Over at Ron Silliman’s blog I participated in a discussion about appropriation techniques and poetry. I’m still amazed at the fact that some poetry readers -and practitioners- still discuss poetry -and art- in terms of “original originality”.
This is all taking place at the time in which John Bloomberg-Rissman and I finished a collaboration that lasted for months and took place via email from coast to coast across the pond working on a 40+ page poem that makes profuse use of appropriation and what I call “sampling” techniques. I suppose it’s not the kind of stuff that my former Romanticism professor at uni, my beloved Sir Colin White, would like. But as someone obsessed with material culture and collectionism and who seems totally unable to concentrate on only one thing at the same time, working like this proved, I don’t know, perfectly natural and just “right”.
I often think that music offers great examples that can be applied to the discussion of poetry. As I explained at Silliman’s thread, even though The Chemical Brothers did use “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles in their dj sets some 12 years ago (which they would mix with their own recorded track titled “Chemical Beats”) their own “Setting Sun” track, a collaboration with Oasis singer Noel Galagher, required the assistance of a musicologist hired by their record company to “prove” that Rowlands and Simmons had not sampled The Beatles track. The difference between mixing someone else’s work with your own is not the same as “stealing”; rather, it emphasizes the similarities and acknowledges the aesthetic inspiration or “source” of one’s aesthetics. In my world, sampling is an act of acknowledging an inheritance, instead of arrogantly pretending no one has come before. When Rowlands and Simmons decide to collaborate with Noel Galagher (whose aesthetic or stylistic relationship with the Beatles is more than well known), the track resulting is strikingly similar to the song by The Beatles.
What are the differences, if at all, between sampling/quoting someone else’s work and reproducing it “originally”, especially when the inspiration that the “original source”, sampled or not, has been publicly acknowledged before in one’s previous work? What is the essential difference (in case you believe in essential differences) between sharing a vocabulary (that is likely to produce similar results) and articulating, instead of microunits, larger pieces as part of one’s own vocabulary? Isn’t it a question of process-result, when both are inseparable? Doesn’t this require a different way of thinking other than the old-fashioned disdain for sampling and automation and the irrational preference for an always-already impossible “original original”?
Listen carefully.
The Beatles, 1966
The Chemical Brothers, 1997
Discuss.
September 27, 2007 at 11:30 pm
well, and after listening to the two examples, what came to my mind is what George and Giles Martin did last year, when they mixed “Within You Without You” (by George Harrison, originally appeared in Sgt Pepper) with the rhythmic base of “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the Love album. Actually, the entire Love concept (the album and the Cirque du Soleil show) would become an interesting discussion in terms of what we (Hollow Kid, myself and others) have been trying to place the record whether as a new Beatles album or not (is it an original and new recording?).
September 28, 2007 at 1:31 am
In a captialist society art becomes a commodity. Perhaps if we, as aritst, academics, etc. did not feel such ownership over what we create? I think there’s something to be said for credit. I.e., citing who you quote, etc…if it is a direct connection. That’s a sign of respect, a nod so to speak of whose work inspires us.
On the other hand, the notion of a pure original is quite laughable. But again we are a society consumed by the desire for the ideal of purity.
September 28, 2007 at 8:47 pm
In earlier eras an artist would paint the same painting over and over for different patrons … an artist would sign the productions of his (almost always his) workshop even if he barely painted a stroke … authors would sign their works with the names of other authors to gain prestige … e.g. Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the works of Pseudo-Dionysius …
From a soon to be published review I wrote:
“I believe I read somewhere in Walter Benjamin that he hoped to compose a book that would include no words, no language, of his own. Leaving aside whether I read that or dreamt it, I’ve wondered for a while now what might be meant by words of “one’s own”.
I’ve done some thinking. I’ve done some research. I’ve looked into systems theory and philosophy and neurophilosophy and psychology and cognitive science. My research suggests, to me at least, that there are no words of one’s own.
But it seems insane to pretend there’s no such thing as plagiarism. The concept can be historicized, and has been, but … we live with it. The Pierre Menards and Kenneth Goldsmiths and Tom Phillipses and Ronald Johnsons and Jean Days and Jen Bervins and the other collage/appropriation artists of the world all (or almost all, that’s a matter for a separate essay) seem to recognize the concept.
So – no one can own language. But one can steal it. Curious.”
I find it all very confusing. But I agree with you, Ginger: possessive individualism, commodity capitalism (2 names for the same thing?), purity …
By the way, the source note for the poem we collaborated on is, single-spaced, a dense 1.5 pages (paper = 8.5 x 11 inches).
September 28, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Oh and yes, there are similarities between the Beatles and the Chemical Bros … so what? The world would be poorer w/out BOTH pieces …
September 29, 2007 at 12:21 am
the geanieus is the one who doesn’t have to remember the past 300 years of crap that every boddhi else HAS to …
September 29, 2007 at 5:00 am
Could be true, Ed; I wouldn’t know; I ain’t no genius. And that’s for damn sure.