[Rumori] Glamour of Theft

[Erick Gallun]

At 05:45 PM 7/15/03 -0700, Steev Hise wrote:

>I've been talking about 3 "phases" of cultural recycling for a
>while, they don't neccesarily always go in this order for
>everyone, and some artists oscillate back and forth, but anyway:
>
>  1. The Pleasure of the Intertext
>  2. The Glamour of Theft
>  3.  (i don't have a zippy phrase for this one) appropriation as
>tool for getting other stuff done
>
>It would be interesting to take a survey on where everyone things
>they are amongst these.

This is an interesting question, Steev.  I have actually given up 
appropriation from the  media entirely at this point.  I became concerned 
that the most interesting aspects of my sound organizing activities were 
due to the use of sounds that somebody else had slaved over in order to 
make it sound so interesting.  Same with my video collages.  Consequently, 
I now record all of my own sounds with a minidisc and record all of my 
video with a camera.  Could I point my mics or lenses at a tv or a 
speaker?  Sure.  But I find the work I'm doing now to be an order of 
magnitude more interesting than anything I did where I was confined by the 
already highly structued sources I got from the media.

How did I get here?  By working through the stages you list above and 
coming out at 4.  Emphasis on the Aesthetics of the Final Work
Consequently, I rarely pipe up on this list, despite a fairly close reading 
of it.  I am quite sure that I will end up back at stage 3. at some point, 
or possibly a stage 5. that involves using appropriated material because it 
works so perfectly for the result I'm interested in.  But anyway, I think I 
really need to make art that I like to listen to and look at long after I'm 
done, and I found that the appeal of manipulating the media environment 
didn't stick around for long after the Glamour of Theft wore off.  In fact, 
it was a distraction.  My work wasn't commenting on the work I was sampling 
in a very deep way, so it didn't really bear much repeated listening.  The 
really good stuff tended to totally distort the sources beyond 
recognizability, anyway.  So why not really be able to say "yes, this is 
ALL my work".

So, okay, back to lurking.  But, I'm curious what folks think about this.

(Oh, by the way, I get to sign this...)

Dr. Erick Gallun
Psychoacoustics Lab
Boston University