In this short article, our aim is to consider contemporary American visual culture through a contribution to the question concerning Barack Obama. However, our article is not a work of academic philosophy, art theory, or even a description of the theoretical humanities. Rather, it is a postmodern meditation on the condition of American appropriation art

Armitage, John

Garnett, Joy

English

Northumbria University Research Portal

Radicalizing RefamiliarizationJohn Armitage and Joy GarnettNorthumbria University and New York, USIn this short article, our aim is to consider contemporary American visualculture through a contribution to the question concerning Barack Obama.However, our article is not a work of academic philosophy, art theory, or even adescription of the theoretical humanities. Rather, it is a postmodernmeditation on the condition of American appropriation art.Of the many stimulating and demanding subjects that visual theorists andartists have had to struggle with in response to the ascendance of Obama tothe 44th Presidency of the United States, is American visual artist ShepardFairey’s iconic Obama ‘PROGRESS’ and ‘HOPE’ posters and the AssociatedPress (AP)’s subsequent declaration of a copyright image war against Fairey.Fairey’s posters thus raise the issue of appropriation artists’ terms andpractices specifically regarding visual art created in the present period thatreflects critical conceptions of affect, sensation and the altered standing of thevisual artist as appropriator, remediator and maker of images.Yet, in what follows, we shall not be reacting to the problem of Fairey’sObama posters and their significance for American appropriation art’srelationship to copyrighted images per se. Rather, our position sharescommon ground with all those thinkers and artists discussing and producingvisual art today that is theoretically informed by what Drucker (2008) calls‘radical refamiliarization’ or ‘an associative reading that resituates imageswithin networks and scenes of knowledge’ (p. 25). Refamiliarization debatesthe theoretical significance of appropriated and aestheticized political icons,and involves itself with making a contribution to postmodern artistic, critical andpoliticized notions of the influence and meaning of radicalization. There aremany examples of contemporary appropriation art that function in this way.Particularly relevant with regard to Fairey’s posters are two works we shallexamine briefly. The first is an iconic portrait of Condoleezza Rice, the formerUS Secretary of State, painted by the influential Belgian painter Luc Tuymans,whose work articulates an important direction in American and Europeancontemporary art. Tuymans’ practice has long involved the appropriation ofmedia photographs and, like Fairey’s posters, Tuymans’ portrait ofCondoleezza Rice is based on a ubiquitous news photograph, and serves as apiquant example of radical refamiliarization.The other work we will examine is American artist Joy Garnett’s 2003painting ‘Stones’, which is based on a Reuters photograph taken by StefanoRellandini in 1991 of a protestor throwing a stone at riot police outside theAviano Air Base in Vicenza, northern Italy. Garnett, who, like Tuymans andFairey, routinely appropriates media images as sources for her paintings, hasalso incurred legal scrutiny and accusations of copyright infringementregarding the source for one of her paintings (see, e.g., Garnett and Meiselas,2007).Certainly, Fairey’s approach in the case of the Obama posters is importantnot merely for its appropriation of a particular news photograph andsubsequent accusation of copyright infringement by the AP, but primarilybecause of Fairey’s immediate and instrumental transformation of the sourceimage into a new entity, in keeping with the practice of appropriationemployed by other theoretically inflected contemporary artists. In this article,then, we shall argue that we can discover new facets of visual culture throughthe procedures of radical refamiliarization. Indeed, we shall endeavour toillustrate how images that emerge in the media can be transformed frombeing images that reinforce it, into works that radicalize our perception of it.What, then, is the relationship between postmodern American visual cultureand Obama? One way to consider this topic is to examine Fairey’sappropriated Obama ‘PROGRESS’ and ‘HOPE’ posters (Figures 1 and 2).Figure 1 Shepard Fairey’s Obama ‘PROGRESS’ poster. Figure 2 ShepardFairey’s Obama ‘HOPE’ poster.Fairey issued the first version of his Obama poster (Figure 1), with the word‘PROGRESS’, in an initial run of 350. The poster was sold to generate funds fora state-wide poster campaign in support of Obama’s presidentialcampaign. The second, ‘HOPE’ version (Figure 2), commissioned andofficially sanctioned by the Obama team, became the visual lynchpin of a viralmarketing strategy that (among other things), served to put the Obamacampaign squarely on the map of 2 1st- century, socially networked culture.This poster, an elegant piece of agitprop showing a portrait of Obama, hischin tilted slightly upward in an attitude of listening or anticipation, isrendered in red, blue and beige, with the word ‘HOPE’ emblazoned along itsbottom edge. Fairey made the image freely available and it was reproducedin myriad ways, even parodied, and on a variety of surfaces including hats,wall murals, posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, buttons, flags and stickers.After eight years of the regime of President George W. Bush, Americans at firstseemed too beaten down by their own resignation and cynicism to be moved bythe symbols ‘PROGRESS’ and ‘HOPE’. Indeed, how could ‘HOPE’ be takenseriously as the tagline of any political campaign, much less a presidentialcampaign launched by one of the two major parties in the twistedentertainment and advertisement-driven world of American politics? But, in ashort time, owing in part to American frustration, and to the Obamacampaign’s online strategies of grass roots inclusiveness, the poster, theportrait and the message they bore became emblematic of something morethan the race to the White House: the reinstatement of the nation’s trampledprinciples, the resurgence of disenfranchised ideals and beliefs suppressedsince the time of the civil rights era. Elderly survivors and heroes of that timecame out to support the campaign, the election and the most cathartic ofpresidential inaugurations. A longstanding battle was perceived as won.In the meantime, the campaign, its medium and its message, extended anongoing invitation to that potent sector of society, its youth, to participate in theprocess and stake their claims in a country whose policies, by broadconsensus, had gone wildly astray. ‘HOPE’ was as much about ending thereign of the Bush era geopolitically and metaphysically, as about bringing ahobbled, queasy, nation past the ingrained norms of orchestrated fear, andinto a place where intellectual exchange and democratic responsibility mightactually be taken seriously.There can be little doubt that the import of Fairey’s Obama posters areconnected to the topic of American appropriation art, certainly as far as the APis concerned. For, in February 2009, the AP issued a statement accusing Faireyof copyright infringement over one of its images, a portrait of the then- SenatorObama at a press conference on Darfur that took place in 2006 (Figure 3).In this battlefield, issues of property and free expression collide. MannieGarcia, the news photographer who actually shot the source photograph,came forward stating that he had no desire to sue Fairey and that he wasproud that his image had been utilized in this way.There have also been indications of the AP’s bad faith; Garcia questionsFigure 3 Senator Barack Obama. APPhoto: Mannie Garcia.their claim that he contractually signed over the copyright of the image to them.Lacking a solid basis for an infringement suit, the AP has resorted to launchinga smear campaign against Fairey, portraying him as a ‘criminal’, a ne’er-do-wellstreet artist and a vandal.A mere month into Obama’s presidency, then, American contemporary visual artand its critical concepts became headline news. But what is the AP’s strikeemblematic of? A censorious critique of ‘open source’-driven internetculture? A futile attempt to maintain corporate control over existing systems ofcopyright? An ill-advised push to exert some kind of influence over the alteredstanding of the American visual artist as an appropriator and producer ofimages? Or is it just a matter of corporate lawyers lining their pockets? Until theFairey case, of course, the war over intellectual property within the realm ofvisual culture (as opposed to popular music, for instance) had enjoyed theengagement of a much smaller audience. This, on the other hand, promises,and continues to be, a fascinating, high-profile story. For Fairey has filed asummary judgment against the AP, refuting its accusations and demanding ajury trial. Fairey makes a strong case for fair use, and working for him probono is the nation’s most progressive, forward-thinking team in cyber law, theStanford Fair Use Project at the Center for Internet and Society, founded byStanford Professor of Law, critic of existing copyright law, and prolific advocatefor ‘read-write culture’, Lawrence Lessig.Even so, we do not want to respond literally to the question of Fairey’smethods of appropriation and association with copyrighted imagery as such.Instead, our perspective centres on art that is concerned with debating andcreating contemporary works that are theoretically driven by Drucker’sconception of radical refamiliarization as an associative interpretation thatrepositions images within information systems and data sites. Discussing theconjectural impact of appropriated and aestheticized political leaders,radicalizing refamiliarization engages with and makes a contribution tocontemporary imaginative, investigative and politicized ideas of the effectand connotations of radicalization, and speaks to the altered reputation ofthe American visual artist as maker of appropriated and refamiliarizedimages.Let us first consider Luc Tuymans’ 2005 painting, ‘The Secretary of State’,which is based on a found news photograph of Condoleezza Rice (Figure 4).Figure 4 Luc Tuymans,‘The Secretary of State’,2005, oil on canvas,18 × 241/4 inches. TheMuseum of Modern Art,New York, fractional andpromised gift of David andMonica Zwirner, 2006. ©Tuymans’ painting concentrates on Rice’s global representation and character,her inexplicable, almost supernatural identity that has been created throughcountless media images of her as a stunning but simultaneously all too realthreat to societies worldwide. Yet we want to propose that we can determinesome original components of contemporary visual culture using themethodology of radical refamiliarization. Accordingly, Fairey’s Obamaposters are significant because of his instant and involved conversion of afoundational image into a novel entity. In brief, we want to assert that thegraphic or painterly transformative processes involved in repurposingObama’s and Rice’s photographic portraits are significant means by whichvisual theorists and artists can refamiliarize themselves with the complexcultural mechanisms by which such images are created.Consider Stefano Rellandini’s 1991 Reuters photograph of a protestorflinging a stone at riot police outside the Aviano Air Base in Vicenza, northernItaly (Figure 5), which is the basis for Garnett’s 2003 ‘Stones’ painting(Figure 6).How do protestors participating in demonstrations in opposition to, forinstance, NATO’s airstrikes on former Yugoslavia and against militarizationmore broadly, develop into publicly available photographs and wider mediadiscourses? ‘Stones’ illustrates that the circuits ofpolitical and communal self-reliance, activist networks and conventionalmedia imagery of uprisings can be critically examined. Yet such illustrationsare not simply a skirmish with the derisory imagery of the conservativenews media and its representational fantasies. Rather, they are battles torework news media’s conditionality, to illustrate that its images are not beyondthe experience of existing individual people in extreme states. ‘Stones’ offers abase for the confrontation between the all-but exhausted debates overreality and representation, truth and trickery. Such suppositions aretherefore a departure from modern de-familiarization, from the attempt todemonstrate that the context of Rellandini’s photograph is misleading. As anFigure 5 Protestor, Aviano, Italy.Reuters Photo/Stefano Rellandini.Figure 6 Joy Garnett, ‘Stones’,2003, oil on canvas, 60 X 78inches. Courtesy of the artist andWinkleman Gallery, New YorkCity.alternative, ‘Stones’ adopts a postmodern, radicalized, refamiliarizationthat reveals the figure, partly through the erasure of the contextualizingdetails in the background of Rellandini’s photograph, as having a kind of poeticor ecstatic reality of its own. The undertaking here, then, is to conductaesthetic investigations, to look for and recuperate from the web images thatwe are by now inured to. After all, images of protestors tossing stones canbe counted as something of an image pandemic in the era of Google and the so-called worldwide War on Terror. In this way, ‘Stones’ is not purely theoutcome of surfing the web for vibrant images that in some way conceal theveracity of protest, but a contribution to alter-globalism and anti-militaryprotests with, as we shall see later, real consequence on the ground.‘Stones’, like Tuymans’ ‘The Secretary of State’ and Fairey’s Obama posters,offers an immediate entrance into the informational and image-laden culturalexplosion detonated primarily by communications technologies founded on awelter of news hyperlinks, informative and not so informative websites,blogged reports, and so forth, all of which incessantly generate ourcontemporary visual culture. Is ‘Stones’ not a picture of the radicalization of thebody comprised first and foremost of an extremely contorted face? This, then, isthe product of the visual regime of the grimace, of the protesting body awry,airborne, as it gets ready to hurl stones. Accentuating the twisted face,cropping closer to the protestor’s body than Rellandini’s photograph, anderasing the riot police in the background, the painterly engagement of ‘Stones’with the f igure in extremis together with its radicalizingrefamiliarization are at once phenomena of extended distortion and removal. But‘Stones’ also confirms how such iconic photographic markers can becomesymbols of identification as protagonists survey their new-found world asfigures in a larger cultural scene that works not on the basis of portraits,names, photographs or protestors throwing rocks at the police, but as anabstract emblem of resistance. Concentrating on a seemingly singular person,the instigator of this particular riotous undertaking, ‘Stones’ reveals him not bean isolated individual but an intersection, a junction where a much widernetwork centred on the radicalization of the protesting body meets a universalsubjectivity that is connected to and sustained by alter- iconic andexceedingly visualized present-day events, by an illustrative regimedisassociated from a mass media that levels all events to mere ‘news’. In‘Stones’, the individual element of identity and truth is subsumed to a morelasting, abstract realm, as a news photograph morphs into something morethan a simple representation of actual events. Appropriated real events turn outto be a discursive set of global connections, a message field in service to alarger project of creating universal symbols that, despite their at times re- anddecontextualized conflicts and mass-mediated destructive energies, in someway radically refamiliarize and disclose both the methods of newsphotography and painting.We began this short article with the aim of considering contemporaryAmerican visual culture through a contribution to the question concerningBarack Obama and ended it with ‘Stones’ as an exemplary manifestation ofradicalized refamiliarization of the familiar face of the grimace of protest, of21st-century political discourse and action. And although we discussedFairey’s Obama posters in relation to the issue of American appropriation art, wewant to conclude not with a discourse on contemporary visual art but with anumber of critical comments that concern the spectacle of the figure of Obamathat, we hope, will resonate with all those who seek to become an emblem ofsomething much larger than themselves.Following the production of ‘Stones’, which is part of Garnett’s ‘Riot’ series (allof which remain online under creative commons licences), she received anenthusiastic email from an Italian stranger who called himself‘Metropolitan Researcher’, identifying himself as the ‘protagonist’ of thepainting, the real ‘Stones’ referent. A year later, another email concerning‘Stones’ arrived from a friend of Metropolitan Researcher, who corroboratedboth his identity and his attitude towards being painted, to becoming apicture. As with our own position adopted in this article, he was joyous to thinkthat others were discussing and producing visual art that addresses anti-military impulses, that radically refamiliarizes social activism, conductsassociative readings that resituate image narratives within the alter-knowledge networks and scenes of metropolitan researchers. Radicallyrefamiliarizing throwing a stone is now a part of the debate over appropriatedand aestheticized political icons. We must, then, involve ourselves withradical accounts of knowledge and visual languages if we are to address boththe altered status of the visual artist as producer of appropriated andrefamiliarized images and the terror of the copyright image wars.Fairey’s Obama posters, Tuymans’ painting of Condoleezza Rice, andGarnett’s ‘Stones’, are all examples of the ways in which we can discover newfacets of the image, a radically refamiliarizing approach to appropriation art inthe era of the creative commons. Fairey’s Obama posters are importantbecause his immediate and instrumental transformation of the sourceimage into a new entity alerts us to the fact that neither ideological imagemanoeuvrings nor media distortion are out of date. These works all show usthat such media images can be changed from being images that strengthenthe conventional media, and our own isolation, to images that can not onlyradicalize our perspective on the media but also bring people together instruggle. They show that this struggle can be given expression, that it can begalvanized and articulated through transformations of single newsphotographs into artworks that describe and refamiliarize us with, forexample, the visage of a terribly powerful woman, or a protestor throwing astone at riot police, or even a man whose very likeness has come to embodyhope.ReferencesDrucker, J. (2008) ‘Making Space: Image-Events in an Extreme State’, CulturalPolitics 4(1): 25–45.Garnett, J. and Meiselas, S. (2007) ‘On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriationand the Art of Context’, Harper’s, February: 53–8.

Making Space: Image-Events in an Extreme State’,

On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context’, Harper’s,

Radicalizing refamiliarization

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