Trivial Matters of Great Importance: Part II The Social Relevence of Collage
Posted on December 25, 2007
Somewhere around 200 BC the Chinese invented paper. By the twelfth century you have some of our earliest examples of collage emerging from Japanese calligraphers creating elaborate backgrounds for their poems. By the nineteenth century, collage was a popular art. Many people commonly collaged scrapbooks of family photos and decorated lampshades. By the turn of the calender you had Hans Christian Anderson and Carl Spitzweg experimenting.
Katherine Hoffman would eventually state that “Collage may be seen as a quintessential twentieth-century art form with multiple layers and signposts pointing to the possibility or suggestion of countless new realities.”
Not long after, Pablo Picasso would glue a scrap of patterned oilcloth to a cubist still life. In fact, collaging patterns into cubist art helped the emerging style establish itself as a new form altogether. Critics hated it, and that did little to dissuade Dadaists from embracing collage with eager mouths. Next thing you know psychology is all the craze, and you have a very thick stew. Surrealists had the ammunition they always needed, and the art of combining ideas entered the commonly traversed Colosseum of hungry pairs of peepers.
In the late 70’s throughout the 80’s, D J’s and B-Boys begin mixing songs on cassette. Searching out desired bpm’s and melodies for a backdrop, these artists mashed up the beats so that they could dance and rap over them. This is a modern day version of Japanese Poetry arranged on collaged paper.
“Modern recorded music has evolved from focusing principally on musicianship and performance into an auditory collage where no sound is off limits. Sampling is simply another color on our palettes. Whether we’re sampling old records, using advanced multi-sampling, or recording sounds ourselves, the final artistic product is paramount and should not be compromised in the face of any corporate legalities.” —Sono
Collaging elements into film has always had huge advances for hand drawn animation. It’s hard to find a cartoon that doesn’t collage backgrounds underneath animation cells. The more you look around, it becomes hard to ignore the fact that borrowing and stealing elements for art is essential in creating new mediums of genres. Just as Vannevar Bush said in his essay As We May Think, sharing our information and accomplishments is the lifeblood of new developments in all sciences. However when he imagined the internet back in 1946, he probably did not foresee the vicious legal battles for control over the entire dominion over arts and sciences.
Today’s broadband has advanced the collecting capabilities of every artist, forcing a revaluation of what determines free use. The sheer number of videos is forcing companies to address the issue. Disney has taken a hard line stance, viciously attacking any perpetrator regardless of circumstance, with the only exception of beneficial diamonds in the rough. Nickelodeon, however, has made a public statement encouraging mashups, “Our audiences can creatively mash video from our content as much and as often as they like,” said Dan Martinsen, a Nickelodeon spokesman. “By the way,” he added, “that was a very nice edit job by whoever did the SpongeBob mash.”
Well there’s a fresh breath of air. Yet still, there is a growing concern of legality among the majority of works. Plus let’s not forget Nickelodeon is part of a gigantic lawsuit against Google.
The most unfortunate element of the modern mashup movement is that the most common reasons given by artists for using copyright material without permission is either “everyone is doing it.” or “It’s ok because I’m not selling it.” Neither of these are useful (or relevant in a legal defense) in any way to change the current condition. Mash up artists have an unspoken duty to research the history of this current legal environment, and using that knowledge, wage a specific and comprehensive campaign to neuter copyright laws. Before you sign up for this, you really need to ask yourself if you are a hypocrite. Are you ready to have someone else use YOUR material without permission? Are you ready to be a part of this world rather than the center of it?
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