Memory Loss In A Copy And Paste Zeitgeist

Admittedly, we are a copy and paste culture. In the 1980’s, artists were first dealing with this notion as appropriation and photography came to the fore with likes of Richard Prince and Robert Longo. What was once a debated action that questioned the power of authenticity and challenged copyrights has come to infiltrate our way of working and attitudes towards the roles of digital media. In the latest show at London’s The Pigeon Wing, Flip It Reverse It takes on this process and how it changes historical contexts. PSFK recently spoke with artist Bill Abdale about his approach to this topic, and its operation on our collective historical memory.

What is the premise of your work? Why do you think it’s relevant to today’s copy and paste culture?

My work deals with history as a combination of subjectivity, retelling, and intervention. But instead of merely representing that, I try to work in a way that shares those characteristics, pushing my own contribution (a drawing, print, etc.) into coexistence with the sources it’s derived from (i.e., historical information) in my own retelling. In doing so, I shift emphasis, form speculative connections, make things up, and leave sentences unfinished. There’s a sense of looking over my shoulder. Also, generally speaking, I tend to deal with things that plenty of people would probably rather not remember.

The problem of writing history – what gets framed and hung, and what gets put in storage – is one that’s always been around. That’s where oral traditions and epic poetry come from. But we’re still dealing with it. Right now in the US, the Texas Board of Education is carrying out its own brand of conservative revisionism; their new textbooks aim to style Ronald Reagan as the victor of the Cold War, and teach that the country was founded as a Christian nation – a statement that blatantly contradicts founding father Thomas Jefferson’s insistence on the separation of Church and State. Meanwhile, in Russia, there’s serious debate about how to make their convoluted and troubled history sound more positive and nationalistic. The comparison to Stalin’s historical rewrites is presumably neither lost on them nor appreciated.

Why do you think appropriation continues to be a relevant topic? How do you think a digital zeitgeist affects appropriation — does it just put it on speed?

I think appropriation will be relevant as long as people still think in terms of the “original” and the “copy.” Whether it’s a question of artistic cleverness or of late-capitalist musings on copyrights and saleable commodities is something that would take far too long to sift out here. With that said, I think we’re so used to being inundated with stimuli through the media that it’s only natural to try and make something useful out of it.

As for digital technology, it makes information more widely accessible, which is bound to speed up any artistic practice based on metabolizing an existing cultural product. At the same time, with easier access comes the risk of superficiality: do people still pore through books and do some digging for their sources, when it’s far easier to rely on Google Images and Wikipedia? Does that even matter? I’d say it depends on the artists and how they use it.

Can you explain a little about the process of your work? How do you treat working with appropriation?

Different things work for different projects, but usually the process starts with some form of research, basically reading up on various things that interest me for one reason or another, collecting images, taking notes, etc. The best ideas almost always come when I’m absent-mindedly wondering what to do about all this junk that’s cluttering up my studio. I use a combination of reproduction (transfers, screenprinting, photographs) and manual drawing (typically graphite) in most of the work

In the case of the posters in the show at the Pigeon Wing, I was looking into organized crime activities in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC during the 1960s-80s. At some point I hit on the idea of making advertisements for these events that had been covered up the first time around. The form is directly lifted from the yellow-and-black posters used on the street to advertise concerts at Webster Hall and Terminal 5 here in New York. I wrote the text to fit the abrupt, clipped format (usually it’s just the band names and the date), had a type designer help me lay it out in Illustrator, and used those files to make the silkscreens. The actual printing was done at the Daydream Silkscreen shop.

What is the direction you think you will be taking your work into?

I’ve been experimenting a bit with the means of displaying the work. For instance, in May I did a project in Brooklyn where most of the show was contained in a poster rack in an otherwise mostly empty space, making a kind of book that visitors could flip through in any order. My contribution to Naked Measures will have some of that feel, along with a photo-essay-like component. Some proposals I’ve submitted but probably shouldn’t talk about yet also follow a similar vein.

Currently I’m at work on a series of drawings and prints that’s connected to the Hell’s Kitchen history I briefly mentioned, but these new efforts add a few pieces to the puzzle. I think there’s still plenty to be wrung out of that particular time and I’m not in any huge hurry to move on. I’d love for all of this stuff to end up as a larger show that would serve as my version of a specific historical study, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Bill Abdale

The Pigeon Wing