Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia's most successful modern artists. Her 2003 exhibition of photography and films, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, set so-far-unbeaten attendance records. Although primarily known for work she shot herself, for several years Moffatt and her editor collaborator, Garry Hillberg, have been making video collages using Hollywood movies.
Yesterday saw the launch of a book
The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt. I went along to hear her thoughts on what she calls montage, and what we here would describe as mash-ups.
Moffatt has made several montages, starting with Lip (2000) which edits scenes of servants 'talking back' to their masters. The most recent one is Doomed (2007) which re-edits disaster movies. My favourite one is
Love (2003) which edits together romance from 153 films in 21 minutes.
The samples are (deliberately) low-fi with multi-generational VHS copies acting as the source for much of the work. This is not just an aesthetic choice.
Unlike most mash-ups, Moffatt's work is sold as limited edition art. Moffatt says she "doesn't really call it video art because it's so fun". However her four art dealers around the world clearly have no difficulty labelling it such. Her videos have been sold to private and public collections around the world. She is being commissioned to create new montages.
None of the material in these commercially-sold works has been cleared with the original copyright owners. In print Moffatt's work is always shown in a gallery space, carefully maintaining the art world context.
There is also a political dimension. As one of Australia's foremost indigenous Australian artists, appropriation of land and culture is unsurprisingly a theme. Moffatt may be able to get away with montage to an extent that a whitey artist can't but the bottom line is that her approach works - both as entertainment and as art. Whether by calculated design or whim her montages are trailblazing mash-up culture in the fine art world. Now I would like to see this plugged into a wider online context so the original films get their due.
I spoke to Garry Hillberg briefly about the idea of attributing the source material in their pieces via something like
modfilms.net. I hope that we might get some dialogue going on that note.
Clever as they are, the most illuminating aspect of this montage series is how IP protocols work in today's society. Moffatt is a represented Artist so she can get away with murder. Sampling CG tidal waves that destroy New York (from Deep Impact) and 're-interpreting' the sequence as a n artistic statement on dream theory is OK because "this is not a film". Apparently tidal waves are the most recurring dreams recorded.
At the same time, a mother sticking her baby videos online gets in trouble with a major recording artist like Prince and a media giant like Google. There's a disparity somewhere folks.
There was a charming naivety about the discussion at the MCA. These artists have either been insulated from the online IP wars or simply don't care enough to reference them. Garry professed to "not knowing exactly what the law was" regarding how much of a film you could sample legally but thought that it "around 30 seconds probably". The advice MOD Films received in 2004 was that you could infringe Hollywood copyright with a single frame.
I feel slightly uncomfortable writing this for online publication as it could be that Moffatt's success with her montages is largely due to being under Hollywood's radar. I'd hate to be one to spoil the fun but I don't see much danger of that happening. The art world and the film world are worlds apart. But artists like Tracey Moffatt are blurring the lines to our benefit. She may be careful to not refer to her work as films but in popular parlance and the uncritical eye, that's exactly what they are. I didn't ask whether she'd be happy with us re-mixing her re-mixes but I'm guessing that her dealers wouldn't like it. That a feature film montage of classic Hollywood moments can be claimed as the copyrighted work of a NY-based Australian artist is clear indication that, in 2007, copyright law is an ass.
Moffatt said herself that the artist is no authority on their own work. So I'm curious as to what you lot make of all this...
I for one, think it's brilliant that mashup culture is spawing not just new artists but attracting established artists. I also think that the more light shone on this area the better for all of us. It raises uncomfortable discussions, as does the recent Wired article on Manga re-versioning in Japan, but the material is out there. The more montages and re-edits the better I say.
The biggest problem I have with her work is the problem that I have with all 'solo' work. In one fell swoop Moffatt appropriates decades of cinematic brilliance as her own creation. Fine for us cinephiles but what about for the uninitiated? One person in the audience last night asked how many of the clips were real. Another asked whether she had sampled any of her own filmed material (the answer being no).
With this kind of work there is no mention, verbal or written, of the armies of VFX people responsible for the visuals she samples. There has to be. We know now that VFX post production staff don't always get onscreen credits for their work on films. So is it not rubbing salt in the wound further for remixers to be making money off this years later? Nowhere in Tracey Moffatt's discourse is there acknowledgement of the wider culture of sampling. Her work is diminished somewhat by this. In time auto-attribution of source material will be out of the too-hard basket.
