Although Nate Harrison originally directed and produced this recording on acetate to be an audio installation with turntable, PA system, and paper documents, it was not in art galleries that his work got exposure but rather on the Internet, where the 2004 video caught fire.
Harrison’s history of the six-second Amen Break brings with it issues that pertain to copyright law versus public domain. One quote in particular reminds me of my first post on the sculptor, Brian Dettmer. At 11:18, Harrison narrates:
In other words, sampling was not seen as merely rehashing past sounds, but as an attempt to make new from something old: an artistic strategy as time honored as creative expression itself.
Dettmer’s library of dated, non-fiction books that he takes the scalpel to is, like the six-second Amen Break, his public domain that he reinterprets with his incisions, thereby imbuing the pages with new life. He becomes the second parent of these books, the first being none other than their author.
But, who knows, maybe there was a parent before their first parent? This wouldn’t be too absurd to suggest seeing that the status quo for many if not all artists is to take the old and make it un-old. Art is not creation, but re-creation.
Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, bundled this notion much more elegantly when he presented the court with his dissenting opinion on the 1993 Vanna White case, which concerned property right to publicity. Despite its elegance, however, it should be noted that the court ruled in her favor. At 17:30, Harrison quotes Kozinski:
Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s suppose to nurture.
The first time I encountered this idea that nothing can ever be original, that there is no such achievement as originality, was while reading a Borges story. But I can’t remember the title or find the quote, and the idea was so stifling at the time that I neglected to jot it down.
Related TOE posts:
- Mia Pearlman :: Cut Paper Installations
- Early Sampling with Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori
- Brian Dettmer :: Book Autopsies
- Apres Moi – Regina Spektor [Lollapalooza 2007]
- Speech to Song :: An Audio Illusion
The theme of the impossibility of originality runs through Borges’ The Library of Babel, whose titular instituion, infinite in scope, contains all possible books in all possible languages. Such a library would appear to obviate any act of new creation, containg as it does every conceivable literary production, menaingful or meaningless, in every possible variation. But given that the meaningful volumes in the library are infinitely outnumbered by the tomes of meaningless strings of characters, the librarians of Babel toil at pains to find any book of real interest. Those who succeed are revered. The act of discovering a meaningful book becomes a kind of creation, pulling order out of the chaos, blurring the line between discovery and invention.
In a sense, Borges’ library already exists, as a logical extension of the properties of written language, defined as the set of all strings of any length of the characters of the alphabet plus punctuation. By defining this set, which contains everything you have ever written and will ever write, do I gain any rights over its contents? No more right than I would have over fire if I found it first. Those who contribute to culture may add a character or two to the cultural alphabet, but they cannot claim ownership over the recombination of these charaacters. If this is not a process to which you wish to contribute, you have the option of keeping your work to yourself. Fortunately, neither Prometheus nor Shakespeare took that option.