Art with a Slap

Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law explores collage and appropriation art through a critical, interdisciplinary framework. The collection emerged out of the 2005 University of Iowa conference, “Collage as Cultural Practice,” organized by the book’s editors, Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli. McLeod, University of Iowa professor of communication studies and music critic, is well known for his activism against copyright law and his prankish trademarking of the phrase “Freedom of Expression.” McLeod contributes his own essays and interviews throughout the volume—on topics such as copyright law, plagiarism, hip-hop, and digital sampling. Reflecting both McLeod’s spirited cultural critique and Kuenzli’s interdisciplinary approach to the arts, Cutting Across Media explores diverse forms of collage and appropriation in music, painting, publishing, spoken broadcasts, poetry, and narrative. In this collage of essays, readers are challenged to rethink notions of intellectual property and to consider the complex political and cultural issues that accompany collage and appropriation aesthetics.

Several contributors take a postcolonial approach in order to reevaluate cultural assumptions about artistic freedom. Gábor Vályi’s piece, “Remixing Cultures: Bartók and Kodály in the Age of Indigenous Cultural Rights,” draws attention to Bartók and Kodály’s borrowing musical motifs from a common folk heritage—actions that would now be scrutinized as colonizing practices when framed in postcolonial thought. Similarly, Jeff Chang asks, “How do advocates of freedom of expression account for the reality that, especially in the case of some indigenous peoples, not all information wants to be free?” His essay, “A Day to Sing: Creativity, Diversity, and Freedom of Expression in the Network Society,” argues that the cultural expressions of indigenous peoples are not information to be exchanged over global networks, appropriated into the collages of colonizing cultures. In contrast, Lorraine Morales Cox argues that appropriation art actually draws attention to marginalized voices. In her essay, “Cultural Sampling and Social Critique: The Collage Aesthetic of Chris Olifi,” Cox describes Olifi’s collage paintings as inspiring a “postcolonial subversion of the colonial gaze” through appropriated African American imagery. She emphasizes important historical and cultural distinctions between two styles of collage—one is a folk aesthetic, born out of scarcity, while the other emerges from a formalist method—arguing that Olifi’s collages draw from both styles. He takes a Rauschenberg-esque formalist approach, yet he uses found materials such as magazine cutouts of American rappers and elephant dung collected in Africa, engaging both pre- and postcolonial African identity and critique.

Even as it engages these important cultural critiques, the book heavily focuses on the recording industry. Making a well-reasoned case for fair use, Negativland (the avant-garde music group who controversially parodied U2 in the early 1990s), argue in their piece, “Excerpts from ‘Two Relationships to a Public Domain,’” that “[t]here is a certain perceptual stance most artists have always taken in relation to their work and their environment—a perception that sees everything out there as possible grist for their mill.” Accordingly, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy explain their musical development in an interview with McLeod. Shocklee insists that a pre-recorded sound is “going to hit the tape harder. It’s going to slap at you. Something that’s organic is almost going to a have a powder effect…. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record.” However, Public Enemy’s early sampling gave way to the use of in-house beats in the wake of stricter copyright enforcement for samples that overtook the music industry.

While Public Enemy has continued to generate recordings over their twenty-three year career, other groups like the KLF failed to survive the shift to digital media. In his forgotten history of the KLF, McLeod calls them the first recording group to challenge paradigms of ownership and authorship before a broad audience, noting that “[t]heir...