Art Panel [1]: Joy Garnett
LISTEN TO THE TALK, Joy Garnett Art Panel [1]:
Hi-res slide images for this talk are available at Flickr:
UPDATE:
HARPER'S, February 2007
p.53
Portfolio
"On The Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context" [PDF]
By Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas
{...This portfolio is drawn from their conversation at the New York Institute for the Humanities' "Comedies of Fair U$e" symposium...}
p.59
Criticism
"The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism"
By Jonathan Lethem {Listen to interview on WNYC}
{Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and You Don't love Me Yet, which will be published in March.}
Ruminations on the Harper's piece from Christopher Reiger, "Hungry Hyaena" blog:
Creative Restraint and Responsibility: Artists, Documentarians and Copyright
{excerpt}
The subtitle of "On the Rights of Molotov Man," the piece preceding Lethem's essay, is "Appropriation and the art of context." Indeed, the latter half of this subtitle is central to the dispute between Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas. The details of the situation, in a nutshell, are as follows. Garnett trolled the web for "images of figures in extreme emotional or physical states." One of the many .jpegs she saved showed a man hurling a Molotov cocktail. Garnett was interested in the act pictured, not the provenance. In fact, the .jpeg was a cropped section of a Meiselas photograph, originally published in the photographer's 1981 book, "Nicaragua." Garnett produced an oil painting based on the detail she had downloaded and, after the painting was displayed in a New York art gallery (and was featured on the exhibition's announcement), Garnett received a letter from Meiselas's lawyer informing the painter that she was "sailing under the flag of piracy." Taken aback and a little shaken up, Garnett turned to an online "new media" community, Rhizome.org, for advice. Aware of the legal cloud, however, she was careful not to "name names or post a link to Susan's photograph." Her situation drew a lot of attention, eventually leading to an international agitprop campaign dubbed Joywar. (The details are very interesting, but, in the interest of space, I'll simply recommend the following links: the full Harper's article; a relevant video lecture; an archive of all things JoyWar; a related photo set). Suffice it to say, although no lawsuit was brought, Garnett and Meiselas have different perspectives on the matter.
Reading Meiselas's half of "On the Rights of Molotov Man," however, one realizes that copyright is less important to her than context. In other words, Garnett's unsanctioned use of the image is less troublesome to the photographer than the generalization of the image's content. There is an important distinction to be made here. The artist - Garnett, in this case - speaks the language of the universal. Hers is "a project born of frustration and anger" and the .jpeg of the anonymous rebel was "emblematic of the series." This is true of all the works that comprise Garnett's "Riot" series. Her inspiration was specific - the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 - but her paintings of "shouting demonstrators, angry skinheads, an Air Force pilot and his girl in an emotional embrace, frat boys jumping over bonfires, screaming punk rockers" are archetypes of the anxiety and anger we feel when powers outside our sphere of influence affect us adversely, especially when they steer the region (or world) toward further conflict. These misgivings are essentially equivalent, irrespective of culture, place or time.
By contrast, the photographs Susan Meiselas shot in Nicaragua are intended as documents of a particular place, during a particular conflict, in this case, the fighting between the Sandinistas and the ruling Somoza family. Although this conflict continues today in a different incarnation, the photograph in question represents the final hours before the Somoza family fled the country in July of 1979. Meiselas's interest is specific and historical; she is a documentarian. Not all photographers are documentarians, but Meiselas makes clear her goals in the Harper's article. "Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context." The Enlightenment thinker in me is inclined to agree with her, but most contemporary artists are not interested in reclaiming specificity. Rather, we are in the business of erasing it, sanding the hard edges of "fact" to reduce friction. Lethem, cribbing from David Foster Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram":"Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange....[by] paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for 'real' to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."
In other words, we're learning to cope with the constant stream of information by boiling it down to an essential skeleton, be it celebrity gossip, dispatches from Iraq, undergraduate lectures on aesthetics or what have you. This process is entropic, but is more easily described than done. We've recognized for centuries that the historical record is ever growing, but recently the number of pages in our encyclopedias (and wikis) grows exponentially. As a result, our circuitry is overloaded. [...]
Garnett asks, "Does the author of a documentary photograph - a document whose mission is, in part, to provide the public with a record of events of social and historical value - have the right to control the content of this document for all time?" Of course not. But we are all responsible, as citizens of the world, for the commons, be it that of language, ecosystems, or the historical canon. Lethem writes, "Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity." We have to decipher the signs with care and the reading mustn't stop at approximation. As important as our attempts to frame events in comprehensible terms are, we must not plead ignorance to create a happy fiction of distressing reality.
"Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?," a blogger named nmazca asked, referring to the Sandinista rebel photographed by Meiselas and, in turn, painted by Garnett. We all do. I see no reason why he can not be both Pablo Arauz, a one time rebel photographed by Meiselas in 1979, who now has a family and "a pretty good job delivering lumber," and the anonymous, existential Molotov Man. It is, however, our responsibility to honor both incarnations. As it exists now, copyright law is a "gag order," as Garnett puts it, to global conversation, but as it erodes (and erode it will, like language and history), we will become responsible for the context. Are we ready to be vigilant in an open source world?
more from edward_winklman blogspot, 1/23/07:
{check out the comments section...}
more from David Bollier's OnTheCommons.org, 1/25/07:
Authorship as a Collective Endeavor {excerpt}
[...]The core question for Garnett is "Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?" She writes:
Does the author of a documentary photograph – a document whose mission is, in part, to provide the public with a record of events of social and historical value – have the right to control the content of this document for all time. Should artists be allowed to decide who can comment on their work and how? Can copyright law, as it stands, function in any way except as a gag order?
Meiselas takes issue with Garnett, however, claiming that Garnett’s "practice of decontextualizing an image as a painter is precisely the opposite of my own hope as a photographer to contextualize an image…." Meiselas:
There is no denying in this digital age that images are increasingly dislocated and far more easily decontextualized. Technology allows us to do many things, but that does not mean we must do them. Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context. We owe this debt of specificity not just to one another but to our subjects, with whom we have an implicit contract.
It's a fair enough response, as far as it goes. But really – isn't a photograph, any photograph, itself a radical de-contextualization of its subject matter? Can a photographer really believe that the context of his or her work can be preserved? Doesn't the act of introducing something to the culture require a certain loss of control, and thus an acceptance of re-contextualizations?
It sounds to me as if Meiselas is belatedly trying to scramble to the moral high ground after her litigation gambit proved too incendiary. Her copyright claims were trumped by the spontaneous acts of artists and revolutionaries everywhere.
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