Command CV: A legend by default.

* ROBYN WHITLAW made an illuminating disappearance in Ralph Rugoff's critical writings.

* MICHAEL MANDIBERG is a conceptual artist who uses the Net to explore identity, labor and commerce. His year-long project "Shop Mandiberg" will be included in the upcoming Transmediale festival in Berlin.

Part of the continuing life story of these cloned triplets should be familiar by now. First Walker Evans secured a likeness, and then Sherrie Levine duplicated it, before Michael Mandiberg multiplied it via the World Wide Web. But in each of these permutations, the image itself has survived as a representation despite the media mongering it has been exposed to--an origin is still visible through the captioned layers that lead back to an identity always posited before. Levine fittingly titled her appropriations After Walker Evans and Mandiberg followed suit with After Sherrie Levine, and it is the chronological gesture of this trace that somehow returns to a conception originally secured for what appears to be a repetitive perpetuity. Each subsequent move (presented in a series of removals that are mediated by technology and facilitated by a caption) consequently offers a distortion to the authorship and the object, but this nominative palimpsest also contains the clues to see these alterations with clarity. T he arguments surrounding mechanical reproduction and mutable code are made explicit by the nomenclature that preceded them--not only by the empirically elusive alterations to the object per se--because the very point of these exercises hinges upon the reticent conundrum that these images are perceptively identical while media modulations and attendant captions tell you otherwise.

Curiously, the ensuing conflicts surrounding representation and ownership that have emerged over the years since 1936, when Evans first cocked and released his shutter, are all anchored in the same indexical relations, and it is this redundancy, a threat to every argument on photography, that the captions seek to overturn with proprietary rhetoric. Modestly logged in small print and contextually formatted to fit a heading, the captions no longer serve to simply connote the image with a definite meaning: their role is parasitical to the extent that words no longer serve to explicate the index, but rather intervene to sublimate the denoted message with another rationale. However, this trail of evolving precepts is of course accompanied by material nuarices, allowing each change of words to align itself with an altered substance; from original to copy and eventually the plethora of digital bytes. Placed side by side for comparative purposes then, the triplets assert difference and sameness, repression and expression, in an identity that is pluralistically unique and individually complicated.

In the attendant passage or artistic movements from modern to postmodern, each was conceived at a particular moment and given a new proper name as a diagnostic measure, all, in turn, assuming a singular presence despite problematic contingencies that were effectively internalized through a legend. With each technologically conceived birthday, "photography" critically matured with considerable attention lent to the postmodern dictums of master narratives, appropriation and copying. Simulation theorists, celebrating a cultural mass conception, declared the conundrum of an identity in multiples (dis)solved while social activists pointed to the ineptitude of quotations to offer an alternative politics or vision, lacking the necessary grounding of a revolutionary material dialectic. Many of these same points have been carried through into a digital vocabulary as amplifications (more copies, even less substance), but the extended family, now counting three, evolving from a genealogical strain of "photography" is pe rhaps better subsumed as a repetitive cloning than a progressive production--every semantic conception of difference relies upon the residual seeds of sameness. And considered overall or by comparison, the recurring articulation of discord allotted each member of the matching trio appears strangely uneventful. Let us, to invest in an alternative methodology, expand on the three captions from a common departure in 1936, a year synonymous with their retroactive arrival. By investigating the temporal markers that, partly, set them apart, it might be possible to examine the gaps a certain critical tradition has posited as distinguishing marks and approach the triplets on terms that are not entirely consumed by proper names and derivative of copying.

[1]

Let us first turn to the first photograph. In 1936, James Agee found himself deep in the Alabama cotton fields on a commission from Fortune magazine. His mission was to capture the poverty-stricken lives of rural sharecroppers. Paired for the assignment with Walker Evans, who was on loan from the Resettlement Administration (a precursor to the Farm Security Administration), Agee sought out the extended families of three tenant farmers that eventually became the subjects of their collaborative book Let Lid Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941). The above photograph derived from Evans first entered cultural consciousness through every printed copy of this perennial volume, and it is now easily found in one of at least 14 versions circulated through first, second and third editions, most in numerous printings, by various publishers. (1)

On the first few pages, Agee sets up a list of credits to introduce the "Persons and Places" in his text, but precisely because the book is not a fiction, as he points out, it is necessary to distort the facts--the proper names of persons and places are altered throughout to secure a level of anonymity for his subjects. The three families hence operate under the invented pseudonyms of Ricketts, Gudger and Woods in Agee's words, and Evans's photographs of them and their environs are presented entirely without captions to maintain an ambiguity with regards to location and likeness. When Agee famously notes that, "The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative," (2) he combines photographs and text in a larger explicatory relationship of extended captions, and the deliberate misnomer he invokes serves to obscure, in the service of protection, what he deemed to be true identities harbored by language. Agee's consistent struggle with proper nome nclature is repeated in his vague dedication, "to those of whom the record is made," and the very last sentence of the book, lifted from the Bible passage in "Ecclesiasticus" that also provided the book's title, "Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth forevermore." (3) Whether a name is preserved through the records of earthly achievements or permanently engraved in divine memory, it is profoundly recognized by Agee throughout Let Lid Now Praise Famous Men as a form of capital that is either respectfully advertised or purposefully withheld for a calculated effect.

Early sales figures show us that Agee should not have worried about unwanted exposure. The book was initially released to a largely indifferent response (less than 600 copies were sold, dwindling to fewer than 50 per year until the 1960S), and only later did it reach the status of an American classic by Walker Evans, by then a celebrated master of modernism, connoisseur of vernacular Americana and early arbiter of semiotics, and James Agee, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist also responsible for the script that carried Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn up the river in The African Queen. Retrospectively billed as an exemplary testament to social awareness and good intentions (attention to plight is, as always, made more poignant through artistic prowess), Let Lid Now Praise Famous Men achieved wider circulation under the celebrated notables that initially supplied a model release from individuality into characterization for their already deprived subjects. (4) Under the name of Evans, pictures of poverty had struck cultural gold and forlorn cotton rags had turned to silver-gelatin riches. The pseudonyms of Ricketts, Gudger and Woods that once broke the chains to reality had a different spelling, a new denomination, underwritten, by layers of catachresis, that was arguably not entirely proper as a form of dedication.

Add these linguistic layers to the facsimile count of the image, harbored by a vast bibliography of matching titles, and it becomes very difficult to discern where the founding stature of Evans's unique photograph ends and the institutional statutes claiming this originality begins. One dividing line can of course be drawn at the very entrance to the modernist art museum, where an exemplary print is usually held in reserve as a distinguished measure of authenticity. But while the image is held hostage, the Evans name is released through cheap mass reproductions to accumulate, through this dispersal, a cultural capital that is primarily invested in what is withheld. It appears that the firstborn triplet arrived with a highly suggestive and foreboding title: Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

[2]

Let us then, in the twist of a return, turn to the second copy of this image. In 1936, Walter Benjamin was working his usual nocturnal hours to put the finishing touches on a manuscript he would publish that same year under the title The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. A visionary manifesto for the last few decades, it has arguably become the most quoted and misquoted translation of German to English and modern to postmodern ever produced, Although the text is familiar by now (while its nuances arguably remain confounding), it is worth recalling that Benjamin argued for a decline of authenticity as a result of mechanical reproduction. A copy could not lay claim to the eliminated elements that Benjamin subsumed in the word "aura"--an object's unique existence in space and time coupled with its historical testimony and place within tradition. Inherently reproductive means such as photography and film could, according to Benjamin, release art from a ritual based on authenticity and return it t o a political practice. Cult value would in short be traded for a cultural reevaluation once the authority of the object, no longer uniquely situated due to the proliferation of copies, was open to question. Despite his revolutionary hopes, Benjamin issued a couple of early warning signs that the authority trading in authenticity would not be relinquished without alternative entrenchments. He both observed and foresaw a growing emphasis on the human countenance as a lasting bastion for the cult value of the photograph, and introduced captions, a feature of the emerging picture magazines, with the words that "they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting." (5)

When Sherrie Levine stepped up to the copy stand with Walker Evans's exhibition catalog First and Last in 1979, (6) it is somewhat misconstrued to think that she had the spectral "aura" of the object foremost in mind as so many commentators have argued. She was plainly shooting from the feminist hip at the authority it commanded. The sharecroppers Evans posed against their rickety shack in 1936 had by now been promoted to the canon of modernism, and Levine was plainly after the values this movement had accumulated under the auspices of a few proper names, Evans among them, and an equally narrow selection of images. She was, to put it very succinctly, critically addressing each and every syllable of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Following Benjamin's initial prescription, Levine's object appropriation obviously aimed to show that there was nothing intrinsic about these images that made them masterpieces (they were in fact infinitely reproducible through the very process that claimed to make them unique), but her most troubling offense or critical endeavor, depending on one's point of view, was found in the subversive record of attribution that she provided. just like the portrait that once belonged to the face of a sharecropper was now recognized as an Evans, Levine called the object her own and paid homage to its source only in the title, an established strategy, it should be duly noted, approved and practiced by photographers, art historians and curators worldwide. Levine pointed out that the natural ability of photography to produce originals was also susceptible to cultural copying, and that the distinction was largely maintained by the application of proper names and their personal styles, a small yet problematic addendum necessa ry to make photography a contender within the domain of art. But it can equally be argued that Levine did not appropriate the image" at all, since it, empirically at least, remains the same for the sake of even pursuing the postmodern argument. A neglected point arising with Levine's prefix to Evans's era lies in her restoration of a photographic reproduction (Levine photographed from an exhibition catalog) to the level of a photograph, thereby reversing the material path of dissemination from depreciated copy to bona fide original, and in a second stroke of conceptual flair she overturned the valorized nomination it sought--a reproduction attributed to Evans was translated into a novel Levine.

The closing account from the above summary of Benjamin's pioneering essay indicates that all of Levine's 1979 actions, and their consequent counteractions, were foreseen in 1936. As tentatively envisaged by Benjamin (although Benjamin arguably referred to the human countenance), the modernist trademark of authenticity had sought refuge in the hierarchical nomenclature of select human beings and disseminated their names in place of a withering presence. The fading Faces preserved in memoriam were animated by a personal, timeless and infinitely reproducible style to rescue an original from a copy and turn reproduction into an ally of authority--a double move where the object becomes a vehicle for the name and tradition follows the trajectory of a resume. Levine's resistance to Accommodation, an agenda that must paradoxically include a certain rejection of adaptation and hence also appropriation, was quickly translated into an appreciation of transformation, articulating the post prefix institutions were stutter ing to pronounce. Her rephotographed reproduction now finds itself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Evans's twin offering. No doubt filed under separate names--Evans and Levine--in different categories--original and copy--and two periods apart--modern and postmodern--their close affinities in this context have, ironically but fittingly, made them into equals and not adversaries.

[3]

Let us, in another turn, return to the third version of this image. In 1936, a German engineer named Konrad Zuse was assembling what was to become the first digital computer in the living room of a Berlin apartment. Using discarded 35mm movie film, Zuse created, as Lev Manovich has argued, (7) the first media processor by overwriting the iconic code of the photographic image with binary punch marks used to store and retrieve data. Accompanying Zuse's efforts that very year, Alan Turing, a British mathematician, published his blueprint article, "On Computable Numbers," for the general-purpose computer named after its inventor--the Universal Turing Machine. For historians and theorists of new media alike, 1936 was a pivotal year in the development of modern computing.

What arose from this primeval soup was generic source code. Zuse's literal old and new media palimpsest booted the digital process that has transformed, or perhaps more accurately transcoded any suitable entity into a numerical representation by means of digitization. But sampled in discrete units, each assigned a numerical value, the representational object has arguably survived its journey through the circuit board in qualified strings of data to arrive, on display, in a shape met with recognition. Although the question of material substance has been raised beyond reach and the digital process has extended the previous dilemma of originals versus copies to a degree of obsolescence, the data still maintains a structure and organization that is anchored in familiar cultural expressions. Sentences may be fancifully floating off the baseline on bezier curves, but their construction and appeal for meaning, branching strains of hypertext not withstanding, rely upon a sense of syntax and grammar advertised by that very first ABC on reading and writing. Images may also arrive on a different media bandwidth via the bourgeoning industry of digital capture, but within those equally spaced pixels there are obviously remnants of silver that still, somehow, deliver an indexical statement that suppresses its widening contradiction in terms. While programs and algorithms will no doubt influence the usual flow of text with tributaries from the bit stream and the direct flight of light will be further reflected in digital processing, the analog traces Zuse once punctured with his digital development obviously remain mere punctuations in a much larger matrix.

When Michael Mandiberg launched his Internet browser and registered AfterSherrieLevine.com, he claimed a domain that was already heavily contested outside the WHOIS database. Mandiberg's Web site currently found under this URL features a gallery of thumbnails that links to a digital set of Levine's images. Scanned at the same size as her photographs housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the downloadable, high-resolution files seek to rival the detail and sharpness of silver-gelatin prints when output. They also come complete with authenticating certificates, available in PDF, and identical framing instructions for the finished pieces. Mandiberg is obviously trying to beat Levine at her own game here by not only duplicating the work of his direct predecessors but also inviting further copying. He explicitly seeks out the digital clause of open source to disseminate the image far beyond copyright infringements, offering it to anyone with an Internet connection and an inkjet peripheral. While Levine photogra phically reproduced the reproduction on a moderate scale to both restore and destroy its uniqueness, thus drawing attention to the facilities and instrumentalities of that medium, Mandiberg seeks to dispose of the limited editions and Cartesian coordinates associated with material objects altogether, thereby highlighting the potent capacities for dispersal in an electronic sphere.

As enlightening as this strategy may be with regards to the immense reproductive glow of channeled electrons, it is perhaps only of concern in this context when we stubbornly continue to trace the punctuated lineage of these triplets backwards, from Mandiberg to Levine to Evans, and in the process secure the individual conceptions that set them apart. The increasingly fluid question of authenticity and substance arises in these relations, and the insistent return to technologies and formats--photographs, reproductions, digital files--accentuates these differences and further anchors them by separating the expressions through proprietary captions. Whether the three are indistinguishable or not can only really be answered by providing one or more reference points, but technological distinctions and their material counterparts, detectable through mode of display, visual scrutiny or material analyses, are plainly not all that is at stake here (anyone with a decent camera or scanner and a valid library card can pr oduce untold variations of an Evans, a Levine or a Mandiberg). Significantly, each protagonist, each triplet, claims both a carnal, historical and epistemological distinction, and it is arguably in the complex conjunctures of these that we must now contend with three instead of one.

Mandiberg's title, like most titles dealing in photography, serves as the generic source code to his, the third, subject. The titular domain now hosting the image is obviously once more trespassing on the Evans estate by openly declaring its projected lineage of appropriating household names in the guise of another, purposefully indexical, expression. A pronounced advocate of open source and its profound dispersal, Mandiberg, like Levine before him, does not escape the imperative dictum forwarded by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Despite, or rather because of, the inevitable effects of the digital ether, there was another institutional closure around this expression, this name, when Rhizome.org immediately included it in its online database for exemplary projects worthy of archival stature. The copy and paste of legacies through legends, the movement whereby one identity now passes into another and retains its trace, is perfectly poised to continue in the same vein.

[?]

Conceiving of the three images as triplets 'born' at the same moment has only served to subdue the conundrum of an origin, or three, arising when each image is predominantly considered a distinctive individual. The captioned bylines and triplicate reproductions that initially set them apart on these pages have in the last few paragraphs matured into a common lifeline of relations and connections, affinities that negotiate the material, historical and epistemological spaces each of them seek to inhabit with some exclusivity. The privileges awarded in this process seem less certain when we are forced to recognize the contingencies that reach from one to the other like shared umbilical cords in a continuous trade of intellectual property for conceptual capital. On a purely empirical level, it seems that our eyes do not actually deceive us. With each removal logged in 1941, 1979 and 2001 respectively, we have returned to a set of characteristics and conditions found to be present at an earlier date, and the later logics addressing the newly altered, yet repeatedly essential, qualities of the image--photograph, reproduction, original, copy, analog, digital--all rely equally on a precursor to assert an identity.

But it also becomes clear that each of these important negotiations have entered into what has become a standardized contract. In the margin of this strangely uniform palimpsest a new label has repetitively been added to mark and declare its differences, and while the nomination process of Evans, Levine and Mandiberg can be seen and read as the articulation of a new subject in a changing object, continually seeking the proper name for a noun, a reader in the place of an author and a personalized narrative in the vast space of history, it returns to the same structure of assimilation--the object, the author and history is always restored in that singular gesture of renewed appellation. Without getting into the fine print of the contract under scrutiny, it is this consumption of the individual in the public sphere (and its ideological apparatuses responsible for inscribing the distinction) that is hard to refute and ultimately refuse.

The compelling command issued by these copy and paste operations, the very process whereby triplets are born, has arguably turned the recurring object into a trademark prop and not a pensive agitator--who's who plainly precedes what's what when genitive and repetition work hand in hand. To pursue this genealogy further, into quadruplets and beyond, we must first consider that the current electronic climate assures us that every generation will remain virtually the same: copy and paste has indeed entered a reproductive cycle that is incestuous by default. I extend this look at captioned legends to Michael Mandiberg with the suggestion that the Macintosh keystrokes for copy and paste together compose a commanding acronym for Curriculum Vitae--Command C.V.

NOTES

(1.) The shortlist or 14 is lifted from Rodger Kingston. Walker Evans in Print An Illustrated Bibliography, (Belmont, MA: Rodger Kingston. 7 clarendon Road, MA 02178 1995).

(2.) James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (New York: Ballatine Books, 1974), p. XV.

(3.) James Agee and walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (New York: Ballatine Books, 1974), P. 405.

(4.) Subsequent monographs on Walker Evans, many produced under the purview or the Evans estate after his death in 1973, has continued to offer generic captions for these Images, often listing just occupation (tenant farmer or sharecropper), place and date of capture.

(5.) Walter Benjamin. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) p. 226.

(6.) Walker Evans, First and Last (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

(7.) Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 25.

RELATED ARTICLE: INDICES

[1] Walker Evans, image scan from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (New York: Ballatine Books, 1974), 1936/1941.

[2] Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, resampled image file from AfterSherrieLevine.com, 1979/2001.

[3] Michael Mandiberg, resampled image file from AfterMichaelMandiberg.com, 2001.

[4] Michael Mandiberg, screen capture of AftersherrieLevine.com featuring an image from Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans" series, 2001.

[5] Kendall Bruns, screen capture of AfterMichaelMandiberg.com featuring an image from Michael Mandiberg's AfterSherrieLevine.com, 2001.

[6] Badur Ramji, screen capture of Scream.ca featuring a screen capture from AfterMichaelMandiberg.com, 2001.

* Michael Mandiberg Mirror

* Do you see the playful pun of Command C.V. to be characteristic of your AfterSherrieLevine.com project, in the sense that it can be read as a readymade copy and paste entry for the CV.?

A lot of these questions of the C.V. point to the larger problem of commerce and art, and questions of artmaking as a commercial practice, even when it doesn't aim to make money directly from the product. The Idea returns to Andy Warhol's invention of the artist as brand. One could argue that I was building a brand when I launched the sites, and that I still am right now, either to sell other objects, to sell myself as a professor, or to gain access to grant funding. Once you move your perceptions in that direction, It is hard to look at any art practice as other than branding. Even a collaboration, which supposedly disowns authorship, becomes the ultimate branding machine, as it is disassociated with any single Author figure. It can be occupied by anyone who occupies the brand-space.

Have you heard from Sherrie Levine, or from her galleries--you did take "Paula Cooper Gallery" as the title of your show?

No, I haven't heard from them, They realize that If they pursue me, they would cause themselves more trouble than if they leave me alone. A cease-and-desist letter in this case would also compromise the conceptual value of Levine's work I partially wanted to Provoke her anger and create a role reversal. I found some erroneous information when I was researching, which indicated that she had been taken to court for the copies, much like Jeff Koons was (the source had probably, confused the two). This prompted a vision of "writing" a play that took the transcript of these court proceedings and flipped the roles, turning her into the accuser and me Into the defendant. I would speak her defense back at her, a defense that was spelled out in the script of the play. Alas, it was too good to be true, as she reached an agreement without ever going to court. Instead I took two of her Interview transcripts and turned them into plays, which are on the Web sites.

You seem to have done a fair amount of research?

The research became part of the project, and the project took on an educational aspect. It sought to shed some light on this art-act that immediately entered the textbooks, but was rarely pictured.

It is very difficult to find reproductions of Sherrie Levine's work. I found three books with illustrations in the New York Public Library, only a few images from Art in America and her galleries claimed to have none of her slides. The only way I was able to see her photographs was to gain access to the actual prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of course, it is ironic that her process is supposedly about reproduction and distribution, and after several months of research the only way I was able to see her work was to track down her "originals."

What is the significance that AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com have in turn been copied?

They were copied twice in fact, and within hours of each other: once at Scream.ca by Badur Ramji and again at After MichaelMandiberg.com by Kendall Bruns. It is worth noting that [e-mail] posted a genealogy of the domain names involved to the Rhizome, Nettime and Syndicate listserves shortly after Bruns purchased AfterMichaelMandiberg.com. The genealogy ends with an open call for someone to purchase AfterKendallBruns.com, which was bought shortly thereafter by Yann Serandour, whom I believe Is behind the email alias [e-mail]. I think another factor is that throughout this genealogy the object was a product of cultural forces, and it would have been produced regardless of who the specific author was--which is part of what the Introduction points to in tracing everything back to cultural events surrounding an origin in 1963. If you look at the case of Walker Evans, there are numerous other photographers with a similar output. Likewise, Sherrie Levine was by no means unique in her appropriative move. If she had not rephotographed art works then someone else would have--Louise Lawler for example. When I actualized this project I very carefully researched it to see if anyone had done anything similar. Though I found nothing. I was contacted by an artist named Eileen Martinez after the launch who told me about a piece she had done two years ago called "After Sherrie Levine" where she searched through books and magazines photographing all the images she could find from Levine's "After Walker Evans' series. The portfolio consisted of 4 photographs. Despite differences in our choice of process and our means of reproduction, we are all, to some degree, engaged in the same project.

Can you discuss your focus on objects as property, both in relation to this project and your identity franchise in Shop Mandiberg?

Both projects are attempts to negotiate and destabilize the art object as a commodity. With Shop Mandiberg (www.Mandiberg.com), which is an e-commerce site that sells all of my possessions, I took objects that already had a financial value, and placed them in an ambiguous consumer context, where they can be read, or purchased, as an "art object' or as a plain "object." With AfterSherrieLevine.com and AfterWalkerEvans.com took an object that had cultural value--that was an art object--and used the certificate of authenticity, the defensive tool of the art market, to keep it from having any stable financial value. It was an attempt to take a tool that had been used to commercially stabilize radical practices of the 1970s and 80s, and use that stabilizing tool to radicalize the now stable practice of appropriation.

In this era it does seem more conventional to appropriate, yet you seem to see your use of appropriation as; different from other uses of appropriation.

Yes and no. To defend appropriation for a moment, one of the things artists of that generation articulated was the impossibility to conceive of cultural production as anything other than appropriation. In contrast, the use of the certificate attempts to do something different than what was done by, or maybe done to those artists working with appropriation around 1980, I did not want these pieces to become instant commodities, both in terms of objects and concepts, like the work of Levine's generation.

If the object is not to be sold, how is the artist to stay alive?

Well that's the question, and I don't really have an answer, only more questions. There are very few ways outside of the system of exchange. Which Is the more valid act in this admittedly parodic example: making an object and selling it to a corporate collection, working for that corporation in order to finance your commodity--free art practice, or receiving a grant/residency/professorship funded by that corporation? What is the purpose of critical art practice, or postmodern identity art, If its venom is inoculated by its assimilation? What is the meaning of art as social critique, when the very people that it is critiquing purchase the art?