Integrating Theory And Practice #1 (ITAP)

Can Recontextualised Ideas Be Contemporary and Notions of Originality

Originality is something every artist wants to be credited with, but in reality very few works can truly be called original. We take inspiration from everything around us, and because of this there will always be parts of a piece that have been done before, whether it is a certain technique, drawing style, or even just subject material. Quite a lot of the time you may not even realise how close your work is to someone else’s until you compare them. Saying that, there has been a definite influx recently of intentionally copied work and mainly, I find, in advertising. It seems to be that in order to sell something now, some companies, instead of trying to create something new and exciting, will just look for an idea that was popular, and copy it. One that was particularly obvious was the 2008 advert for Berocca featuring people dancing on treadmills. The slogun was ‘You, but on a really good day’, so to me it seemed the point of the advert was to say that you can be happy and energetic if you take Berocca. The communication of the advert works, it’s understandable, it’s just the subject material. In 2006 a band called Ok Go created a viral frenzy when they released a video for their song ‘Here It Goes Again’. It featured the band singing and dancing, on treadmills. It was such an original idea that it went on to win a Grammy award in 2007. People could argue that Berocca just took an interesting idea and put a different spin on it, but the fact that they even used some of the main dance moves from the Ok Go video shows that essentially they just copied it.

Originality is rarely found in this modern age, but I think the overall meaning of the word is starting to change. It’s no longer just about completely new ideas that no-one has done before, but also creating new concepts that are a fresh take on old ideas. It’s tied into recontextualising ideas to form new bodies of work. So to answer the question ‘Can recontextualised ideas be contemporary?’ I think yes, they can. By taking something old and putting a modern spin on it, would you not call the finished product contemporary? Take katagami for example, the ancient Japanese art of making paper stencils. This skill definitely wouldn’t be called contemporary, but artist Jennifer Falck Linssen uses it to create sculptures which you cannot help but call contemporary art. Katagami stencils would have been used for kimono printing, but Linssen turns them into something new. Her pieces all seem to have a calm serenity about them, which ties in with their historical origins, but they have a different purpose and isn’t that what recontextualising is all about?

Contemporary art is full of recontextualised ideas, but that doesn’t mean they’re not original. I think that by adding something new you can make an idea yours and use it to create an original piece.