APPROPRIATION

Adrian Poole has offered an extensive list of terms to represent the Victorian era’s interest in reworking the artistic past: ‘(in no particular order)

…borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating … being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed … homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion, and intertextuality’

(2004: 2). We could continue the linguistic riff, adding into the mix:

variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel, sequel, continuation, addition, paratext, hypertext, palimpsest, graft, rewriting, reworking, refashioning, re-vision, re-evaluation.

Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders

 

William Burroughs at a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

 

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit— all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point—had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.   The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin  https://ubuweb.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html

 

Kathy Acker

“ACKER: Almost all of my work is plagiarized. Very little is written by myself. It’s always other texts. Like I say, I have this theme or this problem, and what I do is take all these other texts and structure them next to each other—for various reasons. Sometimes it would be to deconstruct. Sometimes it would be to construct, sometimes to compare, sometimes to find out…”

“ACKER: Yeah. The idea that you don’t need to have a central identity, that you could have a split identity and that was a more viable way in the world. I was splitting the I into false and true I’s and I just wanted to see if this false I was more or less real than the true I, what are the reality levels between false and true and how it worked. And of course there’s no difference. By the end of the Tarantula, when I do the de Sade business, I can’t tell what’s true or false. And the only reason I can tell there’s the truth is that I’m remembering the fact. I took a biography of de Sade and placed it next to my own biography, and except for actual dates that I remember—if I say I was born in 1848 I know that’s false—I can’t tell what’s me and what’s de Sade.”

“ACKER: You know, what a writer does, in nineteenth-century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience—you don’t just make things up, be it a story, or an autobiographical material, or be it social history, whatever—and he “represents” that material. Now what I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as else’s text—well, that’s the etymology! Hijacking a copyright, so to speak. No wonder they got upset. It’s terrorism in literature…”

“ACKER: I can’t remember who or what I saw and who I was influenced by until it comes to the Metro Pictures times. Then I know like Richard Prince’s work and Sherrie Levine’s work and David Salle’s work really influenced me.”

Kathy Acker: The last interview and other stories

 

SHERIE LEVINE Sherrie Levine, Barcham Green Portfolio No. 5. After A Photograph, 1986   Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), Cast bronze and artist’s wooden base, 1991

RICHARD PRINCE Richard Prince, "Untitled (Cowboy)," 1989. Ektacolor photograph. 50 x 70 inches. Richard Prince Sells Other People's Printed Instagrams for $100,000 USD a Piece at NYC Gallery

 

...Intertextuality, you can’t separate a single piece of text, from all the other texts that it relates to?

...interimagality, you can't seperate a single image from all the other images that it relates to?

...Intercollagality, you can't seperate a single repurposing from all the other repurposes that it relates to?