Appropriation or plagiarism? What’s the difference? HAZEL FRIEDMAN grapples with a debate raging in South Africa’s conceptual art circles

ESAU did it to Jacob, Brahms might have done it to Beethoven and Shakespeare has been accused of doing it to his assistant. History is filled with the famous, talented and treacherous who have indulged in, or been accused of, theft — and now two South African artists have been added to the list.

In his review of the 1995 Vita Art Now show, artist/critic Kendell Geers accused Marc Edwards of plagiarising a work by Bertrand Lavier — one of the French artists represented on the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. Titled Form Evolved From a Force, Edwards’s work bears more than a coincidental resemblance to Lavier’s Crash, dating from the 1960s.

Edwards’s response? “Appropriation, not plagiarism.”

Ironically, Geers is now being accused of the same crime in his June 16 exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Called Stealing History, his work is virtually an identical replica of the “date paintings” produced by Japanese artist On Kawara in 1966.

Geers’s response? “Appropriation, not plagiarism!”

Six of one and half a dozen of the other? What exactly is the difference? Or, to borrow from the Bard himself: “What is in a name? Surely a rose by any other would smell as sweet?” The answer lies in the fact that, while plagiarism reeks of theft, appropriation has the more acceptable scent of strategy.

In today’s culture, both practices are rife. Forget the bankrobber with the stocking balaclava. Today’s criminal is the entrepreneur who produces pirate copies of Windows 95, the fashion designer who rips off an original, the retro film-maker who “quotes” from the masters, and the painter specialising in “pastiches” of the past.

Although borrowing images is practically as old as the image itself, the history of appropriation as a contemporary beast dates back to the late 1950s and 1960s. In Britain and the US, in particular, this era saw the re-evaluation of popular culture and its relationship to high art. Modernism, with its pretensions to nothing but itself, and its sense of cultural hegemony, became the target of artists ranging from Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Claus Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein to Sixties conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth, who appropriated pop imagery and took mass production into the cathedrals of high culture.

But whether these artists were engaged in formulating a radical critique of modernism, or simply capitalising on high cultural taboos (art is art, mass is mass and never the twain shall meet), depends, of course, on your angle of vision.

With post-modernism, stealing became not merely a strategy but a defining characteristic, as is evident in the works of Eighties artists Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and, of course, the filch-master himself, Jeff Koons. In fact, the art of the last two decades will probably go down in history as unique for its total lack of originality, its propensity for feeding off the data bank of history, and its parasitic dependence on the principles of reproduction. As well as its unlimited licence to steal, cheat and reinvent with impunity.

In the catalogue accompanying Crap Shoot, an exhibition held in Amsterdam in April this year, and which Geers participated in, Kay Pallister writes: “The art world does not have laws which one can clearly break. There is no legal/illegal. The artists … take their liberty and run with it.”

This is a dictum to which both Geers and Edwards subscribe. “Art is the only site where it is okay to be unlawful,” says Geers. “It has become the scene of a crime, where trangressions that are usually punishable are freely committed. My art deals directly with issues of appropriation, whether it is stealing histories or images.

“After all, crime has become South Africa’s prevailing cultural expression. It exists on all levels. I am reflecting this as both a product and victim of that history. Simultaneously, I am a product of an international art history, in which art has lost its moral base. It has been replaced by the culture of CNN and Steven Spielberg. It is impotent, amoral.”

“Art has been dematerialised, and the real replaced by the hyper-real,” says Edwards. “There is no absolute ideology any more. It’s open season out there, information is there for the taking and the egocentric fingerprint of the artist is no longer important.”

What separates Geers’s appropriationist strategies from those of Edwards is his rigid position on the redundancy of modernism’s obsessions with “material” as opposed to “concept”, and his acknowledgement if not of his sources, then at least of his role as thief.

`I provide clues for the viewer, who must then do his homework,” he says. For example, his work for the Crap Shoot show included a reinvented biography and CV coinciding with seminal dates in South Africa’s apartheid history (“xhistory is about myth- making”) and a plasticine ball (“like history, plasticine always assumes the form of its context”) appropriated from a work by Gabriel Orozco and titled Stolen Idea.

Conversely, Edwards provides no clues: “Perhaps it is irresponsible of me not to acknowledge my sources. But I believe the viewer should know about these things.” He adds: “Geers accuses me of being a modernist, because I am concerned with material. But that is part of my background — I cannot negate it. What I can do is stretch its boundaries, using any means I choose.”

Whether their arguments for appropriation constitute a valid creative strategy, a cynical rationale that relies on the ignorance of the public, or simply the rumblings of art cannibals whose creative juices have run dry, depends, yet again, on angle of vision.

But one fact is certain. In the paradox that is post-modernism, never before has so much energy been invested in justifying one of the most ethically puny of all human acts: deceit. But then again, who says that art must transform or be based on moral imperatives? In fact, who says that art should be at all?

And if it is true, as Geers says, that art’s potency lies in its impotency, and, as Edwards says, that “Art is dead. Long live art,” then I too have an equally unoriginal and faithless rejoinder to add to the epitaph: “God help art. Indeed, God help us all.”