“Lo-Fi” Replication as a Form of Appropriation

This is my master’s thesis submitted to the the FIT Qualifying paper committee for the MA in Art Market Studies.

In this paper I investigate low fidelity (Lo-Fi) replication as an artistic strategy. That strategy is historically grounded in appropriation techniques but has been taken into new critical directions by artists like Liz Glynn, Justin Matherly, Ryan Trecartin. My thesis is that these artists, although working in very different media, adopt a similar artistic strategy which is an evolution of the method of appropriation. They go beyond the recontextualization of readymade objects, and beyond the straightforward appropriation of found objects or pop culture imagery as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and others did.

Their quickly executed, often flawed replicas of pre-existing cultural “forms” share some of the trappings of earlier appropriation art, however their very approximation and lack of pretense make them more accessible and often richer in exploring the interplay between capturing forms (mimesis) and producing meaning (semiosis). Ultimately, as I will try to demonstrate, they are successful in “diverting power” from mass media and cultural institutions to their work and elevating their own value in the art market.

This shift from image to message is at the core of contemporary art practices and is critical to understand the contemporary art market, beyond just appropriation artists.

Concepts and Artists

Replication, low fidelity and appropriation are three different techniques that are interconnected in the work of Glynn, Matherly and Trecartin. By first presenting these concepts separately I will try to determine how they relate to one another as well as how they have been adapted and modified by the artists mentioned above.

Replication

Replication of art objects has always been an element of artistic practices but rarely something valued or celebrated. It might be worth establishing the boundaries on this concept and exploring how it differs from figuration, representation and simulacra.

Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, his classic 1981 philosophical treatise, proposes a typology of the different ways copies can refer to an original. Baudrillard postulates a “first stage” where the copy is “a faithful image, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a reflection of a profound reality.” This is what Baudrillard calls “the sacramental order”. Baudrillard uses the term sacramental by analogy with the Christian use of the term, where sacraments like baptism and eucharist are supposed to be visible symbols of the reality of God. That first stage can be roughly approximated to classic figurative art, like a Vermeer portrait of a Flemish merchant, a faithful image of something real and believable.

Then Baudrillard goes on to define a “second stage” where they copy represents something real, but are misleading in that sense that it “masks and denatures” the things being represented. This second stage “inaugurates the era of simulacra and simulation”. Baudrillard later wrote another polemical newspaper article where he argued that the First Gulf War as narrated by CNN was such a simulacra because its highly stylized media representation made it impossible to comprehend the experience of what truly happened in the conflict. He then postulates a “third stage” and a “fourth stage” more and more disconnected from reality. In these later stages simulacra are representations which appear to be “of something” while they are not, i.e., there is no reality grounding them and they are signs referring to a constructed world of other signs in an infinite regression. Reality TV would be an example of the third or the fourth stage depending on the way you look at it, i.e., appearing to represent reality while being mostly staged or improvised performance.

Although many of Ryan Trecartin’s videos recycle features of reality TV, which will be discussed later, when I use the term “replication” in this essay I don’t mean Baudrillard’s simulacra, but simply the reproduction, with various degrees of fidelity, of pre-existing art objects. So there is a true original artwork that happens to be a cultural artifact. For instance, Justin Matherly’s 2013 exhibition All Industrious people, (fig. 1) replicated archeological artifacts found at Nemrut Dagi in Turkey, an excavated temple-tomb devoted to King Antiochus I, a Hellenistic emperor who ruled in the third

Figure 1

Justin Matherly, All Industrious People, 2013, installation, concrete, ambulatory equipment, dimensions undefined, Paula Cooper Gallery

century B.C. Glynn’s 2017 exhibition The Myth of Singularity (fig. 2) was based on replicating parts of Rodin sculptures. I will use the term “secondary copies” as a synonym for replica in that sense.

Primary copies, one could argue, are foundational to art. Some of the oldest undisputed art objects are paleolithic so-called “Venus” figurines found in caves like the one at Chauvet. They are perfect examples of Baudrillard’s sacramental order, representation of an external reality that people believe to really exist. The most common interpretation of the Venus figurines implies that they were representations of feminine beauty, fertility and attraction, although different opinions exist in the archeological community regarding their significance and function.

What is interesting is that they were found at multiple locations across Europe, most of them are small and portable. Figurines from the same sites of the Upper Paleolithic period show many similarities such as shape, form and ornamentation.

Figure 2

Liz Glynn, The Myth of Singularity (after Rodin), 2014, installation, cast bronze, 71 x 46 x 23 in, Le Petit Palais, Paris

Thus we have a reason to believe that they were also the first examples of “secondary copies”, replicas of one another and that this form of replication has been common since the very beginning of human culture.

Producing those copies was, however, hard, almost as hard as making the original. This copying process was subsequently often used as a way for artists to learn their trade: apprentices copying drawings by masters line by line, or as a very low productivity endeavor which produced very few, but faithful copies of important artifacts like Illuminated medieval manuscripts or bronze casts. High fidelity was something sought after in that historical context. The copy was something hard to achieve and extremely valuable.

All changed with the industrial age, factories and photography. These techniques of mechanical replication are often associated with the birth of modern art and what I call the “Cambrian explosion” of art forms which followed after World War II.

I use the term Cambrian explosion by analogy. The Cambrian period is a well-known discontinuity in the evolution of life. Life forms were relatively static and unchanging for billions of years — the Precambrian period — when they were composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. But in a “short” period of 70 to 80 million years, the rate of diversification accelerated by an order of magnitude and the diversity of life, with all plants and animal phyla, began to resemble that of today. In the same way we could argue that art was mostly figurative and “of the same kind” for centuries until the modernist era which saw an accelerated differentiation leading to the incredible diversity of contemporary practices like performance art, land art, conceptual art, relational art, etc.

This discontinuity was first discussed in Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Benjamin’s essay is “pre digital” but it raises many questions which frame a debate that is still echoing today and is relevant to our thesis.

Benjamin’s main argument revolves around a theory that art objects initially had mostly a religious value as they were used in rituals (back to the “Venus” figurines). Because those rituals were often only performed by a specific individual (priest, shaman) in specific sacred places (temples, churches, etc.) and specific times (winter solstice, for example), the experience of the art object was by necessity very limited, to a point where it may not need an audience at all (or at least an audience apart from a divinity or divinities). Benjamin cites the example that “certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level.” This elusiveness is what according to Benjamin gave those art works what he calls an “aura,” i.e., presence as a unique object, at the complete opposite of mass replication. Benjamin’s theory is that as art objects started escaping the realm of religion and rituals, they started developing what he calls an “exhibition value,” which can only be enhanced by the possibility of mass replication. The easier it is to experience an art object, and the more people can see it, the more effective its exhibition value.

However the price to pay is that those art works lose their “aura,” i.e., derived from their uniqueness. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

For Benjamin, photography and film were the most dramatic examples of this loss of “aura” as they can be easily experienced by anyone, anywhere in any context. The digital era made this evolution even more pronounced.

Benjamin describes this shift as art leaving the world of “rituals” to enter the sphere of “politics.” For him “politics” had a precise historical meaning as he and fellow German cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno were anxious about those mass replication techniques being used as tool for fascist governments such as Nazi Germany, as well as for the capitalist and nominally democratic systems: “In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

There is also a sense in Benjamin’s essay that traditional painting or sculpture just could not compete with photography and films in terms of exhibition value. Benjamin says: “Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience”, and about cinema:

With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.”

This ease of replication of photo and film combined with their higher information density noted by Benjamin is also often associated with the advent of “Kitsch” as analyzed by Adorno or Clement Greenberg, i.e., mass produced, highly replicated art catering to the lowest common shared emotions, pushing people away from their individuality and authenticity.

But the possibility or ease of replication is just a tool. It doesn’t have to lead to a world of Kitsch. Artists are very resourceful people who can take just about any cultural phenomena and recycle it for their own purpose of finding new things to say with them.

As Benjamin also noted, the Dada, Surrealist and Constructivist movements with Russian filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and photographer Alexander Rodchenko were already showing how film and photography, two media which were the most guilty of charge, had also the potential to be empowering and subversive when used in a different way.

So while the possibility of replication, whether perfect or imperfect, can be subverted in the direction of regressive Kitsch, Matherly, Glynn and Trecartin also push the technique in new directions. One aspect of their work is the use of technology-enabled but often pre-mechanical and “artisanal” replication techniques. Embracing and magnifying of the distortions and replication errors which are unavoidable regardless of the technology used is what I’m going to describe in the next section as lo-fi.

Lo-fi: the Esthetic Landscape

I said above “regardless of the technology” because one could argue that digital copies can be perfect and that even with a chemical photo process, near perfection is achievable.

That is true in a narrow technical sense but does not resist social realities, especially in the digital realm. The digital realm is an anarchic universe of appropriated photos and video low fidelity and approximation reign supreme. Hito Steyerl, an experimental filmmaker and professor of New Media at Berlin University analyzes those phenomena at length in a well known essay, In Defense of Poor Images. She reflects on the decay of images as they make their way through the internet, becoming at the same time more ubiquitous but also so degraded to a point that one could argue that they are abstracted into just an idea:

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

This has to do with the fact that replication is not just technology. Budgets, people, time are involved. All have flaws and limitations. They often fail. And in the digital world, the failures get massively replicated, too.

Of course, in the non-digital world it is worse. Chemical photographic copies that can be theoretically near perfect are not stable in time. They are at the mercy of chemical degradation, like the infamous cellulose nitrate-based film stocks of motion pictures. The great majority of films made in the silent era are now considered lost forever because they were filmed on these unstable, highly flammable cellulose nitrate film base, which requires careful storage to slow its inevitable process of decomposition over time. In that respect one can look at the evolution of biological life itself, which in all its mind-boggling diversity, is the product of an accumulation of random errors i.e. mutations in DNA copying. Those replication errors and problems were historically considered something “bad” that one should try get rid of. This is true of pre-industrial artists, but also in art forms born out of the mechanical age, i.e., photo, film and recorded music.

It is however in the recorded music industry that the shorthand “lo-fi” emerged as a stylistic approach: lo-fi is a shorthand for “low fidelity” and refers to an ethos of quick, cheaply produced works. Even its spelling, using an abbreviation, refers to this ethos.

In this music recording world, lo-fi came to describe a deliberate way of recording and producing music with basic equipment and actually embracing the distortion and flaws. Many punk rock and garage rock bands exemplify this aesthetic but it has also been championed by sophisticated musicians like Beck with an encyclopedic knowledge of studio production techniques. Paradoxically, it was, however, always associated with a research of integrity through those imperfections. A desire for less artifice and for demonstrating a certain truth.

This is a theme that we will examine further and which is recurring in this essay: how unsophistication, “rawness” and even degraded or aged material paradoxically can carry a meaning of authenticity, purity, and “essence”. Something which has been a quest of many artists in many media.

The lo-fi ethos, then, developed further in another recording-based art, photography. In the 1970s many Fluxus artists investigated the use of the photocopier in producing art, the so-called Xerox art. The value of those black and white, smudged images was clearly not the quality of their reproduction. More recently in popular photography, there has been a movement called Lomography which initially promoted the use of cheap Soviet-made camera (the original “Lomo”) and later on of plastic toy cameras, with severe optical defects, older chemical development processes and celebrated optical flaws. The color approximations generated on the resulting pictures were celebrated as a “good” thing. One can also cite Jack Smith’s great 1963 film “Flaming Creatures,” which used expired film stock and was Andy Warhol’s favorite film, evocative of Warhol’s own lo-fi reproductions of images of commercial packaging design. This lomographic subculture predates and in turn had an undeniable influence on the Instagram filters look, which has now invaded all kinds of visuals from family pictures to high fashion.

Moving from photography to film, another reproduction-based art form, there is another interesting aspect to low fidelity: the association with the newsreel and documentary genres as a visual cue for authenticity. Again, here I have this theme of “authenticity” and “truth.” I mentioned earlier Dziga Vertov, one of the first filmmakers to practice “montage” techniques, i.e., very short clips, edited together with no transition between them like in his classic 1929 work Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с киноаппаратом). Supported by his formal experiments with montage, Man with a Movie Camera has no plot and no professional actors. Vertov called his movie an experiment in search of “kino-pravda” (which has the same meaning as “cinema-verite” of the French New Wave, each meaning “cinema-truth” in their original language). Early newsreels were often produced in difficult technical conditions. Dziga Vertov produced many newsreels from a train roaming the front line of the Russian civil war. They were born in urgency and the quality of the original material often reflects it. Then they became historical documents that kept getting viewed, long after they were created while rarely maintained well or restored. So on the top of their initial rough image capture, they often bear all the marks of aging like scratches and skipping images. Thus viewers have been trained to associate those grainy and scratchy moving images with a form of authenticity.

An example in mainstream “Hollywood” feature films of the recycling of this esthetics and montage technique to make the narrative feel more real is The Blair Witch Project.

One can also look at the Chris Marker cinematographic essay titled Sans Soleil as an another example of lo-fi film in a different genre. The film is a travelogue with a mix of footage shot by Marker himself around the world, some newsreels, and clips that Marker borrowed from other filmmakers. All of the film is very grainy, and the film has no synchronous sound, but a very subtle audio mix of real world noises and the voice over of a female narrator reading letters supposedly sent to her. But through all this raw montage and composition something comes out of it that feel incredibly true and sincere as a reflexion of time, memory, human frailty and survival.

Then there is Michel Gondry and his feature film Be Kind Rewind from 2008 which takes us closer to Trecartin’s approach. The plot of Be Kind Rewind is about a pair of clueless staffers of an old-school video store, the kind that carried magnetic VHS tapes. After accidentally erasing all the tapes in a “magnetic accident,” they embark on re-enacting and reshooting all the classic movies they erased but with production values which could be described as “strings, bubblegum and duct tape”. This is an example of lo-fi theatrical replication, filmed. In the scenario they peddle those tapes as “made in Sweden” and the movie spawned a real subculture on YouTube of user generated “sweded” movies (fig. 3). The movie has a climactic scene where a studio executive arrives and forces the destruction of the re-enacted VHS tapes for copyright infringement, which alludes to the fact that appropriation techniques have often tested the limits of copyright laws.

Figure 3

Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind, 2008, feature film

Appropriation

Appropriation techniques trace back to Cubism. Picasso and Braque appropriated found materials directly into their works, with very few or no modifications applied to the objects. A characteristic example of Picasso’s work during his “Synthetic Cubism“ period is Guitar, Sheet music and Wine glass, 1912. In this work Picasso assembled a collage from seven pieces of paper pasted onto a wallpaper background. Most notably Picasso used newspaper and sheet music clippings cuts to create this work.

Similarly the artists who were part of the Dada movement believed that “an artist’s conceptual repurposing of an existing object was a valid form of creation.”

Continuing into Pop Art, which incidentally has been referred to as Neo-Dada, artists then began appropriating popular culture imagery (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and others).

Then came the man who maybe was not the very first one to use appropriation but established it decisively as a major technique, and remains its poster child: Richard Prince. In his cowboy series we see the Marlboro man, appropriated from an ad with the identifying text and context removed (fig. 4).

Figure 4

Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989, ektacolor photograph, unique, 50 x 70 in

Prince himself admits a definite lo-fi ethos in his work. He is quoted as saying about the Cowboys rephotography: “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures…” which can be easily compared to the ethos of many seminal punk bands that barely knew how to play their instruments, but went on stage anyway for history making performances. One could also say that low fidelity replication was a necessary condition for his work to be effective. It allowed the audience to quickly identify that this was a photo of an already published photo, putting in motion the perception of simulacra as defined by Baudrillard, which extends to the original staged photo by Sam Abell.

Replication, Lo-Fi and Appropriation in the Work of Glynn, Trecartin and Matherly

The first obvious thing one can notice about Glynn, Trecartin and Matherly’s work is that they are replicating other significant artworks or artifacts. Not as homages like Roy Lichtenstein’s Bedroom at Arles (1992) (fig. 5) after Van Gogh, or parodies like Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919, remade in 1964) (fig. 6) but as technically plain “grabs”, more in the spirit of Prince’s cowboys, but with a definite critical and theoretical complexity.

Figure 5

Roy Lichtenstein, Bedroom at Arles, 1992, oil on canvas, 126 x 165 in, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Private Collection

Figure 6

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1964, graphite and gouache over offset lithograph in colors on paper, 11.9 x 9.1 in, Christie’s Auction House

Liz Glynn

Liz Glynn is a young American artist born in 1981. She is a CalArts MFA graduate from 2008 and currently resides in Los Angeles. Glynn’s works are mostly physical artifacts, i.e., sculptures or installations. These include, Rome in a Day, 2008 (fig. 7) a participatory performance that Glynn repeated on several occasions when she had a group of people help her build a cardboard scale model of Rome in 24 hours. The scale model is then joyfully destroyed at the end of the day. In On the Possibility of Salvage, a 2013 exhibition (fig. 8) which displayed fictional archeological finds from an actual, well-known 16th-century ship wreck, Glynn references a Portuguese ship of 400 tons called the Flor do Mar which sank off the northern tip of the coast of Sumatra rumored to be loaded with 200 coffers of precious stones, diamonds and other valuables and which to this day has not been recovered. Open House, 2017 in New York (fig. 9) which replicates decorative elements and furniture from New York “gilded age” mansions but partially decontextualized as they are now presented as outdoor sculptural pieces near Central Park.

Hercules (ca. 306 B.C.)

Figure 7

Liz Glynn, Rome in a Day, 2008, participatory performance

Figure 8

Liz Glynn, On the Possibility of Salvage 2013, installation, variable materials, 17 x 22 x 10 ft, Paula Cooper Gallery

Figure 9

Liz Glynn, Open House, 2017, installation, concrete, dimensions undefined, commissioned by Public Art Fund

Often Glynn, in her words, “activates” the works through participatory performances which are recorded and easily found on video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. For instance for The Possibility of Salvage opening night, Glynn staged an operatic performance Reverse Siren Song around the boat. It featured four singing “sirens,” who were lured to the ship, instead of the other way around.

Her works are often copies of historical artifacts but deliberately constructed from flimsy and disposable materials. The themes she explores are often emergence and decline in cultures and how they relate to the present time. She is interested in archaeological finds of cultural material from antiquity to more recent time periods, and their presentations in museums., For instance one of the work part of On the Possibility of Salvage, Ming Dynasty Bust from the Flor do Mar, 2013 (fig. 10) presents itself through his wall text as an ancient Chinese bust, although it is visibly made of papier mache in a very naive way.

Figure 10

Liz Glynn, Ming Dynasty Bust from the Flor do Mar (from the installation On the Possibility of Salvage) 2013, sculpture, paper mâché with acrylic and ink in birch box with oiled casein paint 19 x 13 x 10.5 in, Paula Cooper Gallery

Justin Matherly

Justin Matherly (Born 1972 in West Islip, NY) also creates works reminiscent of ancient sculptures. Most of his works start with a two-dimensional photograph of a three-dimensional (real) archeological site (fig. 1). So Matherly does not have the precise dimensions or blueprint of what he is replicating, it is all guessed from photos.Then in his creative process Matherly uses non-standard moulding materials: rigid foam, tree Gators, hot glue, polyurethane rubber and others which are chosen for their flexibility, not for their fidelity. For instance in one of his installations titled All Industrious People at Paula Cooper in 2013, the concrete was cast in those low-fidelity moulds and he let the way they expanded and reacted with the poured concrete dictate the final form of the copies. Faithfulness to a blueprint was non-existent.

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin is a Los Angeles-based artist and a filmmaker who was born in 1981, Webster, Texas. He is best known for his staged videos that combine acting, sound, narrative, and computer-generated imagery (CGI). His videos are kitschy, in your face, discombobulating and disorient the viewer.

What he does can be described as “re-enactments” of teenage YouTube videos or reality TV. In spirit he is not far from Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, but where Gondry was targeting iconic Hollywood movies with their bogus aura and prestige thus creating a kind of homage, the genius of Trecartin is to forgo the homage and go after something already low-brow, cheaply produced and to find ways to go even deeper, turning kitsch against itself through montage, theatricality and dialogue. The potency of his work and why it comes out as art and not as a simple parody is that he pushes the method to a disturbing extreme.

Trecartin’s first major work, A Family Finds Entertainment (fig.11), was produced during his senior year of college in 2004. Two of his most widely available videos are Any Ever, 2012 (fig. 12) presented at MoMa PS1 in 2011 and Center Jenny, 2013 (fig. 13), which premiered at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale.

Figure 11

Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, short film

Figure 12

Ryan Trecartin, Any Ever, 2012, short film

Figure 13

Ryan Trecartin, Center Jenny, 2013, short film

The “Emotional Mechanics” of Lo-Fi Replication

There is obviously humor and a mild social commentary in the work of the artists I presented. Many contemporary artists since Duchamp’s seminal Fountain have used levels of representation as a way to poke some fun at high art and cultural institutions. Here we don’t have anything intensely subversive or transgressive, but Glynn’s papier mache ancient tools (fig. 14), displayed with the seriousness of a museum archaeological collections or the outrageous makeup and valley-girl gibberish in Trecartin’s productions are amusing. Matherly’s use of hospital walkers or classroom chairs as pedestals for his work clearly play on a contrast between his subject matter (Greek archeology) and the incongruity of the presentation devices.

Figure 14

Liz Glynn, Technological Toolboxes, 2016, sculptures, 3-D printed gypsum and nylon elements in powder-coated steel toolbox, 36 x 22 x 4 in

Glynn and Matherly are operating at the most respectable and highbrow end of the cultural spectrum, while Trecartin — at the other extreme — deals with the emerging tropes of lowbrow online videos and reality TV.

However, like Prince, these artists are somewhat ambivalent in the relationship to the institutions they engage, and this is one of their strengths: there are some aspects of parody but they don’t engage in direct confrontation or conversely don’t idolize the cultural realities that they are dealing with. They just deliver a visual and auditory commentary and let the audience make associations.

I already touched on one of those effects, namely creating a perception of truth and primal truth, I can generalize this concept as the quest for revealing the “essence” of things:

There is something all those reproduction techniques have in common: they are a form of simplification, one could say abstraction. The word “abstraction” has two very different meanings in the English language. First, the term “abstraction” is used to describe movements like Abstract Expressionism or Post-Painterly Abstraction, i.e., a way to describe visual forms which are not figurative. But the more fundamental meaning of the word is a “simplification”, an “isolation of key elements” from something to reach some kind of more universal “essence”, as in the expression “abstracted away from”. This is the second sense that I am considering here.

Note that this quest for “essence” was always a theme of modernism, starting with Picasso and Brancusi. Lo-fi replication delivers on this project in several ways:

The “Child-Play” Effect

Children are natural Lo-Fi replicators. Due to their lack of technical skills and also because they tend to be very immediate and literal in their perception of things, and also because they are largely unconcerned with how their artistic production will be received by art critics.

If one looks at a work from Glynn like Building Rome in a Day, 2008 (fig. 15) or Trecartin Center Jenny or Any Ever, there is a lot of this child-like ‘presence’. Adults often have a very nostalgic eye on childhood.

Figure 15

Liz Glynn, Building Rome in a Day, 2008, participatory performance

In Rome in a Day is the group of people helping Glynn usually are not trained architects or art professionals and they cut the cardboards from blueprints in urgency, glue them together very roughly and at the end trample on the whole thing, taking the role of barbarian hordes destroying civilization. The construction phase has a distinct “elementary school” feel to it because of the choice of materials and tools (cardboard, scissors, glue), choice of process, and the fateful end is not unlike children destroying the sand castles they just built. There is a youthful energy in the whole process.

The same can be said of Trecartin’s Any Ever. Makeup is smudged like children trying to apply lipstick from their mother, and the voices are processed to sound like Sunday cartoons “chipmunks” voices. The dialogue collage is littered with pre-teen SMS slang, “as if,” and “whatever,” leading to the agrammatical mashup title of the video itself Any Ever. In Center Jenny the dialogue also has the repetitive and offensive quality of children discovering how some words can be transgressive (bad words) and make their parents freak out by repeating them in a loop. All of those pieces and earlier ones from Trecartin like A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004 are also notable for Trecartin’s employment of child actors.

Dennis Cooper writes in Artforum: “If A Family Finds Entertainment can be reduced to a thumbnail description, this might be it: Trecartin stars as Skippy, a clownish but terrifyingly psychopathic boy who has locked himself in the upstairs bathroom of his family home during a wild party.

Glynn’s exhibition On the Possibility of Salvage weaves together some mock archaeology and Pirates (of the Caribbean) with papier mache reconstructed sunken treasures from Spanish galleons. Anything referencing Pirates of the Caribbean with US audiences probably triggers instant associations with Disney who built a global cultural empire based on a Baudrillard-esque simulacra of childhood. The whole thing has the feel of an elementary school project where, after visiting a museum, children are instructed to copy some historical artifacts using the kind of cheap material and equipment typically available at elementary schools.

Of course Rome in a Day or On the Possibility of Salvage has many other levels of interpretation; that is what makes it more than parody. During a 2017 conference in New York at Parsons, Glynn herself mentioned that Rome in a Day was conceived right after the Iraq invasion, when the US has to go into “nation building” mode, which turned out to be more difficult than the war itself and when many US officials attempted to excuse the lack of progress with the canned expression “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Rooting their work in materials and processes which have the attributes of child-play, Trecartin and Matherly make their art immediately accessible and relatable for the audience and impart a feeling of familiarity and essence.

Because of their child-like quality, even if slightly demented and nightmarish in the case of Trecartin, those works feel closer to some kind of unvarnished truth, free of self-censorship and respect of social codes. Note that there is parallel with the “art brut” of Dubuffet and his search of “truth” in outsider art of prisoners, psychiatric hospital patients and children.

The Brechtian “Distancing Effect” (Verfremdungseffekt)

The veneer of child-play gives audiences an easy way into those works. But as they engage deeper with the work, something else becomes more obvious, something Bertolt Brecht developed in this theory of “epic theater” and that he called the “distancing effect” or Verfremdungseffekt in German.

As a Marxist, Brecht was interested in shattering the illusion of spectacle. By shattering this illusion of “captivating” theater or cinema, he wanted to use theater as a revolutionary tool and make his audience more aware of the social world and politically engaged.

The way Brecht proposed to achieve this in theater and cinema was to use stage devices that make the audience feel detached from the action of the play so they do not become immersed in the fictional reality of the stage or become overly empathetic with the characters. Many of those stage tricks are now referred to as “breaking the fourth wall.”

In the most narrow sense breaking the fourth wall means speaking directly to the audience, interacting or engaging directly with them, therefore breaking the illusion. Together with the other three physical walls of a stage, the fourth wall is generally considered to be an imaginary wall in that separates the audience from the actors. It is used commonly to also describe any technique that breaks the illusion of spectacle to achieve some artistic or dramatic effect.

While there is a less outwardly political intent with Prince, Glynn, Trecartin or Matherly, they also figuratively destroy the fourth wall, including gallery and museum walls. Videos by Trecartin like Center Jenny are chock full of what I would call fourth wall busters.

One of Brecht’s realizations of the distancing effect was to have actors rearrange the set in full view of the audience. Trecartin is using the same technique but with a more millennial twist to it: most of the characters in his videos carry cameras, iPhones and record each other. There is no illusion of being immersed in the scene as one witnesses its very production and the making of the video as part of the video itself.

Likewise, Trecartin breaks the 30-degree rule of classical Hollywood continuity editing, a system of cutting which is used to maintain continuous and clear narrative action. His videos are full of poorly executed cuts which are jarring, thus making the viewer aware that “this is a movie.” What is interesting is that all reality TV shows Trecartin mimics and finds his “inspiration” in usually do apply the classic Hollywood continuity editing rules in an attempt to be perceived as “real” regardless of their highly constructed and framed nature.

Another technique Trecartin uses is the dissolve. This is an old technique which was used frequently in classical continuity editing to transition one scene to another. Here, Trecartin does not transition anything to anything, the dissolve just stays on the screen like a totally botched scene transition and never completes.

Trecartin’s work often exhibits very strong theatricality in a way that traces back to the roots of theatre. Like in 17th-century Elizabethan theatre or Chinese opera, males often play females, but the makeup is outrageous. This grotesque makeup was also one of the techniques promoted by Brecht as he called Spaß. Spaß just means “fun” in German but in this technical stage usage it can be translated as “grotesque stereotype,“ which is what Trecartin delivers in many of his videos. Trecartin shoves the viewer’s face into this distanciation between the representation and the things being represented, unlike “well-crafted commercial” film which tries to conceal it.

In a recent exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery called A Recrudescence, 2017 (fig. 20) Justin Matherly showed a series of his signature lo-fi replicas of Greco-Roman antiques on makeshift pedestals. They portray Asclepius, the ancient god of medicine, his son, Telesphoros, the symbol of recovery, and his daughter, Hygeia, the goddess of health. There is his usual dose of humor as he used orthopedic dressing gypsum plaster for the main construction material and ambulatory walkers for pedestals. Interestingly the works were remade from the broken and torn molds used for an earlier 2016 exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, The Quiescence of the Inorganic World (fig. 21). You can spot fissured seams and accidentally smeared paint on the pieces, as well as impressions of tape and packaging labels that appear on the stands that serve to cement the sculptures. So not only are these further degraded replica of his own replica but they have all the design, transport and construction marks visible to the audience. I had a chance to attend the dinner for the artist and to ask him directly why he left this smeared paint and marks on his works; he explained that he “wanted to humanize them” and make the audience shift their perception of those Greco-Roman sculptures away from representation of Platonic beauty and mathematic perfection. That technique is very similar to Brecht’s re-arrangement of sets in full view of the audience, because it makes the construction of the illusion visible to the audience. The technique hints at the fact that these Greco-Roman sculptures, in a contemporary context, are probably not representations of Telesphoros or Hygeia any more. They have become signs, in a semiotic sense, signs that could be pointing to various things maybe a canonized idea of beauty or what Baudrillard calls a “dream of culture.”

Figure 20

Justin Matherly, A Recrudescence, 2017, installation, gypsum plaster, ambulatory equipment, cardboard boxes, dimensions undefined Paula Cooper Gallery

Figure 21

Justin Matherly, The Quiescence of the Inorganic World, 2016, installation, concrete, modified gypsum, modified ambulatory equipment, paracord, votive tooth, Galerie Eva Presenhuber

The Power Transfer Effect

The first two effects of lo-fi replication I considered — child-play and Brechtian distanciation — operates mostly on audiences. The child-play effect facilitates access to the works and the distanciation tells viewers “beware, this is a representation or a sign, think about it.” The third effect I am postulating here, is at the same time less obvious and more potent. There is what I would call a “power transfer effect” whereby artists choose artifacts to copy which already carry cultural or institutional potency and transfer that “power” to their own work.

This effect has to do with the kind of artifacts artists chose to replicate. When Picasso or Duchamp were exploring early appropriation techniques, their main tool was recontextualization: the objects they picked were banal, and what was interesting was how they acquired a different meaning by presenting them in a different context. But Glynn, Trecartin and Matherly, following on the footstep of Richard Prince, tap into artifacts which already have cultural authority and often tremendous monetary value. We are far from Duchamp’s urinal. The institutions to which those artifacts belong are at the opposite ends of the high brow/ low brow cultural spectrum: archaeological museums and historical monuments in the case of Glynn and Matherly; Reality TV/social media for Trecartin; and, earlier, Madison Avenue advertising for Prince. They carry prestige and pedigree for museums and mass/numbers/momentum for reality TV/social media/advertising, which usually translates into money.

So choosing those artifacts as models is not neutral. We are so socially conditioned to recognize “value” in those artifacts, that even if we can tell they are made of papier mache and are not “the real thing,” some of the value rubs off and we pay attention. We probably take Glynn and Matherly more seriously because they engage with classicism, which is not a totally new thing in the history of art or in culture in general. In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, it when it became a common practice in aristocratic garden and landscape design to have fake Roman ruins or fake gothic ruins called “Follies” (fig. 17, fig. 18). They were an appropriation of the prestige, value and power given by history. Processing them gave the owner of the landscaped gardens a physical manifestation of ancient history “on their land.” Though fascination with ruins was originally a Western phenomenon, it also spread to non-Western cultures such as Chinese as described in Wu Hung’s essay “Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern,” from 1998.

Figure 17

Hagley Castle in Hagley, Worcestershire. It was built by Sanderson Miller for George, Lorde Lyttleton in the middle of the 18th century to look like a small ruined medieval

Figure 18

Fake Roman Ruins at Schönbrunn park, Austria

Glynn’s, Trecartin’s and Matherly’s activities also akin to sympathetic magic, which can be found in many primitive and not-so-primitive societies. One well documented example was the Cargo Cult phenomenon in the South Pacific by the Melanesian islanders in the years during and after World War II (fig. 16).

Figure 16

Cargo Cult phenomenon in the South Pacific by the Melanesian islanders in the years during and after World War II

“A small population of indigenous peoples observed, often right in front of their dwellings, features of the largest war ever fought by technologically advanced nations. The Japanese arrived first with a great deal of supplies, and later the Allied forces followed suit. With the end of the war, the military abandoned the airbases and stopped dropping cargo. In response, charismatic individuals developed cults among remote Melanesian populations. Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden rifles. The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes”.

Glynn, Trecartin and Matherly : a “Working” Sympathetic Magic

In the “real word” magical transfer of power does not really work, at least at the physical level. The cargo cults followers did not get much parachuted to them from the gods. They may have found something else in those cults, maybe a social cohesion as they were absorbing a massive cultural shock, but no actual cargo. However, in the case of Glynn and Trecartin the sympathetic magic “works” because it operates squarely and from the get-go in the cultural realm.

Glynn and Matherly’s pieces are exhibited in prestigious museums with “real” history and gravitas attached to them so they achieve their transfer of power.

Something interesting about Trecartin is that many articles point to the absence of in-depth, published art criticism about him. I have faced that myself: it is hard to find scholarly work on him, but there are a lot of shallow articles written about him which say very little. In an interesting ArtReview article about an exhibition Trecartin co-curated, his co-curators Lauren Cornell and Sara O’Keeffe, the assistant curator at the third New Museum Triennial said: “And yet I find there is actually a dearth of good writing on his videos, because critics seem to go into a kind of “generational shock” when they see them and spout vague words like “millennial” and “Internet” in rapid sequence“.

The comments above from Sara O’Keeffe, for me vindicate my thesis. I don’t believe, however, that the issue is a generational division. I believe it has more to do with the scale and cultural power of institutions like Google and Facebook than anything generational. Images of millennials or of their user generated content are just convenient signs that refer indirectly those new cultural powers. Critic and curators transfer this social and cultural power to Trecartin’s work the same way the prestige of classicism and museums extends to Glynn and Matherly. Trecartin depicts cultural realities so overwhelmingly present that there is an immediate halo effect. That is the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area, which we can argue is a form of “cultural” sympathetic magic, not far from the Pacific Islanders’ beliefs.

The Shift from Image to Message in Contemporary Art

This is the main thesis of my essay: by combining appropriation and lo-fi replication, Trecartin, Glynn and Matherly, three relatively young artists, express each in a very different way, but in a very “essential” way where contemporary art is now. Because of the dramatic development of the art market, the “branding” of many institutions, like the Louvre or the Guggenheim franchising their name to Abu Dhabi, the appearance of art consultancy firms, there has been a dramatic shift from image to message. This shift is best captured by the question of how to judge the “significance” of a work of art. How “significant” it is determines its value, both cultural value and monetary value. Artists, especially younger artists like Trecartin, Glynn and Matherly are aware of the cultural and social “meaning making” (semiosis) operating on their work and started directly commenting or reflecting on the semiotic nature of contemporary art.

Note that this awareness of the semiotic nature of art started in the pre-war period. Some scholars like Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois see the emergence of this semiotic awareness with Picasso’s and Braque’s cubist works and papiers collés in particular. They see those work as the very first engagement of artists with “quasi-linguistic signs.” Those initial explorations were followed by works explicitly addressing images as signs such as in the Rene Magritte painting called in the English-speaking world The Treachery of Images, 1929 (fig. 18) that plays on the same register. It is maybe the first example of true self-reflection in painting. This painting, very classic in its figurative technique, tells us that what we see is not really a pipe, that we see really some paint on a stretched canvas in a frame, that we just perceive it as a pipe, but that is just “in our head”, there is really no pipe in front of us. Together with Duchamp and his contempt for what he called “retinal” art, this painting which says “This is a just a sign” announces the advent of conceptual art and the primacy of the message over the image.

This “revelation” of semiosis is just a tool, and what artists do with it can be very different: Glynn and Matherly investigate historical artifacts, how they acquire potency through the institutions of history, museums and archeology; Trecartin presents a (distorting) mirror to the millennial user-generated YouTube videos which acquire their potency as symbols of the powerful technological “institutions” supporting them like Google and Facebook.

The function of lo-fi replication there is to grab viewers and to make sure there is no ambiguity, that they understand that what they see are all just signs. Although Liz Glynn’s piece is labelled Ming Dynasty Bust, because it’s made of papier mache it screams: “this is not a Ming Dynasty bust”, the equivalent of what pops up in the minds of viewers when looking at the Magritte pipe, i.e. “but… this is a pipe”. So here the wall text next to the piece and the cheap material play important semiotic roles. It is the “idea” of a Ming Dynasty bust but not the thing itself, which initiates the play with levels of significations in Glynn’s work. This prompts viewers to wonder what “real” museum archeological pieces could be signs for. It is an effect Matherly is explicitly after as I explained earlier.

Mimesis (figuration) as exemplified by neolithic “Venus Figurines” is probably at the genesis of all art. But at the very moment those artifacts were produced, the question of their iconographic meaning, cultural meaning, and social meaning, came into play.

In the 1950s and 1960s Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried famously advocated that the highest form of visual art was free of any figuration, interpretation and meaning. This argument emphasizes the “autonomy” of art objects. Fried’s opinion was that true art objects were composed with an internal coherence and therefore were autonomous from the surrounding world. That opinion seems to me a bit naive at best. “Internal coherence” whatever that may mean is bound to be a judgement passed by a human being, living in a social and cultural context.

The problem is that the very perception of art is social and cultural and because of that, semiosis is inescapable: as long as there is an audience, or artists or collectors somebody will “make sense” of it (and maybe sell it too).

But to understand that, viewers must break free from the illusion of the image (mimesis) and perceive art object as signs operating in a cultural and social context.

This is the essence of what Glynn, Trecartin or Matherly do: they show to us immediately recognizable images, which have great cultural potency, but they do it in such a way that their function as signs is made very clear, engaging viewers into reflecting on how they construct meaning from images.

Conclusion: What Makes a Work of Art “Significant”?

As I explained above,many people, including curators, art consultants and art critics, are chasing “significance” in artists and their works. This can be explained by a certain professionalization of those activities. At some level it is easier to justify an esthetic judgement, which may be arbitrary, if one can develop a coherent discourse about why something is significant. Thus a curator can justify an acquisition to a museum board, or an art consultant can justify a purchase to a client. There is nothing negative or reductive in my statement, it is just a general trend that goes beyond just art, and it cannot be unnoticed by young artists like Glynn, Trecartin or Matherly. They recycle this general trend into a questioning: how do art works and artifacts function as signs and symbols, how is this meaning constructed? Their answers are nuanced and sometimes ambivalent, they describe, comment, allude but never make didactic statements.

Their ambivalence is also tied to the “power transfer effect” I postulated earlier. They divert a lot of the cultural power from the originals onto themselves. And because they are successful artists, their works are “framed” in galleries, museums and mass media. So they are themselves immediately recontextualized by institutions as a side effect, commodified and sold in the art market. So in some way their messages apply reflexively to their own works.

Self-reflexivity in art can be slippery. One can always wonder whether it is a device that reveals deep insights into the nature of reality or is just the navel-gazing of artists running out of ideas. For example, is Matherly’s A Recrudescence, which involved the production of worse copies of his own bad copies an example of genius or lazy self-obsession? Or both at the same time? I believe the answer should not be about whether the artist took shortcuts but about the end result. Did it work?

What does “working” mean in the context of art production? This is ultimately a completely subjective answer but for me it is the combination of engaging an audience while creating new perceptive openings for them.

In this case the perceptive opening is about making audiences more aware of the complex levels of semiosis involved with art objects. What make them significant in the art world and elsewhere. Glynn, Matherly and Trecartin, thanks to their specific sensibility, their use of the child-play effect, as well as their humor, are very accessible. This creates the conditions of possible perceptive openings for audiences: Trecartin’s video are instantly watchable by just about any audience on YouTube and are highly entertaining; Glynn’s oversize concrete replicas of gilded-age mansion chairs she installed near Central Park are fun: all sorts of people from kids to bag-ladies (of the homeless kind) sit on them and interact with them.The small incongruous details of Matherly’s antique replica “humanizes” them.

Once that is in place, their work raises many interesting questions about the nature of representation and how artifacts acquire meaning. They “work” and go straight to what consumes the art world: significance. Indeed, they are themselves reframed by institutions but nobody can escape some kind of context. There is always a framing device. Artists might as well embrace that necessity and play with it.

In the contemporary art market significance is constructed to a large extent on the fact that art works can function as signs. Glynn, Matherly and Trecartin manufacture representations of representations, playfully embracing that shift from image to message and touching on something that is unique in the art market: valuation through semiosis.

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