PAPERS

Recycling as Tactic and Strategy in Aesthetics and Protest: the Yes Men
(March 2010)

Fared Use: A Political Economy of the Digitally-Empowered Subject
(September 2009)

The Pictures Movement, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity
(May 2009)

Avant-Garde or Advertising:
A Dialectic of Corporate Art Fair Sponsorship and Alternative Art Fair Programming
(March 2008)

Response to Mark Godfrey's The Artist as Historian
(December 2007)

Wu Shanzuan: Institutional Critique and the Efficacy of Relational, Political Art Practices
(June 2007)

Taking Stock: An Analysis of the Artbeats Digital Film Library
(April 2007)

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Today I will be talking about the Yes Men, and some of the group's projects that have utilized "recycling" as both form and content. I will also be talking about the form and content of Yes Men projects through notions of tactic and strategy. But before placing this work before any analytical lens, I'd first like, briefly, to place the group within an historical context. Recognizing that to delve into the myriad ways in which artists in epochs past have "recycled" style or subject matter--the trope of the apprentice dutifully copying the work of his or her master comes to mind--is beyond the scope ofthis paper, I thus shall begin here with reference to those practitioners who, since the age of mechanical reproduction, have explicitly reused its mass-produced, at-hand materials. This recycling of sorts has been given many names over the years: the "readymade" and "montage" early in the twentieth century; "détournement" and "bricolage" in the post-war period; and later, "culture jamming," and then "remixing" in our early twenty-first century. These names are only a few. All of them could be further categorized under the larger umbrella of appropriation art, perhaps the modern artistic mode of expression. As the art historical record reflects, a common thread running though many of appropriation art's various narratives has been its critical tendencies, encompassing: transgression against the institution of art itself; contestation of fascist political opacity; assimilation of low culture into high; refutation of an administered mass consumerism; and, more recently, infiltration through direct media subterfuge. It is these last activities that will become my focus later on.

For now, I would like to posit this century-long history of appropriation in art as a type of recycling; its practice has consisted primarily of further extracting sign value from modernity's machine produced and, for the most part, disposable mass culture. Furthermore, beyond any intended critique, appropriation art has also been inherently political in gesture, for it has begged the questions value for whom, and to whom. Through recycling form and content, it practitioners have sought to challenge the roles assigned by the powerful to the powerless within the top-down power structures of modern society, ostensibly towards some sort of social transformation. Cue grand narrative music here.

For all of its endeavors, however sincere, appropriation art's political resonance has been ambiguous at best. By many accounts, critically engaged appropriation art has remained something of an "unrealized promise and unsettled debt." For example, far from releasing the grip placed on art by its institutionalization, Duchamp's allowance for anything and everything to be potentially understood as art merely endowed its seemingly progressive powerbrokers with a more expansive vocabulary through which to resume regimes of inclusion and exclusion. And in one of the most sustained efforts at "making the invisible visible and integrally meshing the representation of politics with the politics of representation," John Heartfield and Berlin Dada were nevertheless unable to blunt the blitzkrieg of National Socialist propaganda. Pop Art, even in dethroning Abstract Expressionism as the premier American modern art form, swapped out the glorification of the transcendent for the celebration of the banal, echoing, rather than ameliorating, a full-blown case of post-war mass consumption. Let us not forget it was Pop Art that monetized the avant-garde, transforming the figure of the struggling artist into that of the art star. Finally, the so-called "postmodern" avant-garde saw its appropriations recuperated as "just another style" less than a decade after their initial exhibition.

Notwithstanding the "digital divide" barrier to entry into the networked society, well along now in its "2.0" phase, the author, it seems, has become the producer. Today's digital subject has now folded "reading" (downloading) and "writing" (producing/uploading) into one another, altering our preconceptions of the creative act, which has in turn altered the very definition of what it means to be a creator. And while Roland Barthes' proclamation of the "death of the author" four decades ago may be somewhat misguided, as I intend to argue, it cannot be denied that there has been, on an unprecedented scale, a "birth of the reader," which has consequently shifted the sites of cultural agency in contemporary society.

Creative Industries advocate John Hartley has recently called for the study of media and its effects to shift its focus from (negative) political economy questions (i.e., "what do media do to audiences?") to (positive) questions of agency (i.e., "what do audiences do with media?"). Hartley terms this a "text-audience" approach, which ideologically parallels the "rise of the creative class" discourse articulated by Richard Florida in 2002. Undergirding both Hartley's and Florida's ideas is the notion that the liberation of the creative subject is a more or less completed project, that new technological processes and a productivist ethos centered on innovation have unlocked the shackles that had previously restrained the creative capacities of the masses. Yet I believe swapping a political economy discourse for a text-audience one is a risky endeavor, for the latter cannot exist without the former. The struggle for control over the logistics of the creative act, while seemingly in a state of transformation from a centralized, top-down model to a decentralized, lateral or user-defined model, is far from over. We must not ignore the fact that any realignments in today's methods of digital cultural production come in spite of the desires of powerful interests that strive to maintain a stranglehold on content creation, by continuing to administrate the abilities of the creative subject according to the conventions of consumption that have defined Western culture for the last sixty years. The battle is not easily abandoned. In order to better understand its front lines, and thus the importance of the agency recently afforded the digital author-subject in today's mediascape, I'd like to begin by tracing a genealogy of modern media production in the "broadcast era," how it was authored and by whom.

In the three decades since Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince first exhibited their appropriated photographs--the unaltered images blatant in their disregard for copyright law--the tyranny of authorial rights and the increase in infringement litigation across the cultural spectrum has been nothing less than astonishing. Lawsuits over unauthorized use of cultural products are so commonplace as to imagine that within contemporary art, appropriation since the Pictures generation might have been determined by artists to be a very legally risky endeavor. And while there has been the occasional lawsuit involving appropriation art that is eventually judged to be in violation, those familiar with contemporary art will have no doubt sensed that appropriation is alive and well. There is a lot of copying going on, and as art historian Martha Buskirk describes, "the types of copies that appear in contemporary art are as varied as the materials artists have employed."

There are some initial observations that might help explain this. First and perhaps obvious is the notion that most artists, after all, are not legislators, lawyers or judges. In the most basic sense, artists remain arbiters not of law but of culture, historically tasked with interrogating its signification, even as the commodification of the sign--so heavily theorized in the 1980s-- has become inextricably linked with its regulation through the legal apparatus. Creative disregard for the rule of copyright law is perhaps then a type of anti-establishment dismissal, feeding the notion that for artists, the law does not apply. And while that isn't true, it might appear that way. As Richard Prince himself has stated, in justifying the use of the Marlboro Man campaign for his Untitled (cowboy) series of photographs: "I never associated advertisements with having an author."

Any immunity from (or at least willful ignorance of) intellectual property law that artists claim can be contextualized within an institutionalization of art that is at once in formal dialogue with but in relative consequence cutoff from the everyday economic-legal "facts" of mass production. Much of contemporary art seems to operate "under the radar," its works momentary blips of limited range, its market values and potentials paltry in comparison to the monetary sums indicative of big-budget spectacle culture. Art seems to pose no threat to the status quo, and certainly not to its economy. Therefore any of art's transgressions against the legal regimes that govern both it and mass culture are more or less acceptable in the former, because they are innocuous to the latter. As Peter Bürger laments in describing the seeming impotence of a critical avant-garde project, "It is the status of their products, not the consciousness artists have of their activity, that defines the social effect of works."

But what of those instances when artists' transgressions are considered a threat? Who evades the law, who doesn't, and why? To understand how appropriation art slips in and out of the grasp of intellectual property regimes, inquiry should be carried out at the level of artistic praxis and legal case study: what sort of content have artists been appropriating? How, if at all, are they transforming it, and to what ends? Where in the cultural and economic structures of society are the appropriated, the "violated," located, and what bearing does this location have on the potency of appropriation?

Perhaps no examples more lucidly illustrate the triumph of neoliberal aesthetics and spirit than those of the global institutionalization of contemporary art and its consequent financial structuration. The economically liberal principles of deregulation, self-reliance and free enterprise, reinvigorated in the 1980s through Reagan-Thatcher policy, have colluded with modern art's core set of politically liberal principles: creative autonomy and freedom of expression, and artist as singular (read: self-determining) intelligence. Over the last few decades the implementation of this politico-economic liberalism has congealed into a set of institutional relations that greatly influence- if not overtly schedule- much of current art's production, exhibition, and reception. Described nowadays as having become "perhaps the largest legal economy in the world to be almost totally unregulated," art is disseminated seemingly according to a neoliberal playbook. Examples that illustrate this include the replacement of ever-diminished state funding for the arts with private sector dollars (e.g. the corporate takeover of the museum and the birth of the "blockbuster" show), the development of "magic money" art economies (e.g. the rise of the auction house and the transformation of art collecting into a multi-billion dollar, but still very risky, speculation industry), and the uncritical, celebratory embrace of multicultural expression and expansion (e.g. the now global biennial exhibition system). Art, increasingly the province of a globe-trotting entrepreneurial elite, has never been a hotter ticket.

Art's recent financial success- any instability in the current world economy has not hampered a bullish art market that instead expands unabated- has been due in part to another, newer phenomenon: the contemporary art fair. While the fair as a model for art's reception has been in place since at least the salons of 18th century Europe, their expansion of late across the planet is unprecedented. From New York's Armory Show to Hong Kong's International Art Fair, from Art Athina in Greece to Art Dubai, "the Middle East's first contemporary art fair," an economics of contemporary art is being carried out in arenas and other large scale exhibition halls around the world, resulting in a new, steroid-injected form of cultural capital.

Like the biennial model, the art fair is a globally far-reaching but temporary phenomenon (fairs usually run under a week), and is understood as more flexible and dynamic than the grounded sites of the traditional art museum or gallery. And just as with the biennial, cosmopolitan areas around the world look to the art fair trend as a means to draw attention to themselves, in hopes of evincing a certain cultural credibility, proclaiming that they too are joining the "new world aesthetic order." Local population centers commingle with a spate of commercial art enterprises from abroad (mostly galleries but also arts related, for-profit companies), providing the impression that art, and its appreciation, know no geopolitical boundaries. At the art fair, national borders (but, curiously, not the cachet that goes along with being from "somewhere else") become meaningless. This produces a scenario where, as art historian and critic Julian Stallabrass states, "you have a German collector buying through a British dealer the work of a Chinese artist living in the US." In Fukuyamian terms, one might understand this as signaling "the end of (art) history."

In his essay "The Artist as Historian," Mark Godfrey highlights recent art practices whose points of departure are not only researching past events but also "the way in which such events have formerly been narrated or indeed ignored in received historical writing." Godfrey himself uses history, linking the formal strategies of these contemporary practices to Conceptual Art as well as the Pictures artists of the 1980s. While noting that a new generation of artists are using similar media when compared to the canon of conceptual and appropriation art (e.g. text and the indexical image), Godfrey distinguishes the former from the latter two movements by observing that today's artists are using these media to specifically critique modes of historical representation. He then focuses the remainder of his essay on analyzing the works of a current practitioner who exemplifies the "artist as historian"- Matthew Buckingham.

One of several works Godfrey appraises is Buckingham's The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, In the Year 502,002 C.E., 2002. Its subject matter, the creation of Mount Rushmore in what is now South Dakota, is used to critique the patriotic master narrative that Mount Rushmore symbolizes as well as the corresponding modal hegemony of linear narrative itself. Godfrey's analysis of the work's form and content compliments Buckingham's own theoretical approaches to historiography, which, according to the author, are informed by Walter Benjamin's writings on history. One of the main ideas employed by both artist and critic is Benjamin's notion of history understood not as a set of events "disappearing behind us," fixed in a chronology, but as a "real-time" tool used for critical assessment in the present.

Using theoretical models gleaned from Benjamin is a fairly routine practice in art criticism and much of today's politically minded art. It is difficult to overestimate just how much of an effect his work has had on contemporary art theory and practice. Yet given the particular subject matter of Six Grandfathers- the critique of historiography within the context of the Lakota Sioux Indian- it would be unfortunate if the link between Benjamin's historiography and Sioux conceptions of historical consciousness were not made more apparent. I would therefore like to offer less a refutation of Godfrey's interpretation than an extension of its theoretical bases by understanding Six Grandfathers through native conceptions of history, which share much with Benjamin's historical materialism. I shall also like to conclude with a reappraisal of Buckingham's Six Grandfathers through a uniquely Native American concept: that of history as received through space/place. I believe doing so will not only expand the reading of Buckingham's piece but also help to move beyond the tendency of historiographical work to produce post-colonial, guilt-laden results while keeping its discourse comfortably within the confines built around stalwarts like Benjamin.

The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a renewal of political and social art in the United States and Europe. It was in 1985 that American artist Andrea Fraser first used the phrase "institutional critique" to describe practices specifically operating both in question of, as well as within, the systems of public and privately funded arts organizations. A few years later French curator Nicolas Bourriaud would develop a way to describe a breed of artists that, while working in some respects with the traditions of institutional critique, were doing so in intersubjective and participatory ways that complicated the traditionally static roles of artist, art object, and audience: "relational aesthetics."

Curiously, neither the discourses of institutional critique nor relational aesthetics, despite their shared emphasis on the interconnections that constitute social and institutional structures in order to illuminate new- to use Bourriaud's word- "microterritories" of engagement, make much mention of similar artistic strategies that were happening outside of the US and Europe at precisely the same time. Just as Fraser was solidifying institutional critique as a movement, China's '85 New Wave Movement was flowering into life, summoning a cadre of artists who, at the end of the country's Cultural Revolution, wanted to reclaim avant-gardism through a radical, individualized but particapatory politics of aesthetics.

Wu Shanzuan is an artist who contributed to this highly charged avant-garde movement and his practice will therefore be the focus of this essay. I would like to propose that Wu's work is a unique hybrid between realtional aestehics and institutional critique. The work patterns its content after western historical and neo-avantgarde strategies, which initially shunned but subsequently recognized the requirement of the "institutional frame." However, institutional critique has, for all its intentions, nevertheless tended to remain grounded in the model of the artist as disseminator, revealing a "hidden truth" to a passive audience, where the artwork is provided to allow contemplation and critical reevaluation. Here Wu's work parts ways with institutional critique, instead swapping out contemplation for participation and the potential for dialogue- strategies more in line with those espoused by Bourriaud.

One may question why the work of an artist from communist China should be examined through theoretical lenses coming from the post-industrial, democratic and free market logic of the west. For decades now China has held an ambiguous if sometimes very dramatic relationship with overt market economics and the flexibility of individual liberty. It is for this reason that an analysis must be done. Applying the principles seemingly inherent in the discourses of institutional critique and relational aesthetics to art practices that have operated outside of their purview will help shed new light on their implicit ideologies and limitations. I am hopeful that Wu's work can be used to foreground a growing tension today that has less to do with east/west or capitalist/socialist divisions than it does with transnational issues involving collective will and individual agency in manifesting political change. I believe his work provides a unique but also crucial context through which group dynamics and the efficacy of "relational spaces" can continue to be measured.