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Universitt Hamburg 53-566: The Literary World of Kathy Acker
Winter term 13/14 HA Prof. Dr. Florian Zappe
How do Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine
deconstruct the notions of originality and
creativity? A comparative analysis between the artists
Germn de la Cruz Blanca Matrikelnummer: 6425392 Free mover
exchange student (bei Alexander Bednasch) Herrengraben 68, 20459
Hamburg Tel.: 01520 308 9797 [email protected]
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Table of contents:
1. Introduction....2 2. Plagiarism and appropriation strategies:
drawing the line between the
original work and its reproduction.....3-5
3. Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine: how do they deconstruct the
notions of originality and
creativity?.............................................................................6-12
4. Conclusion.12-13 5. Bibliography.....14-15
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1. Introduction:
This essay will be centered on two American artists: Kathy Acker
and Sherrie
Levine. Concretely, the topic of the paper will be a comparative
analysis of how the two
artists use appropriation strategies to deconstruct the
traditional the notions of creativity
and originality. First, the concepts of plagiarism as well as
appropriation strategies
related to the postmodernism will be defined. Consequently, the
comparative analysis
will take part, having a look at both artists simultaneously. In
this section, biographical
data of both artists will be mentioned concurrently so as to see
their connection within
the arts. Two interviews with Acker and Levine will also be
included as the main
sources due to the fact that they are the relevant material,
which help to uncover the
truth about the way these artists create their work, as well as
to what extent their works
relate to each other. These interviews are A Conversation with
Kathy Acker by Ellen G.
Friedman and After Sherrie Levine by Jeanne Siegel. At last but
not least, the
conclusion, with which the paper will try to come with a final
point, trying to elucidate
the reasons that led Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine to employ
appropriation strategies
and therefore, showing what their works mean to them in terms of
originality and
creativity.
Regarding Kathy Ackers works, two of her novels Blood and Guts
in High School and
Don Quixote, as well as other novels mentioned in the interview
will help to understand
when the aforementioned literary strategies take part, and on
behalf of Levine, two of
her most relevant works After Walker Evans and After Courbet
will be taken a look at
so as to know her opinion regarding these methods of
appropriation or repetition.
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2. Plagiarism and appropriation strategies: drawing the line
between the original work and its reproduction.
What is an original and what is a reproduction? According to the
oxford dictionary,
originality is the ability to think independently and creatively
as well as the quality
of being novel or unusual1 and a reproduction is a copy of a
work of art, especially a
print or photograph of a painting.2 Taking this premise as a
starting point, numerous
postmodern literacy works have been accused of having lack of
originality. Writers and
artists have used techniques such as plagiarism or
appropriation, and in order to situate
these strategies, the term postmodernism will be defined, due to
the fact that plagiarism
and appropriation strategies have been linked to this literature
and art period. The
second aim is to define plagiarism and appropriation strategies
from a postmodernist
point of view and see whether they are different or relate to
each other.
According to Marilyn Randall, plagiarism has carried away
negative connotations
throughout history. Rarely, except in the hands of []
plagiarists, has the practice
been considered in a positive lights. She comes up with the
aforementioned period
Postmodernism, eluding that thanks to it, strategies like
plagiarism or appropriation
strategies, which have been used by Sherrie Levine or Kathy
Acker, are scarcely
distinguishable from real plagiarism and [] have been threatened
with copyright
lawsuits. She raises the question of whether there are
aesthetics of plagiarism that
are part of the specificity of postmodernism.3 It is necessary
to have in mind the
possibility that plagiarism has become a kind of an extended
convention within the
postmodern aesthetic. Nevertheless, it is also likely that the
definitions of plagiarism,
originality and authenticity of their own creators, are not
conventional as they think. As
said by the oxford dictionary, Postmodernism is a late
20th-century style and concept
in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a
departure from modernism
and its characteristics are the self-conscious use of earlier
styles and conventions, a
mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general
distrust of theories.4 For
Douglas Crimp, Postmodernism can only be understood as a
specific breach with 1 Anon,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/originality,
last seen on Monday 31st at 12:35 2 Anon,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/reproduction,
last seen on Monday 31st at 12:40 3 Buranen, Lise, and Alice Myers
Roy, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property
in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press.
p.131 4 Anon,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/postmodernism,
last seen on Monday 31st at 16:40
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modernism, with those institutions which are the preconditions
for and which shape the
discourse of modernism. These institutions are the museum, art
history and
photography.5
The two protagonists of this paper, Kathy Acker and Sherrie
Levine, have been related
to plagiarism and appropriation in numerous of their works:
Blood and Guts in High
School or Don Quixote, or After Walker Evans, respectively.
Plagiarism has connections
with the arts and the moral and legal fields. It is often
discussed in simplistic terms:
using someone elses words without telling whose they are or
where you got them.6 As
for the term of appropriation, the oxford dictionary cites that
the term is the deliberate
reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of
art.7 The context of
the works and their justification are based on the background
against the role of the
image. Then, the appropriation appears, not to represent reality
through an image, but
by re-contextualizing earlier works. Douglas Crimp is an art
critic who wrote an essay
called Pictures (in which he found useful to employ the term
postmodernism),
gathered the work of artists, such as Jack Goldstein, Laurie
Anderson or Sherrie Levine.
Their images are purloined, confiscated, and appropriated,
stolen.8. Appropriation, as
well as plagiarism, questions several points: the genius,
authorship, creation, the
sustainability and originality. According to Randall,
plagiarism, historically has always
been bad, as well as Laurie Stearns, who claims people commonly
think of it as being
against the law. She goes on by saying that plagiarism is not a
legal term [] and
therefore it does not necessarily constitute a violation of
copyright law. Julie Sanders,
who focused on postmodern borrowings, questions certain academic
stance where
Shakespeare allusions to the classical authors (Ovid, Plutarch,
etc.) are considered a
legitimate practice while the contemporary creators enter the
field of plagiarism.9 Due
to the multifaceted nature of the techniques, there isnt any
work or an author that could
be considered canonical and which could serve as a model for
these topics. However, 5 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic
Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91. 6.
Introduction. Buranen, Lise, and Roy, Alice Myers, ed. 1999.
Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a
Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p.
xv-xvi 7 Anon,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/appropriation,
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:41 8 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The
Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91-92.
9 Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New
Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge. p.34
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there is a criterion that relates postmodern plagiarism to
appropriation and adaptation
strategies: intertextuality. Asa Berger cites:
We live in a world in which simulation is all important - in
which real objects are replaced by their copies and in which
culture has to be seen as an assemble of texts, all of which are
intertextually related to one another and gain their meaning from
the connection to other texts that preceded them.10
Along the same lines Asa Berger interprets that intertextuality
aims at weakening the
alleged importance of the so-called originality.11 According to
Sanders, she suggests
that originality is not a concept of interest when the current
artistic production is based
on the DIY of items and borrowings. Sanders, has thought about
the different types of
versions and the differentiation between what it is to
appropriate and to plagiarize.
Occasionally, she focuses directly on the postmodern
discussion:
On what grounds, after all, could such a judgment be made?
Fidelity to the original? [] It is usually at the very point of
infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and
appropriation take place.12
One could say that from a traditional perspective, it seems
contradictory to consider the
presence of a relationship between the semantic change and
plagiarism. However, it
could occur that plagiarism happens through a partial copy
instead of a complete and
literal one, such as the stealing of paragraphs or elements
considered substantial, as well
as the suppression of the source, which is vital from the
canonical point of view. Thus,
how can one define plagiarism from a postmodernist view? For
Stearns, plagiarisms
essence from a modernism perspective is a failure of the
creative process through the
authors failure either to transform the original or to identify
its source. The author
claims that people usually loathe plagiarism because it is a
form of cheating that allows
the plagiarist an unearned benefit. She states that there are
two types of these benefits:
tangible and intangible, the first corresponds to the work and
becomes moneymaking
and the second takes place when it gives certain personal or
professional status to the
10 Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003. The Portable Postmodernist. Walnut
Creek, CA: Altamira Press. p. ix 11 Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003. The
Portable Postmodernist. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. p. viii-x
12 Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New
Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge. p.20
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plagiarist.13
Do Kathy Acker or Sherrie Levine have the same opinion about
this topic? How do they
create their works? What is to appropriate for both artists? Or,
more importantly, what
is originality or creativity for Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine?
The next section will
take a look at their thoughts on the matter.
3. Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine: how do they deconstruct the
notions of originality and creativity?
What is it that these two artists have in common? As mentioned
earlier, both Kathy
Acker and Sherrie Levine have been accused of using plagiarism
and appropriation to
create their works. For the first, Levine has been an
inspiration in her works, as Martina
Sciolino relates on her chapter on Acker, she has spoken of her
affinity for Sherry
Levines photography, which decontextualizes and re-represents
photography by
men.14 Either one has used appropriation, as well as cut-up or
collages strategies in
order to carry out their works. Thus, why have they come with
such techniques? What is
the origin of their way of deconstructing art? What is
originality or creativity for them?
Kathy Acker is without any doubt a cult figure of the punk
movement. She was born in
New York and regarding the date of her birth, there has been
some incongruence on
behalf of Edward Robison who claims that Acker was actually born
in 194815 and
Suzette Henke talks in her chapter on Kathy Acker that the
writer was born in 1947.16
She is considered among the most remarkable protagonists of
radical feminism and the
postmodern literary aesthetic. She would call experimentalism
her work with
language, but even though she has been catalogued as feminist
writer, she has been
damned by feminists when she was thirty.17 Anyhow, she studied
poetry in San Diego
and focused on countercultural fiction published with
underground presses in the 13 Stearns, Laurie. Copy Wrong:
Plagiarism, Process, Property and the Law. Buranen, Lise, and Roy,
Alice Myers, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual
Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New
York Press. p. 7 14 Sciolino, Martina. 1990. Kathy Acker and the
Postmodern Subject of Feminism. College English 52 (4): 437. Doi:
10.2307/377661. p. 441
15 Novel Arguments Reading Innovative American Fiction. 2009.
Cambridge Univ Pr. Robinson, Edward S. 2011. Shift Linguals: Cut-up
Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Postmodern
Studies 46. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi. 16 Hawkins, Susan E. 2004.
All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School.
Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 637. Doi: 10.2307/3593544. p. 91 17
Friedman G. Ellen 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker.
Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary
Fiction, Volume 9.3, last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50
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1970s.14 She was influenced by poetry, mainly the Black Mountain
School of poetry.
Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg and David Antin were her
educators and even though
they were poets, she somehow wanted to make with fiction what
those poets made with
their works. The fact that there werent many prose writers who
used the ways of
working of poets she was influenced by, encouraged her to
following her writing in that
direction.18 It is the time after having lived in London in the
80s, when she acquired
higher level, becoming an important avant-garde writer whose
techniques were
primarily intertextuality, pornography satire and plagiarism. 19
But what is it that led
Acker to plagiarism? First of all, one could raise the question
of whether Ackers work
can be truly labeled as plagiarism work. Some scholars of
postmodern literature like
Victoria de Zwaan do not hesitate to classify part of her work
as texts full of that
technique:
[] Acker weave together material from other texts, without
always signaling to us what they are, where they come from, or even
that they are lifted out of another text. This is precisely what we
call plagiarism.20
De Zwaans statement about literary theft is approaching the
traditional proposal: a
substantial copy of the original and the concealment of the
source. Nevertheless, when
clarifying the processes of the alleged plagiarism of Acker, De
Zwaan is closer to
intertextuality than to plagiarism itself:
This is similar to Ackers approach to plagiarism in Blood and
Guts in High School and Don Quixote, where narratives are placed
into modern settings with ironic, parodic, and diverse effects.
They are signaled as other texts.18
The paradox is clear. It not only designates the source of the
borrowing, but also the
original text has additionally undergone a change; it has become
parodic. In interview,
Kathy Acker herself, referred to the transformation of a text
when she refers to her own 18 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A
conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 19 Hawkins, Susan E. 2004. All in
the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School.
Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 637. Doi: 10.2307/3593544. p. 91 20
De Zwaan, Victoria. 2002. Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the
Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and
Kathy Acker. Studies in Comparative Literature 43. Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen Press. p. 14/131
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creative process: If I had to be totally honest I would say that
what I'm doing is a
breach of copyright - it's not, because I change words-but so
what?21 In another
interview, A Conversation with Kathy Acker By Ellen G. Friedman,
Acker speaks about
her novel Empire of the Senseless (1988) and she finally
confirms that she did use a
number of other texts to write it, though the plagiarism is much
more covered, hidden.
Almost all the book is taken from other texts.22 Therefore she
made clear that
plagiarism was in use. In the same interview, Acker already
gives a fairly explanation of
how she encountered plagiarism, thus confirming the use of this
technique.
I came to plagiarism [] from exploring schizophrenia and
identity, and I wanted to see what pure plagiarism would look like,
mainly because I didnt understand my fascination with it.20
In exploring schizophrenia and identity, Acker wrote three
novels and they are what she
calls the trilogy: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by
the Black Tarantula, I
Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, and Toulouse Lautrec. In the
interview she talks about
schizophrenia and identity:
The thing about schizophrenia: I used a lot of autobiographical
material in Black Tarantula. I put autobiographical material next
to material that couldnt be autobiographical. The major theme was
identity, [] After that, I lost interest in the problem of
identity. The problem had for me in a sense been solved by that
trilogy. After that I became interested in plagiarism, working with
other texts.20
21 Dettmar, Kevin (1999). The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and
the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism. Eds. Lise Buranen y Alice
Myers Roy. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in
a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p.
106. 22 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker.
Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary
Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50
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Two of her most well known novels Blood and Guts in High School
and specially Don
Quixote are mentioned in the interview and it is through the
interview, where Acker
gives way to Sherrie Levine: What I really wanted to do was a
Sherrie Levine painting.
Im fascinated by Sherries work.20 Since the
80s, Levine has been known for her work with
appropriation of well-known photographs or
paintings. Her famous work is a series of
photographs named After Walker Evans, in
which she made photographic replicas of
Evanss work. In 1936, Walker Evans
photographed the Burroughs, a family of
sharecroppers in Depression era in Alabama. In 1979, Levine
re-photographed Walker
Evans photographs from the exhibition catalog First and Last.
She also turned to
pictures by other figures from the history of art, such as Karl
Blossfeldt and the
commercial photographic team Gottscho- Schleisner. Regarding her
way of thinking
towards the way she photographs, once she said about it:
I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous
longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of
aloofness. [] It is my aspiration that my photographs, which
contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both
worlds.23
Already in works of the early 1980s, Levine poses for the first
time issues that
modernity had absolutely relegated: copy, plagiarism, parody or
quotation but what is
really appalling is her comment on the technique of
appropriation itself:
I never aspired to belong to a school of appropriators. That is
a label that makes me cringe because its come to signify a polemic;
as an artist, I don't like to think of myself as a
polemicist.24
On the other hand, for Acker, being accused of plagiarizing does
not seem to matter
very much. In the aforementioned interview with Acker, she
corroborates what she was
23 Levine, Sherrie,
http://photoquotations.com/a/408/Sherrie+Levine, last seen on
Monday 31st at 19:20 24 Siegel, Jeanne. 1985. After Sherrie Levine.
Interviewed by Jeane Siegel on ARTS Magazine, Available at
http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html last seen
Monday 31st 12:30
Left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981; Right: Walker
Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmers Wife, 1936.
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interested in was what happens when you just copy something,
without any reason.25
Noticeably, Acker traces back Levine by putting emphasis on the
fact that she doesnt
mean Levines work does not have a justification but it was the
simple fact of copying
that fascinated her.23 Acker, while trying to do what Levine
did, used the technique of
repetition: a paragraph is repeated five times, and that its
just one example of Blood
and Guts in High School.26 Why would she do that? She told G.
Friedman about the
way she started using repetition in her novel I Dreamt I Was a
Nymphomaniac, as well
as exploring language within a problem.23 On behalf of Levines
art, she was interested
in the idea of multiple images and mechanical reproduction and
therefore influenced
Acker. Levine said that having done a lot of commercial art has
an impact on her work.
She was truly fascinated by the way commercial art dealt with
the idea of originality
and claims that if they were keen on an image, they would simply
take it. She loved the
fact that there was no sense that images belonged to anybody, []
therefore it was
never an issue of morality; it was always an issue of
utility.27
In the aforementioned interview with Kathy Acker, Friedman
speaks about Don Quixote
and later on she tells her that in reading it, she is a woman
reading Don Quixote,
therefore, whether this is a way of appropriating the language
for women. Acker
seems to confirm what has been said earlier: I picked Don
Quixote as a subject really
by chance. I think it was a bit incidental, perhaps consciously
incidental, that it was a
male text. Afterwards, she insists that she hasnt thought of a
statement such as I am a
woman, a feminist, and Im going to appropriate a male text, yet,
she maintains the
coincidence of having done it that way.28 What about Sherrie
Levine? She claims that
much of her work has been [] realizing the difficulties of
situating herself in the
art world as a woman, because the art world is so much an arena
for the celebration of
male desire.25 25 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with
Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of
Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 26 Acker, Kathy. 1989. Blood and
Guts in High School. New York: Grove Press. p. 22-25 27 Siegel,
Jeanne. 1985. After Sherrie Levine. Interviewed by Jeane Siegel on
ARTS Magazine, Available at
http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html last seen
Monday 31st 12:30 28 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with
Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of
Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50
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But one thing that Acker and Levine have in common is the
purpose of their work; they
create pieces of texts or art for themselves and afterwards,
they question the meaning of
it. On that matter, Sherrie Levine quoted:
I make the things I want to make. The language and the rhetoric
come afterward when I attempt to describe to myself and to other
people what I've done, but I'm not making the art to make a point
or to illustrate a theory. I'm making the picture I want to look at
which is what I think everybody does. The desire comes first.25
Kathy Acker comes with a similar description of what is for her,
the creation of a work,
but eventually, she agrees that the more she writes, the more
she focuses on the
audience, which would be different in Levines case:
I write for myself and maybe my friends. Although as I give
readings more and more, I try and see whether the audience is
bored. There has to be that element of entertainment, really, or
theres limited accessibility. So I do care about my readers in that
way.29
Levine requests that images should be seen in an entirely
different context than that in
which they were first made. Her photographs bring to mind
questions about gender or
authority. If the photographer has that request, it would be
rather complicated to rethink
what is an original or what is a reproduction. These questions
of originality and
reproduction are posed in Levines After Courbet (2009), which is
composed by
eighteen postcards showing Courbets famous 1866 composition
titled LOrigine du
monde. Courbet depicted the torso and genitals of a model;
Levine undoes both
operations by presenting the once- taboo work multiple times and
in the format of an
easily acquired souvenir. In After Courbet Levine challenges
assumptions about the
experience and reception of art.30
29 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker.
Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary
Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/
last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 30 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The
Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p.98
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Therefore, what is originality for both artists? Levine
emphasizes in the interview with
Jeanne Siegel, the fact that it is more attractive for her to
focus on what it is to own an
image rather than originality itself:
Originality was always something I was thinking about, but
there's also the idea of ownership and property. The point is that
people want to own things, which is more interesting to me.
On the contrary, Acker revealed that, plagiarism became a
strategy of originality.
Such statement is rather confusing, but she later on said that
plagiarism is both an
attack on the autobiographical I and a strategy of originality:
a textualization of it.
4. Conclusion:
The line between plagiarism and appropriation doesnt exist in
that they are not
truly gradations of the same aspect, as the question seems to
suggest. Even though both
terms might be associated to copying, plagiarism is not the
copy; it is the lie of falsely
demanding authorship. Appropriation when used in art is the
recycle of material and as
a tactic it needs recognition of the original in the copy. In
that sense, it almost has to be
overt. If the copying is hidden (as in plagiarism) then it is
not appropriation art by the
most common definition nor is it really even an attempt at
appropriation art. Saying that
appropriation is clearly not plagiarism is not necessarily an
endorsement of
appropriation art ethically or otherwise. The place where there
is any confusion comes
from influence in other than appropriation. How transformative
of ones influences does
one have to be before the work is purely derivative? Over the
last three decades
Levines work questions the importance of authorship however, she
acknowledged that
a cumulative production of photographic images has enabled an
effortless exchange of
influence through borrowing and recasting images. Undeniably, at
first of her career,
Levines work had resonance with a growing image-culture,
forestalling many of the
discussions around todays digital modes of reproduction,
distribution, and sampling.
As much as she defeats conventional ideas of art history, she is
also part of the centuries
of artists that have drawn upon the work of their predecessors,
either by making visual
references to actual works or by reusing specific or historical
titles or subject matter as
nods to the past. Levine has continued that tradition, but she
has also pushed it to its
logical extreme by producing work that often stands slight
visual difference from her
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source material. One could say that Levine examines the matter
of authorship
throughout her works and makes art that is visually appealing
and stimulating, but for
some, it is justly unemotional. The fact that she brings this
work back into the conscious
of the art world, she was proceeding the art form that is
photography, by using it to
increase our consciousness of already existing imagery. On a
basic level, we tend to
equate originality with aesthetic newness. Nevertheless, Ackers
complex nature in
contemporary art creates confusion with the term intertextuality
and even with the
notion of copyright. Regarding the tradition and the
intellectual work, they conspire
against postmodern stances, following the line of the borrowing
without mentioning the
source. Both artists avoid the direct claim of literary theft;
they try to get away from
their works the feeling of bad faith. On the contrary, they
focus on the problem with
vague concepts that are linked in a new way of producing
literature: authenticity,
according to Levine; plagiarism as a strategy to originality,
according to Acker.
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14
Bibliography Buranen, Lise, and Alice Myers Roy, ed. 1999.
Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a
Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic Activity of
Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91-101.
Dettmar, Kevin (1999). The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and
the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism. Eds. Lise Buranen y Alice
Myers Roy. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in
a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp.
99-110.
Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New
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