KEEP ON GENERATING
ON CORNELIA SOLLFRANK'S MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIPS
Jacob Lillemose
[Inside the book, p. 44]
TO COPY OR NOT TO COPY - THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION
Another important aspect of Cornelia Sollfrank's net.art generator and her use of Warhol's flower motif is the challenge of copyright in the context of art history and culture in general. The challenge is not only formulated through the generated images. In the exhibition project This is not by me, the images are complemented by three videos that extend the challenge to the level of a philosophical, a legal and an aesthetic discourse. Featuring herself, four lawyers and Andy Warhol, the videos' intentionally dry documentary style contrast the images' exuberant visual energy. However, the videos are inseparable from the images, and vice versa. They constitute each other's paratexts, so to speak. The videos emphasize the fact that the images are not pure visual entities in the tradition of Modernism that Warhol still believed in, despite his irony. The images generated by the net.art generator (like images in general) are traversed by cultural languages or-to use a term that is more appropriate in this context-by cultural codes. Warhol definitely was aware of this 'coded' condition of images, that is what he played with, and Sollfrank is aware of that when she uses Warhol to address the codes or the codedness of his images. She thereby shifts the focus of perception from the realm of the visual to the realm of the conceptual6 and the net.art generator comes to generate not only images but also discourse. A discourse that, contrary to how Foucault defined it, does not try to exercise power but to distort power in the name of artistic conceptualizations, fictions and imaginaries; and it is namely the discourse of copyright, originality and authorship that Sollfrank distorts with her discourse, the very discourse which was essential to the Modernism formed around American painting and sculpture in the post-war period parallel to the emergence of a new political and economical culture of individualism; a version of Modernism that Warhol responded to by working in the tradition of other versions of Modernism, namely the avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century, including Constructivism, Dada and Duchamp.
[...]