Every Night Is a Remix

 

Doris Salcedo's Chairs installation (2003)

 

Or its anagram: everything is a remix.

The idea that everything comes from everything isn't always interesting. Photo mosaics of the Mona Lisa or other related or ironic sources was interesting at one point but is now a cliche. It is still a clever device but doesn't have much generative depth. The sources images are charged with significance, in which the collaged work automatically inherits. To use the term "sculpture" to define a piece of music, its "materiality" is in copyrighted material, as opposed to found objects.

In terms of "contaminating" metaphors (i.e. words that "infect" meaning) perhaps it is better that words are "lost" (as in "I am at a loss for words"). A soon as we use a word like remix (as in Everything is a Remix) it makes it possible to posit that all creativity is derivative. This is self-evident, and requires no elaboration: The word itself made it possible. One of the nice things about visual abstraction is that it leaves words out initially, but they get added later as labels and metaphorical linkages that attempt to make it representational and derivative of something that already exists. (Sculptors always have this look-alike problem, as when Charlie Rose suggested that Richard Serra's Intervals installation looked like a cemetery).

I recently saw an exhibit by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. I thought the work involving cut-ups of furniture packed with slabs of concrete was highly original and interesting and then I realized that Gordon Matta-Clark did this type of thing in the 1970s, although at much larger scales. Of course something can be similar to or inspired by other artists, but it's not a remix per se. Both artists had different concepts. 

Ultimately the question of the impetus of art is moot. As E.O.Wilson has asserted, creativity can arise from consilience (a unity of knowledge) that obviates the need to prove the efficacy of the tools used. To that end, pop music has in a sense become like a scholarly paper, with properly formatted footnotes, citations and bibliography. Bjork herself has stated that sometimes she wears the hat of a librarian or archivist while writing new music for new technologies. The bibliography is not the book, and if it is lengthy, one has to wonder how many original ideas are within the book.

Ideally, creativity is a combinatorial activity, gathering disparate elements and moving it towards a resolution as a new entity. It may have resemblances and associations to other work, but it is not a Remix per se. The fashion world has knockoffs, and it is common (almost expected) that something is a derivation. So remix really has more things in common with fashion rather than literature or science, and in that context it is easy to explain away by applying the maxim:

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Quotation Remix

A quotation can be a posthumous testimonial, especially if it has been appropriated to support theories, such as everything-as-remix.

The quote has an interesting history of modification and appropriation. (See: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

The original quote can be traced back to the (relatively recent) 1890s, first appearing in a men's magazine in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists” asserting that ““to imitate” was commendable, but “to steal” was unworthy.”” T.S. Eliot flipped it in the 20s, which is not surprising given the epochal cultural shifts at that time. It is wildly poetic and self-referential now as a simulant in contemporary culture.

We can remix everything, including the aphorisms that support the idea of remix: "All great artists borrow and/or steal and cover their tracks with quotation remixes."

But there is an interesting logic in all of this, i.e. inadvertent copying is worse than blatant copying, i.e. knowing your sources is better than discovering them later. Stealing is also more romantic, and has an alluring sprezzatura about it.

Another interesting quote that has been remixed is the following, attributed to Goethe, but has other appropriations:

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Remix circa 1985

Speaking of Goethe mash-ups, when I was a composition student, one exercise was to create a music paraphrase of an existing piece (in this case a piece by Schubert), where the piano part was cut and pasted to a new score, to which a new melody was composed to the Little Rose of the Field. Nothing was "stolen" in this case, but rather more cut-up a la Burroughs or Schwitters collage.



Back then, making music from recordings was basically understood as a variation of musique concrete, and I think it might be more interesting to associate remix with those procedures, as opposed to simple cut-up. Remix is a sub-department of the avant-garde really, not a metaphor of genetics as it is now.

In the early 2000s a phrase that was thrown around was "post-interesting". The mid-90s were the early years of the Internet, which created many new philosophical ideas about modern culture with the new technology. People were "Interesting" and wrote and talked about "interesting" Third-Culture things, like culture-as-biology. We are now post-post-interesting, where the interesting things are subsumed into current culture as common knowledge. You can't even find that term on search engines now because post-interesting now means "interesting wall post". (This happened before when I was thinking about young children being the "i-Pad Generation, yet when I googled that phrase the results related to the next version of the iPad.)

Needless to say, music history didn't start with the advent of recording. It is a means of collecting and transmitting existing ideas going forward. So it is not surprising that the two are now merged and in many ways confused with each other. What about equal temperament or African music? We remix that every time we write music, or create music from existing music. The sources are still charged with that significance, regardless of whether they are in a recording. But the irony is that without the recordings, recordings might not be what they are now.

My feeling is that real creativity and originality comes from constraints and generativity. That way randomness and serendipity are more of a factor, and the artist is manacled from the get-go. But that is real work--to work within a box made for yourself. If an artist works from ideas, it is perfectly logical that some of it may look like pre-existing work (as that came from ideas), but since everything comes from some part of everything, cut the artist some slack. But that will never happen and would make the copyright law a feckless instrument. 

[6/2024:  "Generativity" now means it can be generated using AI, and consequently the sources are all hidden, so we don't even know what the essences are or what history we are using. It's automated remix without any creativity].