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The Borrowers

By Megan Driscoll

As summer dwindles, Portlanders welcome the last big event of the season, the annual Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) Time Based Art Festival (TBA). The festival presents contemporary artists and cutting edge concepts in a wide range of formats, from lecture to exhibit to performance to live installation. PICA invites artists from all over the world to explore "moments of movement and imagery," often very loosely time-based, but always pushing the boundaries of contemporary art.

This year, the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts (PNCA) collaborated with PICA and donated the Feldman Gallery to the Illegal Art exhibit (Aug 28 - Sep 26, 2006). Of all the exhibits and all the events at TBA, this author was particularly drawn to Illegal Art because of its theme: the clash between the art community and a legal environment that is rapidly being outpaced by technological and artistic innovation. Much of the work in Illegal Art looks at the question of intellectual property, which is a particularly troubling issue for the arts. While intellectual property laws have the potential to protect the individual artist — and drive up the monetary value of the artwork — those same laws clash with the sampling and recycling of symbols that have become so essential to postmodern culture. The problem is most familiar in the music industry, where some musicians are fighting alongside the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to combat music sharing and sampling, while others are using entirely recycled samples to create brilliant musical collages.

While the visual arts have certainly explored the meta-narrative potential in the use of other works of art (see many of Robert Rauschenberg's painting collages or Sherrie Levine's famous "re-photographs"), the legal struggle tends to arise when artists co-opt imagery from other aspects of visual culture — particularly corporate culture. One such example from Illegal Art is Kieron Dwyer's Consumer Whore graphic (1999), which is a parody of the Starbucks logo. Dwyer distributed comic books, t-shirts, and stickers with the Consumer Whore graphic. The graphic is more than a cheap shot at Starbucks — it's part of a tradition of using the visual arts for social and political critique, for which Starbucks sued Dwyer in 2000. Ultimately, Dwyer was allowed to continue using the graphic, but with such extreme limitations that he was forced to discontinue all products with the image and even take it off of his own website.

Another example of the conflict between satire and corporate interest in Illegal Art is Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial Orgy, a poster that was originally published in 1967 in The Realist, an underground newsletter. The poster depicts classic Disney characters engaged in a variety of depraved acts of sexuality, violence, and drug use. It functions both as a parody of quintessential symbols of American innocence such as Mickey Mouse and Snow White, and as a criticism of the Disney corporation. Money symbols rise from the castle at the upper-left corner of the image, drawing a parallel between the corruption of capitalism and the corruption depicted in the poster. Disney chose not to sue until an entrepreneur turned the image into a black light poster, both gaining profit from the image and dramatically increasing its distribution.

Consumer Whore
© 1999 Kieron Dwyer

Another piece in Illegal Art takes a different approach to parodying American iconography. Packard Jennings' Fallen Rapper Prototypes (2001) consists of three Pez dispensers and their molds bearing the heads of Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and Biggie Smalls. In a short series of letters accompanying the display, Jennings (under the pseudonym Michael Durham) attempts to market the dispensers to the Pez corporation, arguing that as leaders in rap music who have "given their life for their art," the artists are an important element of American cultural history. After gentle persistence from Jennings, the company finally responded to his inquiries, refusing his idea on the grounds that their demographic is 3 to 6 year olds. Although Jennings' dispensers are not as confrontational as Consumer Whore or Disneyland Memorial Orgy, they successfully criticize the Pez corporation as a symbol of mainstream Americana and for the way that it marginalizes black culture.

Not all of Illegal Art is designed around parody. Michael Hernandez de Luna presented several examples of his stamp art, which is part of a larger tradition of mail art. Most mail art violates federal law because the stamps are typically manufactured by the artist rather than purchased by the U.S. Post Office. In his display, de Luna also included several cancelled letters as evidence that the stamps successfully deceived postal workers. In the context of mail art, counterfeiting stamps takes its place alongside traditions like trompe l'oeil in the drive to use technical skill to fool the eye. However, by not only recreating stamps but using them, mail artists like de Luna toy with the boundaries of artistic innovation and the law, upping the ante on their game of drafting prowess. In Prozac and Viagra (1996, 1999), de Luna's stamps push the limit a little further by depicting trademarked designs for the drugs on his stamps. His choice of subjects, however, goes beyond a test of trademark infringement. American stamps frequently depict people and objects that are considered important American symbols. By putting Prozac and Viagra on a stamp, de Luna makes a sly reference to the central role that such drugs have taken in American life.

Illegal Art continues with many examples of the "theft" and recontextualization of symbols. Although the exhibit is built around the more blatant examples of such appropriation, it reminds the viewer of the important role that borrowing has played in cultural development. As the cliché claims, there is no such thing as a new idea, and it is in the reuse and restructuring of old images, sounds, and concepts that innovation and creativity take place.

To learn more about this year's TBA Festival, visit http://www.pica.org/tba/tba06. To learn more about the project from which the Illegal Art exhibit has sprung, visit http://www.illegal-art.org.