+++
title = "Avant-gardist subversion of copyright"
glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"]
+++



Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable and idiosyncratic
recalcitrance fall no less under the legally delimited space of
copyrightable works. As they shift format, new claims of ownership and
appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative classification that is
totalizing, regardless of the effects of leaky networks speaking to the
contrary. Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical
classification by copyright more lastingly than the UbuWeb archive.
Espousing the avant-gardes' ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years
it has collected and made accessible the archives of the unknown;
outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that
would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access
channels of esoteric markets, selective museological presentations and
institutional archives. Knowing that asking to publish would amount to
aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb has
shunned the permission culture. At the level of poetical operation, as a
gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited,
into a regime of unlimited access, it has created provocations and
challenges directed at the classifying and ordering arrangements of
property over cultural production. One can only assume that as such it
has become a mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists, who,
short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of
the art world they inhabit, use UbuWeb to release their own works into
unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might be no way or
need to produce a work outside the restrictions imposed by those
institutions, just as sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid
the contradictory world of academic publishing, yet that is still no
reason to keep one's allegiance to their arrangements.

At the same time UbuWeb has played the game of avant-gardist subversion:
"If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist". Provocation is
most effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of the contexts
that it is directed at. Its effect starts where fissures in the defense
of the opposition start to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence
for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a process of "giving
to all", its volunteering *spiritus movens,* Kenneth Goldsmith, has been
constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way. Rather than
producing qualifications, evasions and ambivalences, straightforward
affirmation of copying, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant yet
suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the
avant-gardes' gesture of taking no hostages from the officially
sanctioned systems of classification. By letting the incumbents of
control over cultural production react to the norm of copying, you let
them struggle to dispute the norm rather than you having to try to
defend the norm.