Have you come across 'pocahotties'? I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. It is apparently the term used for young women who dress up in 'Red Indian' outfits in which to prance around on Halloween. I have to confess that until recently, being as happy to watch scantily dressed young women capering around as the next male, I would have seen this as essentially harmless, although it isn’t prevalent in the UK. However, reading the reaction of those on the receiving end made me realise that in practice this is just as offensive as would be putting on blackface and an 'African Princess' outfit. While there are, and probably always have been, people who respect Native American culture and see virtue in emulating it, dressing up for a party is not respect.
Following this up, I came across the term 'cultural appropriation’, defined on Wikipedia as “the taking – from a culture that is not one’s own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge.” It is perhaps best used to describe the broader process of acculturation from the perspective of a minority or weaker culture.
While I understand the 'pocahottie' issue, I have immediate problems with this wider concept. Almost every term used in that definition has further problems of definition. What does ‘taking’ mean? What is a culture? Can we locate the source of ‘intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge’ at a cultural level? Can the appropriation of objects like works of art be considered in the same way as appropriation of content like artistic styles or culturally significant rituals?
Moreover. as the term has passed into wider usage, its meaning has become confused, muddled and riddled with inconsistencies. In particular it has become used to justify claims that the use of concepts from other cultures is in some way unacceptable, to be avoided and perhaps even racist. Dig into blog comment threads and you will arguments to that effect about judo and other martial arts, yoga, textile patterns, music and a huge range of artistic endeavours. Most of these arguments moreover take the ‘donor’ culture at face value, without looking to see how far it is itself a synthesis. The implied suggestion that these cultures cannot stand up for themselves but must be defended by others and, implicitly, fossilised is also at best patronising and potentially racist.
To take this further let’s look at some cases of alleged content appropriation in the arts.
Jazz and blues are generally considered to have their roots in African-American culture. It has been argued in the past that when non African-American musicians attempt to play jazz or blues they are cannot perform with the right sensitivity and feeling and are also damaging the culture from which they are ‘stealing’.
So far as the first argument is concerned there is plenty of contradictory empirical evidence. Many years ago I saw a TV interview with musicians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee in which they recounted how, when they first heard a recording by the British artist Lonnie Donegan, they thought it was by Leadbelly, so accurately had he captured the sound and feel.
Philosopher James O Young in his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts
A third example can be found in the almost universal praise for the work of Eric Clapton from black artists like Muddy Waters and B B King.
The second argument about damage to the donor culture also fails to stand up to investigation. The classic 'St James Infirmary Blues' is a case in point. The words and melody have their origin in an 18th century traditional English folk song called "The Unfortunate Rake" (also known as "The Unfortunate Lad" or "The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime"). There are numerous versions of the song throughout the English-speaking world. It evolved for example into other American standards such as "The Streets of Laredo". Effectively the song is the product of a long process of adoption, adaptation and transmutation into the blues we know.
A similar case is the song ‘Goodnight Irene’ recorded in 1950 by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. This was an adaptation of a song called ‘Irene’ by Leadbelly and proved controversial at the time. It turned out however that the Leadbelly song – which he had copyrighted – was based on a traditional Southern folk song he had learned from his uncle. That song was in turn an arrangement of a waltz written in the 1880s by Gussie Lord Davies, an African America composer who wrote however for a largely white audience. Probably Leadbelly’s uncle had come across it via that non African-American channel. Davis of course had in turn appropriated the waltz from the music of Vienna. The song has now permeated British culture to the extent that it has become the club song for supporters of the English football club Bristol Rovers.
In both cases these songs have been passing in and out of African American culture over an extended period. The extent to which they can be placed within a specific culture is minimal and the extent to which any culture has been harmed by the process is probably zero.
Film is another example of appropriation resulting in positive outcomes. The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made numerous films based on Western literary sources. Perhaps the greatest of these are Ran (derived from King Lear) and Throne of Blood (derived from Macbeth). Another of Kurosawa’s films Seven Samurai was in turn remade as The Magnificent Seven, while his film Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars.
Shakespeare was himself an arch appropriator, from Holinshed and others. His themes and plots have a mythic quality that stands above any specific culture and so easily slip from one medium to another and from one cultural setting to another. As well as the Kurosawa films, Lear was the inspiration for the film Broken Arrow Lance, the musical Kiss me Kate came from Taming of the Shrew and most well known of all perhaps, West Side Story, from Romeo and Juliet. His work was also the stimulus for the suite “Such Sweet Thunder” by Duke Ellington.
Appropriation of content then has been the source of much great work. The adoption of artistic elements from a culture and their remaking into something new is a positive thing. Examples have been cited from jazz and film, but there are many others. In music, tango, salsa, Tejano, flamenco and high life are all syntheses from a range of cultures. Surprisingly perhaps the Mexican Tejano music includes elements from the brass band music of German immigrants, while flamenco incorporates Arabic and even Indian influences via Gypsy music. None of these examples cited have taken anything away from their culture of origin, in fact by their creation the sum total of human happiness has been increased.
Cultural and artistic change is inevitable. Without it we would still be picking wild berries and fleeing from predators. Trying to prevent change will be as successful as King Cnut. Everyone loses.
I think I have more to say on this, but this post is already rather long.
This long post has grown out of an attempt to analyse why the idea of 'palimpsest' has become so important in my work. In it I attempt to trace a path from my previous life as a planner to my present one as an artist and to examine how ideas and people from my former existence still influence me.
Early in my career as a planner I developed an abiding interest in how towns and cities developed, especially the way in which the history of a place can be read in the world around us. I'm not just talking about buildings, although these obviously show their history too. I have always had a fascination for things like crumbling and patched brickwork for example.
Street patterns, building plots, even field boundaries can survive for hundreds, even thousands of years, all casting shadows into the present day and creating a richness and depth in our environment that we recognise, often can't define and almost always cannot replicate.
Many of the planning and architectural writers I admire, and who influenced me as a planner, seem to have had similar obsessions with growth, change and emerging complexity. The book that started it all, after realising that my maths simply wasn't good enough for chemical engineering, and which literally changed my life is Death and Life of Great American Cities
...modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos.
I found the ideas she espoused fascinating, especially the idea of places and communities emerging from small individual decisions. Much later in my working life, and still before I had any ideas of being an artist, a colleague introduced me to the work of Christopher Alexander, in particular his book A Pattern Language
The language begins with patterns that define towns and communities. These patterns can never be designed or built in one fell swoop - but patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns, will, slowly and surely, over the years, make a community that has these global patterns in it.
Relatively recently I discovered two other books that helped crystallise my ideas. The first was by architect Camillo Sitte, called City Planning According to Artistic Principles'. Sitte analysed the growth of historic cities like Venice, showing how as buildings were modified and extended, the architects gradually created the superlative environment of the modern city. The many squares and piazzas did not spring into existence fully formed but are the result of perhaps hundreds of years of change and incremental growth. The second was How Buildings Learn, by Stuart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalogue which looked at how buildings grow and adapt in response to changing needs.
I finally I got the chance to apply some of these ideas - with modest success - in my own work.
I referred at the beginning to palimpsest as an influence on my work as an artist. This was originally a term used to describe a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The historian studying such a document wants to separate the layers to make sense of each separate one. Her interest in the manner in which these layers have accumulated is incidental. Architects use the term to refer to signs of what once was on a site. Urban historians mean it to show how the complex environment of the present day has accumulated over time.
Other writers have taken it further still.
A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than once. Frequently it's impossible to say which layer was first inscribed; and in any case any "development" ... from layer to layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A "developed" into layer B (we're not even sure which came first). And yet the juxtapositions may not be purely "random" or "meaningless"....
Juxtaposition, superimposition, and complex patterning thus produce a malleable unity
(Hakim Bey http://hermetic.com/bey/palimpsest.html)
So we have three statements:
Bey - Juxtaposition, superimposition and complex patterning to produce a malleable unity.
Jacobs - layered complexity
Alexander - piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns
Although written from three very different perspectives these summarise very precisely the essential central idea in my art.
My images are not conceived as a coherent whole from the outset. They grow in front of me, whether physically or on the computer screen through a process of accumulation and accretion. Each intervention in the piece, each mark, each dab of ink on the plate, each stroke of the pen has to be made so as to build on what has happened so far and enrich it.
I realised when reading this previous post that my concluding paragraph doesn't really address the issues as clearly as I would have liked. Rather than edit that post - an edit would probably be missed by those who had already read it - I'm picking the topic up afresh here.
In essence I want to make two points:
First, the complex process by which these prints are made calls into question their conventional attribution to a single named artist. Decisions by the so-called 'copy artist' (hikko), by the carver and by the printer all had a significant impact on the aesthetic and artistic quality of the finished piece. Attribution to the 'artist' seriously devalues the contribution made by the other artisans involved.
Second, the multiple stages of production also call into question the narrow view of the original that surfaces from time to time and that I have already addressed in several posts here. Let's look at these stages and see where the 'original' might be found.
The conventional attribution might suggest that the original lies in the initial drawing by the artist. Setting aside that this drawing is done purely for the purpose of creating a woodblock print (what I called in this post the 'intention of the artist'), this causes immediate problems for the second, more elaborate drawing used to prepare the blocks. Despite being prepared by the so-called copy artist this second drawing (hanshita) is in no way a straight copy. Woodblock printer David Bull in this discussion thread, included some examples that make this point very clearly.
Here for example is an initial sketch by Hokusai.
While here is the same section from the final print:
The step between these two is of course destroyed in the carving of the block, but it is clear that the making of the hanshita involved much more than simply tracing and required in its own right a considerable artistic input.
David Bull also provided an example of a surviving hanshita, which is as detailed as any final print:
David Bull's argument is that the role played by these other craftsmen (and they almost always were men) demands a much greater recognition. I agree entirely, but my point here is in relation to the identification of the 'original'. If the surviving example of a hanshita is typical of the great ukiyo-e prints, and I see no reason to believe otherwise, then those unknown artists should be seen as artists in their own right.
If on that basis we then argue that the hanshita is the original, the initial sketch becomes just a preliminary study - a concept drawing - and the attribution should go to the hanshita artist.
What about those who argue that the plate (or the photographic negative or the digital file) is the original? I have argued elsewhere that those few who attempt to make this argument do so either from ignorance of the process or from special pleading (ie they sell reproductions and want their product to be elevated to the same standing as 'handpulled prints') Nevertheless if we take the argument at face value, it still doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. A typical woodblock print may have 15 or more blocks and some may be used 2 or 3 times. Some prints require perhaps 100 impressions to get to the final image. There is thus no single block that can be pointed to as the 'original' .
Normally these prints were not produced in limited editions. Each print run would be quite small - perhaps 200 - to reduce wear and tear on the blocks, but there would be no overall limit. The same applies in fact in the West - prints by the master wood engraver Thomas Bewick were not issued in limited runs.
In summary therefore, if we try to place the 'original' anywhere but the final print, many problems arise. If we accept the defining characteristic as being intention, then regardless of the numbers produced, the original is the printed paper on which the image appears and all these other problems simply disappear.
I did, rather mischievously perhaps, consider the idea that these woodblock prints are perhaps the earliest conceptual art. After all the process starts with an idea - or concept - in the mind of the publisher, who then draws together the resources to realise his concept. That would make the publisher the 'artist' of attribution!
I have to accept, that without any formal art training my knowledge of the work of other artists is patchy at best. I tend to see a piece I like, or someone mentions an artist in a discussion forum somewhere and follow them up. Sometimes the effect of this work comes through unconsciously, sometimes I deliberately set out to explore their work by recreating it in my own way - as in these two paintings in the shop.
These explorations are usually expressed across the range of media in which I work. As an example take this digital print, (which has just been in the Royal West of England Academy Open Photography show). It started life as two separate photographs, combined digitally and then further manipulated. At the time I made it, my understanding and control of the digital process was much less than now. The affinity between the shapes and colours in this print and Matisse's cut-outs was thus in part serendipity.
The effect was realised by chance, but once achieved I recognised the relationship, especially to this.
A couple of years later I made more specific references in these two collage (both available in the shop here.)
Building on Matisses's use of prepared paper, these cut-outs were made from the sort of monoprint I described in this post. The background was an acrylic wash prepared for use under a linocut but never used. In this case the reference is quite explicit, but the use of paper prepared in a different way over an acrylic wash, moves these pictures I believe beyond simple mimicry.
The final piece I want to refer to is a monoprint made last year using a combination of ink rolled out and blended on an acrylic plate, with small pre-inked cut out pieces overlaid on the plate. Again the Matisse reference is explicit, but the image itself has moved even further away from the crisp monochromatic elements of Matisse's own work.
My aim in making these pieces is in part to explore the work of these artists, but also to filter them through my own thought processes so that when the work is made it is not a copy, but a reworking and reinterpretation in my own way - a visual art equivalent of the classical 'variations on a theme'
How do you handle influences in your own work? Do you consciously work them out or do you simply let them permeate through?
