Appropriation/Plagiary/Derivation

Plagiary, appropriation, derivation.  The question is not about "originality."  It isn't an esoteric question when intellectual property is stolen.  It is simple theft--Jeff Koons has been tried in court for plagiarizing the photograph of Art Rogers and lost the law suit, amongst other cases.  Though I don't think that culture, art and personal expression are exclusively created within one's head, I do think that artists owe it to other artists to cite their sources.

In light of this, and in light of a recent event in my life where plagiarism was committed against my family, I would like to cite the different non-personal sources of a recent painting of mine, so that there is no question of the work's derivation, sources, and quotations.  I quote many known images in this painting because I wish to convey a non-oblique idea.  Visual images as such have history, and when this history is juxtaposed against another, ideas can be generated, commentary or questions can be posed and perhaps communication  is made possible.

Here is my painting Louis-Philippe, roi des Français (ba mabaz magran ek agathaen moman), 2012, oil/canvas, 97 x 146 cm:

The citation at the base of the piece comes from the work of Frédéric Werst in his invented language of the Ward people, which is the foundation of his fictional work published by Les Editions du Seuil in 2011.  "Ba mabaz magran ek agathaen moman" is a phrase that Werst had "gifted" me and it translates into "to bury doubt and to climb to another place" (pour enterrer les doutes et grimper vers l'ailleurs).

The original idea of the painting had been worked on many times in different forms, originally as a sketch I did while on vacation at the Normandy Coast at St. Martin de Bréhal, which has a yearly festival of "unidentified floating objects" (les O.F.N.I.'s).  

This painting now hangs at the Mairie de Bréhal.  I had then painted another version of this scene in the studio which was entitled "xar zaron amar nāz zagra berzanōn".  

Now that the basics have been posited, I am going to one by one list from where I generated the elements of the piece:

1.  Nicolas Poussin's ink drawing "Music of Time"--I wanted to directly cite the four dancers of Poussin as the idea of dancing muses in our time seem rather arcane and perhaps even ridiculous.   The internal challenge was this: in our day and age, can one without cynicism nor irony reference the four symbols of time, of human life?  Furthermore, nowadays when one thinks of dancers, the image of Matisse's dancers, ochre bodies floating over a blue ground comes to mind.  The implication of using Poussin's drawings may be that Matisse himself referenced Poussin, but then which artist of the 19th or 20th century, did not have Poussin in the back of his mind? 

2.  The two figures in the left foreground are figures of antiquity--two different antiquities from two different continents.  There is the greek figure of Antinoüs, which I concocted based on drawings that I have made of the many sculptures that the Emperor Hadrien had created in memory of his beloved dispersed throughout the Louvre.  Then there is the small child, based on a ceramic figure of an Olmec child from Mexico (from about the 9th century B.C.) that I "befriended" and sketched during my weekly visits to the Metropolitain Museum in New York when I lived there. The idea was to place these two youthful funerary figures together, one from a clearly Western tradition, and the other from a "primitive" native American culture, together.  

3.  The small animal figures in the foreground--the cats serving the mice--are based on drawings I made at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo of the Satirical papyrus (#232 in Cabinet 9 of room 29).  The Egyptians were conquered by foreign powers at the time when the drawings were made and the cats serving the mice were a metaphor of the Egyptians subjugated to foreign rule.

4.  In the center mid-ground, there is a portrait of Louis Philippe, King of the French between 1830 and 1848, known for his exploitation of the working class, leaving them in miserable condition while making the wealthy more wealthy.  

5.  In the right mid-ground, I directly quoted the French pompier painter Jean-Pierre Granger (1779-1840),  who painted Apollon et Cyparisse in 1816, which is now in Leipzig.  

In turn, it appears that Granger had quoted Benjamin West.  Apollo  was amorous of many different earthlings, from Daphné to Hyacinth.  In fact, the poor Hyacinth was killed by a discus that was thrown by Apollo himself; "The Death of Hyacinth" was painted by Benjamin West in 1771 (Philadelphia Museum of Art):

6.  The right mid-ground has a model wearing a jacket from the 1971 Yves Saint Laurent collection.  I can't find the original ad but here is a photograph of the jacket:

7.  Finally, the distant background is a jumble of quotes based on images that proliferated around the teaching of salvation and expiation of sin as proposed by the Catholic religion that I will list here in no particular order:

from "Les Belles Heures du Duc de Berry" (Cloisters Museum, NYC)

The San Zaccaria altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini in Venice

One of the St. George cycle of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio at the Scuolo Dalmata delli Santi Giorgio e Triffon in Venice

Many other works were thought about, referenced, studied during the time of the conception of this painting but these are the main references.  The spiral of references, quotations, borrowings may appear to be endless.  The citations were an effort on my part to use images that are known, that have a certain historical context and to place them as such in a sort of stage so that they can dialog with each other.

More importantly, the original idea of the composition of this piece was a reflection about a painting by Terry Winters called "Good Government" that I have spoken about in an earlier post.  The horizon-line of the painting is disposed of in an "off" perspective manner, much too high to be at eye level really.  In fact, in the painting, there is no certainty as to what exactly is the "eye-level."  The illusionism of the figures getting smaller is preserved but the disposition of the figures also implies multiple possible levels of vision, high and low, up in the air or down in the sand.  The hierarchical groupings reference the spores and minerals of the Winters painting, but I am very much painting figures and not morulae, spores, nor insects.

Artists have borrowed from and quoted each other for centuries.  It is just that having lived through the wholesale theft of my partner's work, I would like to make my references clear, to differentiate my process from that of a plagiarist by simple admission and citation.