calin dan on Fri, 26 May 2000 09:41:17 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] subREAL - Death by Copyright |
DEATH BY COPYRIGHT As a fare well to the 20 century and its archive craze, we decided to turn the Art History Archive of subREAL into a hand made wall paper. All the art pieces reproduced in that archive by means of photography will be thus turned back into Art by the act of painting. The craftsmanship of the person who made this possible is a commodity we purchased under the provision of the fact that the one who holds the idea, the content and the financial means can buy the authorship and the processes that enhance it. Our work with archives grew in parallel with the global extension of legal concern for copyright issues. It is interesting now to look back at our Berlin period (1995-1996) as being contemporary with the pre-history of the copyright hysteria which touches nowadays all domains and all people dealing with direct production of branded values. At that time we thought that information is public domain and its preservation/dissemination are moral obligations regardless of and beyond any property debate. But our personal history, although limited to a pile of old, dusty photos, could not be separated from the mainstream developments. And unavoidably, our "Datarooms", "Datacorridors", and phantomatic "art servants" became a source of suspicions concerning intellectual property, image manipulation, rights of use, distribution and profit. Our attempt to clean the drawers of a deceased art magazine and to see how Time is filtering History became an issue of discontent. Discontent has so many unspeakable roots, but thank God there still is one that can be quantified: Copyright - the father and mother of all developments coming in the aftermath of the "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". At this moment of political correctness nobody can dismiss a discourse (artistic, political or else) on the base of its content. That would mean censorship. But EVERYTHING can be questioned on the ground of ownership. And ownership is the cornerstone of our very existance as politically correct animals. On this ambiguity builds a new and efficient form of censorship, born (what a coincidence) from the tormented debates of the post-modern decades. While post-modernism was dying under the load of its own complexity, copyright fed on the po-mo corpse until it grew into what it is today: the overwhelming criteria that makes fortunes and failures. And also a target for hoaxes and cynical simulacra. The wall paper version of "Serving Art" is belonging to a new era when manual work and manufacture will hold their value ONLY within the spectrum of mass reproduction. Talking from our own experience in the previous century, a photograph found in the gutter can raise more legal issues regarding ownership than a painting ordered and purchased under solid contract-binding circumstances. And since what we want to preserve is ideas and attitudes more than inventories of objects, we turn to painting as the most stabile medium in those times of DEATH BY COPYRIGHT. Amsterdam, January 2000 (Text first published on the occasion of the exhibition "L'autre moitie de l'Europe", Jeu de Paume, Paris, February 2000) Calin Dan Rozengracht 105/D4 NL-1016 LV Amsterdam T: + 31 (0)20 770 1432 F: + 31 (0)20 623 7760 e-mail: calin@euronet.nl http://www.v2.nl/v2-lab/hd _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold