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Eric William Carroll <essays>

Easier Than Drawing A Mustache
Originally published in ARP, Spring 2009
Eric William Carroll

Though missing the raw rebel energy of its cut-and-paste origins, appropriation art has gone mainstream. Our culture, increasingly inundated with images, is drawn to the art form that thrives off this superabundance. Jeff Koons and Richard Prince are among the richest living artists, Sherry Levine has become a textbook stalwart, and Shepard Fairey’s imagery helped propel Barack Obama into the presidency. With the addition of online image search and management tools like Google and Flickr, it is easier than ever to sift through contemporary and historical images. But is this a good thing?

In the press release for the landmark 1977 exhibition Pictures, curator Douglas Crimp noted that artists were turning to “’found’ rather than invented images.” A growing group of artists, finally warming up to the precedent set by Warhol (who nearly 20 years earlier was collecting his images from newspaper clippings), were using imagery created by the general public. The availability of this kind of imagery was rising, due to the popularity of cheap cameras and the proliferation of the snapshot.

In the same year as Pictures, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan published the results of their investigation into the photographic archives of government, science, and industrial agencies. Simply titled Evidence, the book is a collection of photographs stripped of context and caption; taken by themselves, they are puzzling and intriguing. These images were found in archives as disparate as the Hetch Hetchy Water Company, Salz Tannery, and the United States Department of Commerce. The two artists traveled across country for two and a half years, examining the photographic archives of more than 70 organizations. Mandel recalls, “We usually were looking at 4-by-5 contact prints, which permitted us to examine a lot of material very quickly. One day, at the Los Angeles Water Department, Larry started at one end of the room, I started at the other. Between us, we looked at 400,000 images."

Joachim Schmid is another artist to physically sort through millions of photographs. In 1990 Schmid announced the establishment of “The Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs.” Pitched as an ecologically sound solution to the ‘problem’ of accumulating photographs, the Institute promised to ‘professionally reprocess’ all images that were sent to its headquarters (Schmid’s apartment). Schmid received a wide range of materials, from personal snapshots to entire commercial archives. This provided a wealth of raw images for his increasingly vast projects—most notably Archiv, the ongoing catalog of photographic trends throughout history.

Many other artists have constructed new photographic collections from archives and public sources: Tacita Dean visited a countless number of flea-markets for her project Floh; Michael Lesy sorted through the entire historical archive of Jackson County for Wisconsin Death Trip; Masao Mochizuki constructed a special camera to capture images from the constant stream of his television set. The point is, there once was a time when artists had to go to great lengths to find images to appropriate. The process of looking, which these artists experienced, helped frame their image choices and ultimately contributed to the success of their projects. The longer the search, the more rewarding the find.

This theory becomes problematic today, when the average Google search takes a fraction of a fraction of a second. A number of artists have supplanted their old patterns of looking with the search string. Not only are there issues with copyright and crediting, as the current Fairey lawsuit proves, but the amount of aesthetic overlap that has resulted from this shared method may be cause for concern.

The most popular art trend that sites like Google and Flickr promote is of categorical nature. These projects simply display multiple examples of a type or kind of image past the point of redundancy. Suns From Flickr (2007), a large-scale photographic mural by Penelope Umbrico, is exactly what the title promises. In her statement, Umbrico explains that the images were found simply by searching for ‘sunset’ on Flickr. The resulting images were cropped and printed as snapshots. Umbrico compensates for the quick process with quantity; when it was exhibited at the New York Photography Festival in 2008, Suns From Flickr included many of the 3,221,717 results the artist found so far. However, I’d still argue that the brevity of the search and the thin conceptual underpinning reveal the work's weaknesses.

Even Schmid has foregone his own Institute for the convenience of Internet searching. One can purchase the print-on-demand book Big Fish on Schmid’s site. The book is a collection of photographs Schmid has found on Flickr that (unsurprisingly) depict large fish. You can also choose from Bags, On the Road, Sites, and more. Many of these projects seem more like curatorial exercises than finished art pieces.

Another popular format for these “categorical” works is the layering of images into obscure, content-laden blurs. Typified by the work of Jason Salavon, another Google user, who stacks graduation portraits, little league pics, and wedding photos into what could be considered archetypal images; and Idris Khan, who layers Becher photographs and historical texts into self-referential composites. While I understand the conceptual interests that these artists’ searches and projects display, their presentation and execution is largely amateur, not to mention depressingly alike. As Duchamp made perfectly clear, the Mona Lisa only has room for one mustache.

I don’t mean to sound as if I’m writing off any project whose material was generated through an Internet search. I do however wish to voice my concern over the speed with which many of these projects seem to be completed. Perhaps they simply aren’t made for the printed page: Christopher Baker’s projected Hello World (in last year’s GM08: PAY ATTENTION at the Soap Factory) and Martijn Hendriks’ Erased Google Image Search both successfully mined the Internet’s images with finesse and purpose. Even more challenging are Club Internet and the Spirit Surfers, two web collectives that creatively remix online detritus.

Perhaps what is needed most is more time, in every sense. The days of the static image are quickly disappearing—the most successful projects have made time and interactivity their forms. More time needs to pass for the lasting potential of these new appropriations to come into perspective. And also the artist needs more time: just because the search for images has been reduced to seconds doesn’t mean critical thinking should follow suit.

EWC