51 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Avant-gardist subversion of copyright"
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glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"]
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Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable and idiosyncratic
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recalcitrance fall no less under the legally delimited space of
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copyrightable works. As they shift format, new claims of ownership and
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appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative classification that is
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totalizing, regardless of the effects of leaky networks speaking to the
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contrary. Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical
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classification by copyright more lastingly than the UbuWeb archive.
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Espousing the avant-gardes' ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years
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it has collected and made accessible the archives of the unknown;
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outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that
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would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access
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channels of esoteric markets, selective museological presentations and
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institutional archives. Knowing that asking to publish would amount to
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aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb has
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shunned the permission culture. At the level of poetical operation, as a
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gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited,
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into a regime of unlimited access, it has created provocations and
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challenges directed at the classifying and ordering arrangements of
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property over cultural production. One can only assume that as such it
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has become a mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists, who,
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short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of
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the art world they inhabit, use UbuWeb to release their own works into
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unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might be no way or
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need to produce a work outside the restrictions imposed by those
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institutions, just as sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid
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the contradictory world of academic publishing, yet that is still no
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reason to keep one's allegiance to their arrangements.
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At the same time UbuWeb has played the game of avant-gardist subversion:
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"If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist". Provocation is
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most effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of the contexts
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that it is directed at. Its effect starts where fissures in the defense
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of the opposition start to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence
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for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a process of "giving
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to all", its volunteering *spiritus movens,* Kenneth Goldsmith, has been
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constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way. Rather than
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producing qualifications, evasions and ambivalences, straightforward
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affirmation of copying, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant yet
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suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the
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avant-gardes' gesture of taking no hostages from the officially
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sanctioned systems of classification. By letting the incumbents of
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control over cultural production react to the norm of copying, you let
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them struggle to dispute the norm rather than you having to try to
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defend the norm.
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