Plagiarism and the illusion of the unique
A curious fact about ruptures and revolutions is that these movements generally carry with them a little of the structure being negated. Radical Luddites use industrially made sledgehammers to destroy factories; noise-core punk bands make use of musical instruments to produce anti-music. From the artistic avant-gardes of the 19th century onward there is a wealth of similar examples, until we reach the cataclysm caused by Marcel Duchamp — almost a hundred years ago — when he displaced some industrialized objects (such as a urinal and a snow shovel) into the museum, and called these objects “works of art”. Perhaps there is not much to see in an upside-down urinal or in a bicycle wheel stuck on a stool, but there is something to think about in these acts — that of decorating common objects with the laurels that characterize the “artistic object”. This far-from-naive action has not been well digested to this day; Duchamp is still the name behind a good part of contemporary artistic production. His gesture is of a scope unthinkable to the obtuse avant-gardist who says “this no longer serves, now we need this, which is the new”. For Duchamp, everything serves, provided there is a good idea to set the banal in motion.
The Duchampian key is the recombination of ideas, images and meanings. If we conceive his actions under the common notions of “original” or “new”, and especially according to the market application of these terms, we may consider Duchamp a plagiarist. Plagiarism frequently carries a weight of negative connotations. While the need for its use increased over the century, as a response to the bombardment of images we now know so well, plagiarism was camouflaged into a new lexicon for those, like Duchamp, wishing to explore this practice as method and as a legitimized form of cultural discourse. Ready-mades, collages, found art or found text, intertexts, combines, détournement and appropriation — all represent incursions into plagiarism.
The actions of plagiarists subvert concepts of value based on hours of labor and difficulty of production — new meanings are created from previously founded structures. Plagiarism in this sense is a form of negation that involves the re-invention of the canons and signs we have learned to accept as immutable, “normal” or correct. By creating new meanings, plagiarism acts as the negation of a culture that finds its ideological justification in the “unique object”.
Even mass-produced objects are sold to us with the intention of provoking the illusion of the unique. The phonographic industry and its CDs, for example: why would anyone buy an original disc, if they can obtain the same material — sound, image and text — for free, over the Internet? The little colored disc inside a little box awakens our sensations of ownership, our collectors’ pleasures; for some people there is the pleasure of the purchase, the satisfaction of spending their money to possess something in return. We were trained to cling to this.
However, there is an entire generation growing up accustomed to the idea of immateriality and to the speed of the computer network. Downloading songs from the network and exchanging them with friends via cell phone has become routine practice among children and teenagers at school. Music lovers with limited financial means finally have the possibility of listening to everything without spending fortunes on records. This generation is learning to value information over the medium that supports it: the music, not the plastic disc. But the cultural industry and the art market still keep their focus on unique objects, fighting recombinant culture however they can, with injunctions and million-dollar lawsuits, often against simple home users.
The negative connotation of plagiarism is intimately tied to this conflict between the market and the advent of “non-things”, the Flusserian term for all information that is decodable yet impalpable. The cultural industry does not want to lose control of the art-public mediation. The individual’s experience with art cannot be direct — there must exist an institution to bridge the gap, be it a museum, a record store, a teacher or a television. Everyone must be duly credited and reimbursed. The problem with institutions is that they cause the deceleration of the process of communication and recombination of ideas. Take blogs and online texts as an example.
The online text flows in an uninterrupted current through the electronic network. The production of the text presupposes its immediate distribution, revision and consumption. All who participate in the network also participate in the interpretation and transformation of the textual flow, with comments, hyperlinks and the various types of feedback available. And that is quite different from waiting for a certain book to be published by a publishing house, or buying the newspaper the following morning. The recombinant text closes the gap between production and consumption, and widens the possibilities of those who are not literary celebrities.
Incredibly, we can also imagine new possibilities of recombinant culture for erudite art, art with a capital “A”, of the geniuses, isms and avant-gardes. The process is basically the same: to break the mentality of the unique object, so that thought can keep pace with the technologies of its time. Let us imagine, for example, that all museums and art collectors, suddenly seized by a mad feeling of collectivity, agreed to digitize their entire holdings, making them available online and in high definition. Allied to the technology we already have, this collective mentality and an immense collection of images could give rise to several electronic museums, which would house not works of art but various panels capable of faithfully reproducing the desired works of art — with even more sharpness and detail than the original works. That way, countries without the resources to fund great exhibitions could realize the dream of placing side by side the most significant works of a given period, artist or movement, for example. Thematic curatorships with educational purposes would also be possible. Current technological conditions offer us an encouraging scenario — limited only by the prevailing mentality of the culture market.
What remains curious about this revulsion toward plagiarism and recombination is the fact that big media makes constant use of these practices. Telenovelas, pop music, best sellers, canned films, fashion, journalism, advertising; one need not go far to realize that, in most cases, it is the re-presentation of very similar or identical structures, with shades and garments swapped. In the world of academic art, such practice is also recurrent, and as subtle as it is scandalous; it makes use of subjective concepts like creativity, style and reinterpretation. Let us now consider a practice employed both by the industry and by some artists of the highest echelon: self-plagiarism.
Self-plagiarism takes shape when the artist (or company) resorts to aesthetically significant devices from their previous work, and re-presents them under the false assertion that they are creatively original, and that some aesthetic progress has been made. In ordinary cases of plagiarism (plagiarizing another), credit would be denied to the plagiarist had they added no element of importance beyond what was plagiarized. But if an artist systematically repeats the elements of their own work, there is a tendency to consider such practice legitimate, often under the aegis of “style”. The habit of thinking of style as a “natural” outgrowth of the artist’s personality seems to justify, many times, the indiscriminate repetition of what was once interesting. We would like to risk a sentence here: habit is irrelevant, if not opposed, to art and its practice.
We have noticed, so far, how malleable are our conceptions of new, creative, original, unique, artistic, plagiarized — words whose meanings change according to the interest of those who employ them. We wish, however, to raise questions that stand outside the battlefield for the mediation of the arts — neither in favor (copyright, institutions, money, lawsuits), nor against (piracy, sabotage, judicial counterattacks). Open creative actions, without tendentious labels like “Art” or “counterculture”, for example. Making art outside the art world, without the influence of the canons of the unique and without the pressure of lawyers. But what could this refusal of art consist of, today? The “negative gesture” lies in the almost universal boredom that befalls most people at the mere mention of the word “art”. But what would be the “positive gesture”? Would it be possible to imagine an aesthetics that does not compromise itself, that removes itself from History and even from the market? Or that at least tends to do so? That wants to replace representation with presence? How can presence make itself felt even in (or through) representation? Where and when does the world of unmediated creativity exist?
Art in the Art World has become a commodity. More complex still, however, is the question of the refusal of all mediation. Mediation is difficult to overcome, and it is the origin of all the problems related to authorship, plagiarism and copyright that afflict both the art world and those acting outside it. Interesting questions are emerging, especially in the “immaterial” world of non-things, which interferes ever more acutely in the material world and in the market. The distance between producers/consumers of language has already been dramatically reduced, and the current horizon allows us at least to daydream about the day when “the artist will not be a special kind of person, but every person will be a special kind of artist”.