2.2 Building Upon History
Our contemporary focus on originality as a measurement of creativity is relatively new and local (Western). The ideal of originality was not a driving force for authors like Homer who considered themselves historians whose oral culture relied on keeping alive stories and characters already familiar to their listeners and shared by many storytellers (Lord, 2000).
History shows that the great authors are great remixers. Shakespeare drew on the material of other playwrights, local history and public records for plots, characters, and themes. He applied information form Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland to his dramatization of Henry IV. William Blake created The Marriage of Heaven and Hell based on the Proverbs from the Old Testament. It doesn’t matter to the reader that Shakespeare’s Richard the Third is based on cultural propoganda drawn from Hall’s History of England. The character is so transformed and the original source is so intimately bound to the new creation that the true character of Richard has become lost to contemporary audiences.
During the mid-20th century, Robert Rauschenberg created a series called Combines, which incorporated trash and found objects into his art. His goal was to transform everyday objects into something new. An example of his art remixes, Retroactive I (1963), incorporates publicly available printed images with mixed media to create a collage of related images. Rauschenberg juxtaposed the images to create a new and contemporary statement on the condition of humankind at midcentury. To fully understand the images he selected, we must reconstruct the historical context from which they emerged. In Retroactive I, Rauschenberg juxtaposes an image of John F. Kennedy, who challenged America to put a man on the moon, with images of the Mercury space mission. As you listen to this segment from Kennedy's speech about space travel, see if it adds new significance and emotional impact to your experience of Retroactive I.
History shows that the great authors are great remixers. Shakespeare drew on the material of other playwrights, local history and public records for plots, characters, and themes. He applied information form Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland to his dramatization of Henry IV. William Blake created The Marriage of Heaven and Hell based on the Proverbs from the Old Testament. It doesn’t matter to the reader that Shakespeare’s Richard the Third is based on cultural propoganda drawn from Hall’s History of England. The character is so transformed and the original source is so intimately bound to the new creation that the true character of Richard has become lost to contemporary audiences.
During the mid-20th century, Robert Rauschenberg created a series called Combines, which incorporated trash and found objects into his art. His goal was to transform everyday objects into something new. An example of his art remixes, Retroactive I (1963), incorporates publicly available printed images with mixed media to create a collage of related images. Rauschenberg juxtaposed the images to create a new and contemporary statement on the condition of humankind at midcentury. To fully understand the images he selected, we must reconstruct the historical context from which they emerged. In Retroactive I, Rauschenberg juxtaposes an image of John F. Kennedy, who challenged America to put a man on the moon, with images of the Mercury space mission. As you listen to this segment from Kennedy's speech about space travel, see if it adds new significance and emotional impact to your experience of Retroactive I.
Rauschenberg was part of a larger group of artists who created Pop Art, response to the growth of mass media and popular culture in the second half of the 20th century. These artists included Andy Warhol who painted images from advertising materials, Richard Hamilton who constructed collages from images cut out of popular magazines, and Roy Lichtenstein who adapted images from contemporary comic books.
Rauschenberg often remarked that the Combines’ series allowed him to work “in the gap between life and art.” Retroactive I reflects his shift from creating art as individual expression to create art as commentary on the state of the American ethic.
Pop artists were the latest among artists and writers who took inspiration from, or who appropriated and remixed elements from their culture. Throughout Reading in a Participatory Culture, we have consider Herman Melville as a master remixer of nineteenth century American culture. Henry Jenkins comments in Reading in a Participatory Culture:
Melville was a great writer and a gifted storyteller, but it didn't mean he made everything up out of his head. Melville and the other writers we study in high-school literature classes borrowed from everything they had ever read, yet in the process of remixing those elements, retooling that language, and retelling those stories, they created something that felt fresh and original to their readers. Bakhtin tells us that writers have to battle with their materials, forcing them to mean what they want them to mean, trying to shed some associations and accent others. The borrowed material is never fully theirs; it leaves traces of its previous use, traces we can follow like so many bread crumbs back to their sources, and in the process we can see Melville and these other authors speak to and about what came before. (Chapter 7, page 75, Reading in a Participatory Culture)
The process of appropriation can be found in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which is inspired by and borrows from a diverse number of sources. Moby-Dick is often considered a hybrid, discontinuous text, written in multiple kinds of prose: philosophical musings, adventure narratives, theatrical dialogue, or scientific descriptions. Wyn Kelley states that Melville was inspired not only by different textual sources (such as the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, popular nautical adventure stories of the time, and scientific manuals on whales and whaling) but also by different genres and artistic forms.
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