Note: if you’ve been following the conversation on writing negative reviews, Will Brand has an interesting take over at the L Magazine.

Pardon the interruption of our regular programming. Instead of running a regular Q&A column this week, I’d like to take a moment to address an essay published last Friday on Slate.com. Simon Reynolds’ “You Are Not a Switch: Recreativity and the modern dismissal of genius,” manages to get a number of notions about creativity and appropriation wrong, and over the past nine months of writing this column I’ve received a number of questions about this subject, so continuing the dialogue seems both relevant and timely.

Here’s how Reynolds begins his essay:

“Some years ago I visited the Tate Modern in London with my young son. Then aged 5, he had lately been drawing pictures of a fantastical nature, so as we approached the threshold of a Surrealism retrospective, I suggested that he might want to check these paintings out. ‘It’s really weird, this stuff,’ I said, giving it the hard sell. ‘And you might get some good ideas.’ He just flashed me a disapproving look: ‘That would be copying.’”

“This incident sprang to mind recently when making my way through a spate of recent books, articles, and blog posts celebrating the practice of artistic theft. In stark contrast to my 5-year-old’s seemingly instinctive aversion to mimesis, an emerging movement of critics, theorists, writers, and artists argue that techniques of appropriation and quotation are inherent to the creative process. Not only are the concepts of originality and innovation obsolete, they’ve always been myths. Let’s call this movement recreativity.”

Candice Breitz, Becoming, 2003. Stills from video installation

There’s a problem with this approach: leaving aside the idea that anything intellectually germane on this topic could come out of the mouth of a small human only recently cognizant, the field isn’t really emergent; it’s just coming now to the fore of cultural consciousness as it has done so many times before. “Recreativity” was first addressed in the Bible (written around 1000 BC), to wit, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun,” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, KJV, italics mine). Nearly three millennia later, in 1609, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59 was built on that biblical verse: “If there be nothing new, but that which is/Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,/Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss/The second burden of a former child.” For those of you not familiar with the conventions of the Bard’s phrasing, here’s the Cliff’s Notes translation: “Sonnet 59 dwells on the paradox that what is new is always expressed in terms of what is already known. The elements of any invention or creative composition must be common knowledge, or old news. The phrase ‘laboring for invention’ indicates not only the poet’s determination to create something entirely new in his verse but also his frustration in trying to do so.” Given these well-known antecedents, it seems in many ways quite silly that in 2012 we’re still questioning the role of prior works in the production of new ones, or even wondering if some kind of pure originality—what Reynolds calls “genius”— exists.

One notable absence in Reynolds’ essay is an acknowledgement of the differences between the various kinds of artistic theft and their distinctive aims and intentions. Instead of teasing apart the characteristics of separate practices, he misses the mark entirely by gathering all mimetic usage under one dank umbrella of failure, citing “…the genius, who takes something and makes it his or her own, effectively erasing its origin and turning it into another facet of his or her glittering originality. This contrasts with the timid craftsman—the merely talented—who never quite makes you forget the source and ultimately achieves glitter only by association.” One might forgive Reynolds, a music critic, for not understanding the aims of the appropriation movement in visual art that began in the 1970s and 80s with artists such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. The whole point was to take images that already existed and, by re-photographing and recontextualizing them, examine the influence of culture by putting it at a one-step remove or critical distance. It’s not that Prince and Levine hoped to make the viewer “forget the source”—truly, the work relied on the viewer’s knowledge of the source material and would have been culturally irrelevant without it. In fact, Barbara Kruger, another Pictures Generation artist, suggested that someone from the gallery’s staff should, “nudge visitors conspiratorially in front of each picture and whisper, ‘Get it?’”*

Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989.

Nevertheless, and ignoring more contemporary contributions of accomplished artists like Sturtevant, who re-created Warhol prints using the artist’s own original screens to challenge the notion of the famous artist’s aura; or Glenn Ligon, who has adopted historical frameworks such as runaway slave posters and quotes from Richard Pryor jokes to confront the legacy of racism, Reynolds continues: “Whereas the ideology of recreativity, as it spreads, not only legitimizes lazy, parasitic work, it actively encourages it by making it seem cool, ‘timely,’ somehow more advanced than that quaint middlebrow belief in the shock of the new.” Yet there has always been sloppy, lazy, simply bad art in all forms and genres. Reynolds’ error is in lumping the chaff with the wheat as though we can’t tell the difference. Some art transcends, and some doesn’t. The human race has never been able to agree on what makes a good work of art, but to suggest that there isn’t a hierarchy of value, and that any remix is legitimized based on the very nature of its form, is absurd. The sophomore artist that exhibits a re-photographed Levine—itself a re-photographed Walker Evans—and attempts to make a claim for its relevance fools no one. If there is an ideology of mimesis it exists in a plurality or spectrum of ideas, and its mere existence ordains nothing. No art has been made extraordinary simply by being the product of an appropriative practice, just as no art that is “original” or “new” is legitimized on that basis. The social valuation of art has less to do with its supposed ideology than with what it brings—visually, aurally, etc.—to its audience. While the current popularity of mimesis and the remix might encourage budding creatives to try their hand at mash-up videos, found poetry, and bedroom-set rap songs, it does not make those concoctions more advanced or more inherently interesting. By tarring all mimetic art, good and bad, with the same broad brush, Reynolds undermines his own argument.

Glenn Ligon, No Room (Gold) No. 42, 2007.

Unfortunately, the essay veers from the uninformed to the offensive: “As much as it is propaganda in favor of underachievement, recreativity is also, I suspect, a form of solace: reassuring balm for the anxiety of overinfluence, the creeping fear that one might not have anything of one’s own to offer….beneath the surface positivity, I suspect, lurks despair about a kind of inner poverty, as though the mass of cultural matter we collect and stuff into ourselves is just making us ever more empty and barren inside.” Though Reynolds might be projecting his own alienation onto the work of others, the reverse of this is closer to the truth for many artists who appropriate, mimic, or embody a particular element to make their work: the world is too rich, too fecund, too plush with information, images, movements, and sounds to not be investigated directly by tackling our cultural inheritance head on. Most successful appropriative practices aren’t based on poverty, but on a surfeit of material that insists on being explored. In many ways, it would be easier to attempt to create something “new” than to take on the intellectual and emotional challenge of inhabiting a form in order to understand how it works, to capture the primary source’s cultural essence and build upon it. James Joyce understood this; so does Kenneth Goldsmith. The difference is that Joyce enjoyed the moniker of “genius” and the mantle of “originality,” while Goldsmith rejects it. What has changed is not the artist’s practice, but the way it is received by its contemporaneous society. The only poverty is in refusing to acknowledge what appropriative practices have to offer us: a mirror to our civilization, one that can reflect faithfully, or distort and misrepresent, in an attempt to project the very nature of what it means to be human and participate in our own culture, right now, at this moment.

The irony of Reynolds producing a reaction to this recurrent zeitgeist, without appreciating that this is also what many appropriating artists do, is lost. There is, however, one thing that he gets (almost) right: “The stealing and the storing is the easy part. The much harder—and forever mysterious—stage is the transformation of the borrowed materials. Recreativity has nothing to say about this stage of the process, the bit where, every so often, genius comes into play.” Though I reject Reynolds’ notion of genius—the idea of genius is what leads nascent artists into the trap of believing that great works are produced without hard work, intellectual weight-lifting, time, and sheer determination—I do accept that the bulk of commentary on appropriation and remix doesn’t take transformation into account. But how could it? There is no formula for transformation; a feel-creative-now book like Austin Kleon’s can only exhort you to steal, but not what to do with the goods once you’ve gotten them. That’s where the practice of being an artist comes in, where the ceaseless wrestling with raw material (wherever it comes from) to make something relevant, exhilarating, intriguing, revolting, necessary—begins.

*(Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation 1974-1984, p. 200)

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Thank You for the Music, Installation View. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

Thank You for the Music recently ended the second part of its showing at Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. The exhibition presents works by artists inspired by music, musicians, and the way individuals and communities experience a place, their past, and themselves, through the myths and rituals surrounding music. In particular, the notion of performance in the construction and reconstruction of an individual’s identity surfaces through several of the works in the exhibition.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Kiss My Nauman, 2007. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

Titled in reference to Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up  (1967), Kiss My Nauman (2007) by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard is a four-channel video installation where the members of Dressed to Kill, a Kiss tribute group carefully paint their faces in preparation for a performance. With a close-up view of each member in surrounding separate screens, one stands within a zone of intimacy, gaining access to the concentration and collectedness of a musician during the period before a performance, where the putting on of a mask conceals yet reveals the bareness beneath.

Petri Ala-Maunus, (Left) A Tribute to Petri Ala-Maunus, 2009, (Right) Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby, 2009. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

The idea of performance as a means of disclosure of an individual’s vulnerability emerges in Petri Ala-Maunus’ works, from the viewpoint of one who seeks to fulfill a teenage dream of becoming a rockstar. In Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby (2009), Ala-Maunus strums a guitar to a song he composed when he was 16. With the yellow floral wallpaper and pink stuffed rabbit behind him, Ala-Maunus as rockstar is at once comical and mournful, of the search, effort, and impossibility of achieving the fame and glory of a past imagined ideal. A related work A Tribute to Petri Ala-Maunus (2009) is an LP with a music station area that features the original recording done when Ala-Maunus was 16, together with versions by invited musicians.

Candice Breitz, Britney Spears Monument, Berlin, September 2007, 2007. Digital c-print mounted on Diasec 70 7/8 x 165 3/16 in. (180 x 419.6 cm) © the artist. Courtesy White Cube

Three large photographic works by Candice Breitz occupy the walls in one gallery, surrounding the viewer with monuments to Britney Spears, Abba and Marilyn Manson. These monuments celebrate the legacy of each idol in the way their style have permeated communities of fans in Berlin. While each fan mimics the style of their idol in their dress, posture and paraphernalia, the composition of each group portrait emphasizes the diversity within. What becomes apparent are the acts of performance we go through often with unabashed enjoyment, as modes of expressions of time and taste.

Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –, Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Elgreem & Dragset, Installation, The German Barn, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. Image © designboom.

Ise (Roslisham Ismail), Secret Affair, (work in progress), 2010 – 2011, food installation, © the artist.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum (2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’s Devo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

Arin Rungjang, Big Moon and Waterfall, 2006, outdoor light installation, bamboo, Passage de Retz, Paris, © the artist.

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The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.