The ecstasy of plagiarism

Associated media

Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law

Edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli

What lingers, weeks after finishing this absorbing collection of essays, interviews, and experiments in form?  First, Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’ is reprinted from Harper’s minus only the illustrations and adverts.  Yet maybe it is not what its provocative subtitle claims, followed as it is by a key ‘to the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)’.   

Lethem appropriated primarily from sources less litigious than composer Philip Glass (whose lawyers’ cease-and-desist letter to a hip-hop producer appears elsewhere in this collection) or the Disney Corporation.  And in the end, the writer gives due credit to all – except those he forgot.  Novelists, he points out, have had a far easier time of borrowing freely than journalists or scholars (and music samplers).  Indeed, there is a distinguished tradition of the practice.  His fascinating conversation with Kembrew McLeod, one of Cutting Across Media’s co-editors, precedes the essay, both giving away the secret and providing personal context. 

Second, David Tetzlaff’s ‘Das Plagiierenwerk: Convolute Uii’, is composed entirely of endnotes to a notice telling us that, because the work ‘has been determined to violate U.S. copyright law, it does not appear in this book’.  I have not been able to determine if “’Plagiierenwerk: Convolute Uii’  actually exists, but the endnotes are a delight to read with a serious point to make.  Third, Gábor Vályi’s essay examines approvingly Bartók’s and Kodály’s folk music borrowings in their early 20th-century compositions, especially in light of current attitudes toward indigenous cultural rights.  Fourth, the anarchic collective Negativland (sic) I commend for their sober, reasoned essay in favour of liberal borrowing.  Revered or reviled, as the case may be, for sound and film collages such as The Mashin’ of the Christ (Christianity Is Stupid), it was a pleasure to experience Negativland in a mode of uncharacteristic restraint.

The 24 entries explore appropriation, interventionist collage, and copyright issues from a variety of perspectives (not too many of them female, though) and in a wide range of art forms from music to film to painting to photocopied ’zines to altered billboards.  While the only colour illustrations here are Chris Ofili paintings, the traditional visual arts of painting and sculpture are only infrequently the main subject.  Virtually every contributor favours reversing the direction of increasingly onerous copyright restrictions; few are holding their breaths.  Frequent references to Walter Benjamin prompted me to reread with renewed interest his celebrated 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (not included here but freely available online); now I look forward to confronting Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a massive work of appropriation left unfinished at the author’s 1940 suicide.

Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli is published by Duke University Press, 2011. 361 pp. illus, £16.99/ $25.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4822-1.