

great artists steal

Bad artists imitate

great artists steal

Good artists steal

[anti]capitalists [dis]appropriate¹

Appropriation in art is a method for creative expression that can be empowering. It is the practice of owning something and giving it new meaning. Informed by Isabelle Graw’s essay, “Dedication Replacing Appropriation,” noting that appropriation is subversion and criticism, it can also be framed in terms of empowerment. Taking a piece from existing images, objects, text, art or ideas and providing new interpretations to the piece gives artists extended language to communicate and speak truth to power. To give a cultural example, appropriation has long existed as a strategy for art-making that can be found in traditional Chinese painting instruction dating back thousands of years. Modern and contemporary appropriation has diverse meanings, functions and representations. Critical intention is the common denominator. The intention of criticism or providing alternative perspectives is what makes appropriation a powerful means for activism. Appropriation not only empowers artists, but also empowers viewers to think actively and engage in a dialogue with the work by conflicting a viewer’s prior understanding of the appropriated and the new interpretation.²

Defining Appropriation

Let’s get literal. “Appropriation” is the nominal version of the late Middle English verb “appropriate,” which was originally appropriated from the Latin appropriatus which is the past participle (a kind of verbal remix) of appropriare, meaning “to make one’s own.” This Latin verb was initially fabricated by mashing up the words ad and proprius, which is a word that had been originally used to designate whatever is peculiar to a person or thing or to identify what is characteristic of a person or thing. As such, the word proprius is properly speaking the opposite of both communis and alienus. Following this line of linguistic appropriation, whereby one language has taken over and made its own something that was originally derived from another, “appropriation” can be properly characterized as precisely this act of taking something over and making it one’s own. The word, therefore, means what it does and does what it means.³

In recent times, appropriation as a concept appears to be undergoing renewed popularity due to its relevance in explaining not simply the emergence of new forms of cultural remix, but in addition, its ability to describe the racialized dimensions of making things into “property.” As Lisa Nakamura notes, affordances of digital platforms allow users to treat images as resources, whose value is derived from moving them from the context in which they were created, to another. In her own case study of “racialized showspace,” Western users turn African men, featured wearing bras, hitting each other in the face with fish, and pouring milk on each other’s heads, into trophy photos for circulation in meme traffic. The value from these sexualized, humiliated bodies does not accrue to the people themselves but to the person who distributes their circulation. In what is often termed “cultural” appropriation in popular discourse, we find a useful way to understand continuing practices that reinforce racialized relations of dominance.⁴

Authorship and Appropriation

The word “appropriation” contains within it the dialectic of authorship. As the OED tells us, to appropriate is to “Take (something) for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission.” In the case of remix culture, video collages, mashups, and the like, all reflect an assertion of new modes of authorship at the expense of traditional practices based on authorial originality and private property. The “death of the author” simultaneously breathes new life into authorship writ large. Creativity necessarily requires destruction. Appropriation is the politics of authorship.⁵

Remix artists, due to their ongoing reevaluation of authorship in relation to creativity, are usually explicit about their borrowing, whereas the majority of “original” authors borrow heavily from others without acknowledging their contribution in the new work. The image of the original author popularized by the eighteenth-century publishing industry is a myth—everyone borrows from and builds on the work of those who came before them; however, remix artists tend to borrow more directly through the act of sampling. The individual artist is always dependent upon external sources. The artist and author are merely secondary facilitators of cultural texts, weaving together tapestries of citations, intertextual artworks built upon explicit and implicit references to previous works, codified and connected to all other artworks that came before. Culture may be conceptualized as consisting of bricolage, remediation, and implicit participation. A writer never begins with a blank page no more than an artist starts with a blank canvas. Each begins their respective process at the end of a long tradition of creative practice that came before them, outside of which it is impossible to operate.⁶

Appropriation as Practice

In Paul D. Miller’s chapter, “Versioning,” he explains that appropriation “is as old as language itself. It does not ask permission and it never gives permission. It is basically creativity as a verb—not as an adjective.”⁷ This idea may resonate with some people when considering appropriation as a creative strategy. So, how does one appropriate well? What makes an appropriation successful? In considering this, let us borrow from a master painter, color theorist, and design educator, Josef Albers.

In an interview, Albers said, “one plus one equals three.” If you are unfamiliar with Albers’ concept, put up two fingers like a peace sign and then notice how whatever you frame between your fingers creates a third element. This third element has the potential to transform the message of the peace sign. It is especially noticeable when that third element is brought to the foreground through contrast in its formal properties, whether aesthetic (shape, size, hue, value, rotation, and so on) or linguistic (its semantic role).

Successful appropriations are like Albers’ riddle—the borrowed work in addition to its context or juxtapositions creates a third meaning. Measuring the success of a work of appropriation must be related to the degree to which the foreground (the new meaning) and backgrounds (borrowed context) are at once separated and understood. The system in which one plus one equals three is based on Miller’s idea that creativity is a verb and appropriation is its strategy.⁸

Taking a step back, it can be argued that there is nothing special about remix appropriation. If we start from the assumption that all art begs, borrows, and steals from other works, then remix is no different than any other creative practice. But, of course, there is a difference, namely that what remix appropriates it incorporates as a sampled excerpt stitched directly into the newly created work. Remix materializes its intertextuality, foregrounding what it borrows, for all to see. Remix appropriation comes closest to the creative strategy of collage, in that sampled source materials are always visible as such, even as they come together to create a new work. Remix lets us see the borrowing at the same time that it provides the basis for novel, creative production. In this regard, remix appropriation is never fully appropriation in its etymological sense of making-one’s-own.⁹

Playing with Appropriation

It is undeniable, regardless of how much remix may or may not rely on appropriation to create new works, that appropriation is play, and at the core of creating. Without it there is no making, no production, no art, no science. Let’s take the experience of a drummer as an example:

in entering a musical tradition such as a jazz or punk, I attempt to learn sonic styles by way of imitating and appropriating those that resonate. As John Coltrane said, “I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light” (Coltrane 1960). By entering into and imitating/appropriating traditions I open myself up to its structures and codes. I am played by, while playing and creating in, tradition. “Whoever plays is also played: the rules of the game impose themselves upon the player, prescribing the to and fro (hin und her) and delimiting the field where everything ‘is played’” (Ricoeur, 1981: 186). The gift of ethically (not necessarily legally) grounded appropriation is that it goes both ways.

When we appropriate, create and play, we are appropriated and played by the tradition. It is not static or unidirectional. Appropriation is cyclical, until artificially curtailed by instrumentalist motives, such as economic agendas or political ideologies.¹⁰

The unidirectional form in which appropriation appears to function can be useful to understand its creative potential in art as the recontextualization of a referent to change its meaning. The referent’s meaning is transformed because its visual or linguistic sign is read differently in a new context. For example, in “After Walker Evans” (1981) artist Sherrie Levine exhibited Walker Evans’s photographs as her art, and 20 years later, Michael Mandiberg offered the work online in “After Sherie Levine” with certificates of authenticity to create an object with cultural value but no economic value. Does the meaning and its value change when the same work is interpreted as produced by a woman then a man again? The meaning of a sign is not fixed; it varies over time, in different contexts, and by the intent of the speaker/writer/artist/reader/viewer.¹¹

Ownership and Authenticity

What does it mean to own a sign? Is it the same as owning the referent? Artist Sophia Wallace’s “Cliteracy” six-foot neon sign and “100 Laws of Cliteracy” street art about the organ drew attention with physical signs to a referent that women own within their body but is little understood and more often shamed. Do we deliberately and inadvertently steal signs as well as their referent throughout the process of annihilation? Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, an internationally recognized Cheyenne Arapaho artist, highlights the atrocities committed against native people in the United States with “Native Hosts,” a series of signs with the name of the local area printed backward followed by the words “Today your host is,” and the name of a local Native American tribe that has been displaced or are victims of genocide in the United States. Maya Lin’s “What’s Missing” science-based artwork maps the disappearance of species habitat degradation and loss with markers of places named for the species that once thrived at the location but no longer ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Appropriation
• 2 Archive
• 3 Authorship
• 4 Bricolage
• 5 Collaborative
• 6 Consumerism
• 7 Copyright/Fair Use
• 8 Creativity
• 9 Cut-up
• 10 Deconstruction
• 11 Diy Culture
• 12 Fan Culture
• 13 Feminism
• 14 Intellectual Property
• 15 Jazz
• 16 Location
• 17 Mashup
• 18 Memes
• 19 Parody
• 20 Participatory Politics
• 21 Remix
• 22 Sampling
• 23 Transformative
• 24 Versioning
• Index