Copy Rights: As digital tools transform the way artists find and rework images, ‘fair use’ is becoming more complicated
“I think about so many things when I think about working with an image that I just can’t name it,” says Kelley Walker, when asked if he is an appropriation artist. Nonetheless, sitting next to a massive printer capable of turning out mural-size pictures in his studio in the Flatiron District of Manhattan, Walker seems fully equipped to make his huge, rambunctious screenprint paintings, with imagery derived from sources as diverse as Andy Warhol, civil-rights protest photographs, ’60s advertisements, and chocolate. Walker is the epitome of today’s brand of appropriation artist, using a combination of scanning, photo manipulation, and conventional painting techniques to transform found imagery into his own unique works.
Walker, 42, is also typical of the newer appropriation artists who seem slightly uncomfortable with a term that is burdened with art-historical associations. “Appropriation” covers a broad array of practices—reworking, sampling, quoting, borrowing, remixing, transforming, adapting—that focus on one person taking something that another has created and embracing it as his or her own. Recent exhibitions that have highlighted this controversial technique range from “Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art,” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which traces the practice back to 16th-century printmakers, to “Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture,” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, which took the subject into the digital age. “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, featured work by pioneers such as Richard Hamilton, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, and Richard Prince who were inspired by Marcel Duchamp. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art also focused on this period with its landmark 2009 show “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.” Today, in almost any gallery or museum you will see artworks that incorporate or allude to press photographs, fine-art masterpieces, video games, Hollywood movies, anime, found objects, and just about anything that can be pulled off the Internet.
As common as it has become, appropriation does not sit comfortably with U.S. copyright law, which is intended to protect artistic material from being poached by copyists. According to James Pilgrim, cocurator of “Copycat,” Dürer was one of the first artists to sue another for copying; he charged Marcantonio Raimondi with making prints of his paintings and using his monogram. Today, five centuries later, courts differentiate between that kind of forgery and appropriation art, permitting the latter if it falls under the “fair use” exception to the copyright law, that is, if it can be proved that the appropriator transformed the original material as a way of commenting on, satirizing, or criticizing the source. Still, even Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol have occasionally had to pay other artists licensing fees, and appropriation artists are not always able to win over judges, as was the case last year when Richard Prince was sued successfully for using another artist’s photograph.
‘Certainly Pop artists are crucial figures in the genealogy of appropriation,” says art critic and historian Hal Foster, who recently published The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton University Press). “For the most part … Pop had to do with the collision between high and low, painting and Disney characters and comic-book figures. With the Pictures Generation people, the politics was different. They were very concerned with photography, and the original charge of their work was part of a general critique of originality.”
Foster sees a new shift among current artists. “It is interesting that artists who follow this work shy away from the term ‘appropriation.’ It is too brutal a term for them. Sampling is now just so pervasive in the culture—it’s everywhere in the production of music—the force of appropriation doesn’t seem to be as strong.”
“The way people perceive appropriation in a larger cultural context has shifted over the years, so it is sometimes hard for people to see how radical it was and sometimes continues to be,” says Johanna Burton, cocurator of “Mayhem,” the recent survey of Sherrie Levine’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “I think it is really a sign of how strong an artist Levine is that after 30 years she is still controversial.” Even today, it is a little shocking to see Levine’s 1981 series “After Walker Evans,” in which she re-presented the haunting images that accompanied Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee’s classic work of Depression-era journalism. Without a side-by-side comparison, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between Evans’s work and Levine’s.
“Stealing may be a cooler, more street term for appropriation,” speculates Walker, who shows at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. “I think it takes time to consider something to be an appropriation. Naming something ‘appropriation’ isn’t necessarily interesting, but in time it could show itself as being interesting.” For his series “Black Star Press,” Walker started with a 1963 photograph of a civil-rights demonstrator in Birmingham, Alabama, being attacked by a policeman with a dog. He then blew it up to monumental scale, nearly obliterating the image by smearing it with three kinds of chocolate—dark, milk, and white. According to the artist, the works are not so much a comment on race as a presentation of the way certain images endure and are recirculated, much, for example, in the way Andy Warhol used images in his famous “Race Riot” series.