Screen Tests art and the public domain

Marysia:

Thanks to CIMAM
And Sheena Wagstaff for the invitation

Lovely hospitality

This film playing is called Screen Tests, and Neil will talk about how we made it – and in what context – a little later. But before that I want to say something more generally about our practice.

I came to London from Poland in the late 1980s, and began working with Neil in 1995, so over ten years ago, and in our collaborative practice we have a long-standing interest in public archives and collections.

We think that the site of our practice –which is not necessarily a gallery- doesn’t really exist before our act of engagement, we try to create the site through research.

And its for this reason, that archives and collections are interesting to us.
In that they are places where exchanges are made between people and things.

Our first very long-term research project was a book – unattached to any other event or exhibition – called The Value of Things, which was published in 2000. And we researched for about five years, and developed a parallel history of the public museum and the department store, using Selfridge’s, the first purpose-built department store in London, and the British Museum; we explored how these institutions formed us as modern individuals.

In 2001 we completed two years of research at the invitation of Tate Modern, which was called Capital; it was commissioned by senior curator Francis Morris, and also involved the Bank of England. We researched the structuring of financial and cultural economies through the two institutions, and triggered the project through a very particular gesture; which is the reciprocation implicit in the gift. And as we know, all cultural institutions are really run on gifts, while all financial institutions are run on debt. As part of the project we produced a limited edition print (although we never specified how limited it was), which was given away by members if staff at both institutions to unspecified visitors.

Then more recently, again out of an interest in something that may not already exist as a collection or archive, we initiated a research project which took me back to Poland. Out of that research we made a project called Enthusiasts, which was first shown in Warsaw at the Centre for Contemporary Art, at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2004. And later, due to an amazing response from Iwona Blaswick, at the Whitechapel in London, and later Kunst-Werke and the Tàpies Foundation who all collaborated in staging different editions of the project as Enthusiasm.

What it was really about, those two years’ research, was the remnants of amateur film clubs which existed in Poland, attached to factories in the former regime – well, under Communism.

We tried to find the films made by workers at that time. And, of course, all this material was totally – well, it wasn’t really valued by anyone except the people who made the films. So we felt there was this whole cultural production excluded from official collections or institutions, pretty much for two reasons, probably: one, they were films made by amateurs; and two, they were made under communism.

The project is really complete in some ways, by having been shown in diverse institutions, although it has grown a more permanent archival extension; we’ve created an online archive, at Enthusiasts: archive.
Because we relied so much on the generosity of the film-makers, who wanted to their films to be seen again and gave us access to pretty much everything, we thought it would be good to negotiate with them, that these films will now be available under ‘open’ Creative Commons’ licences. So, if you like, we’ve already used the films in our Enthusiasts projects, and now others can have access, and use them for something else.

The Enthusiasts’ project initiated an online archive, which connects to our longstanding fascination with archives. And it was very interesting for us to hear yesterday how Claire talked about establishing the Asian Art Archive, and, of course, what Dan and Lia are doing in Bucharest to – as Lia put it – try to preserve, or save memories from being lost.

And archives have an increasingly powerful grip on the reproduction of culture. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida diagnosed a virulent Archive Fever at work in his famous book (of the same name). There’s an astonishing growth in digital databases of images and information through databanks and image libraries, knowledge which is not always public, in fact its increasingly commercialised through the growth of intellectual property regimes. We are all implicated in this process.

And public collections of art in museums and galleries actually store most, probably up to 80%, of their collections at any one time. So again there is, you know, a question of how much of it we ever see or have access to. The collections in Britain at least can never let go of their accumulated material, they can never de-accession.

But public archives, like public collections, are built on the property of multiple authors and previous owners. And yet unlike a collection, an archive designates a territory and not a particular narrative (authored by a collector or curator), and that’s a very important distinction. I know yesterday there were some question about why we call certain things ‘archives’ or ‘libraries’ or ‘collections’, and I think that this distinction is crucial.

In other words, there is no imperative for the archive to display or interpret its holdings, and therefore meanings are up for grabs. So it’s a discursive terrain. There is a creative potential for things to be articulated, not already authored as someone’s, let’s say, the curator’s, narrative, or as someone’s property. Which means that interpretations are invited and not pre-determined, which may be why there is a creative space that artists and others are responding to. And that’s really the raw material of our culture. And it’s also important to say that in our practice we are very interested in working with what already exists, and trying to understand under what conditions it came to existence and what value it may have beyond history. So it’s really an almost ecological project about how to bring existing objects and images to relevance again.

And I would just like to say as a closing remark before Neil takes over, that maybe, as Sheena suggested in her introduction, our attention has also shifted from consumption to participation.

Neil

OK, can we have a tiny bit of sound? Just for...

Thank you.

OK, that was just to show you that there is sound in both films. So I’m going to explain a little bit about the films you’re watching. They were commissioned by the British Art Show Six , which is a five-yearly exhibition that takes place here in Britain and is intended to be a survey of contemporary British art. It’s co-ordinated here by the Hayward Gallery in London, but it tours to four British cities which compete to host the exhibition.

So we were commissioned by the curators, Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker, to make a new work, which is unusual for the British Art Show: they usually exhibit existing artworks. We choose to collaborate with two other artists ; we collaborated with Eileen Simpson and Ben White, and together we began to research the four cities for the British Art Show: Nottingham, Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle.

And we realised that each city hosts the Regional Film and Television Archive for the region of Britain that they’re in. So we contacted each archive about the possibility of using some film material in their archive, and said we wanted to make a new film from this material, so asked if we could use out-of-copyright film – what’s called ‘orphan film’, film-material that you don’t know who the owner is, or material that is already in the public domain. And like other collecting institutions, these archives are publicly funded, which means they get public money to run and they rely on donations from generous individuals, from bequests, from gifts, and from local companies and local TV companies to give them material.

So we tried to make our intentions clear to these archives. We also said we wanted to use out-of-copyright sound and spoken words, from the British Library or the Library of Congress to make a new soundtrack for each of the new films that we were proposing. We’ve had some experience of working with archives before, particularly on Enthusiasts, an earlier project in Warsaw, that also toured as Enthusiasm to London, Berlin and Barcelona.

For the British Art Show, we’d said we’d make a film from the film material in each city and would add the film to each location on the exhibition tour. We also said that if we could find enough money we’d like to produce a DVD of our films - the new films we were making - but we also suggested we’d like to include the archival source films and audio, because we’ve been interested for some time – and Michelangelo Pistoletto mentioned this yesterday – in free software. And we were using, if you like, a free software model of releasing a work of art, by including its ‘source’ code.

Free software is enabled by something called an ‘open-content licence’ or a ‘copy-left licence’. What these licences do is they act as extensions to copyright. They extend certain rights to others to use, modify and redistribute the appropriately licensed material. At the heart of these new kind of licences, is a kind of viral intention: and it’s this, that as a user of open content licensed material, you must in turn, pass on (through your new work) those rights to use, modify and redistribute to everyone else.

So, rather ingeniously, what free software has done and what the licences enable, is the building a new kind of public domain, or public realm, where the artwork or material cannot be re-enclosed and cannot be re-appropriated as property, through copyright.

So we made this clear to the archives from the beginning. We intended the release of the DVD with our new films, and the ‘source’ material to open up a kind of discussion in collecting institutions about the nature of public archives; what does it mean to say that something is ‘public’?

There’s a growing interest in the public domain and the public realm, and of exploring new models of creative practice. As a contemporary artist, what kind of practices can we use to continue and enrich, creativity itself?

The first public archive, in Newcastle, which was the first place on the exhibition tour, after several letters and telephone calls refused point blank to have anything to do with our project. The second archive, in Manchester, were happy for us to use some archival material, but they made us sign a contract where they tried to stipulate what we could and could not do with that material; they said we could show it in the designated exhibitions of the British Art Show, but once the exhibition was finished we must cease from showing the work.

So imagine doing that with a book. Imagine lending a book to someone and saying, ‘Ah, er, on Friday you have to give it back, you are not allowed to make notes from it, and you’re not allowed to lend it to anyone else.’ So rights are being claimed over digital material that we would not consider with other kinds of public material or ‘content’.

The film you saw earlier is called Screen Tests, part of our contribution to the British Art Show, its made from film material from Manchester, and is set in the Manchester School of Art during the period 1929 to 1934.

Now copyright, as I’m sure you’re all only too well aware, is based on restriction and rights of exclusion. And through the fixed term of copyright exclusion, creative work is removed from the public domain, which denies any legal possibility of the work’s creative re-use by others without express permission. You have to ask permission in writing and, depending on the whim of the copyright holder (or the authorized curator), you may or may not be granted access to that material.

Now there’s a logic, of course, in copyright when it’s applied to owners and authors of physical material goods, a logic of scarcity and a bounded relationship between people and things. This much I can understand. But this logic dissolves when it’s applied to media made for reproduction, like film or immaterial goods like ideas, information, or previously distinct material translated into digital code, which is endlessly replicable, at marginal cost with no appreciable loss of quality.

So as I mentioned earlier, most public media archives are assembled from donated material. Gifts. And these gifts are usually accepted with the agreement that the management of the copyright embedded in the material is assigned to the archive. Or, as we discovered, even though we found film which was out of copyright, the nitrate and celluloid – so, this is a hard thing to understand – the material the film is stuck to, the nitrates and celluloid, belong to the archive. So even though the ‘content’ of the film is in the public domain, some archives claim property rights over the physical substrate, and deny access

Some archives, of course, attempt to use access rights to generate income, to fund their activities, which is fair enough. But the people they sell these rights to, or on-sell their reproduction rights, tend to be commercial broadcasting corporations; consequently, one minute of film time can cost £3,000. That’s often a standard fee.

Effectively, our moving-image cultural history, our public film and broadcast culture, is being expropriated from the very people who paid for its production. People like me, and you. It’s like charging tens of thousands of pounds to visit a museum or gallery.

So we suggest that there is a conflict blossoming at the heart of culture, a conflict convened around the private property rights that subsist in materials stored in public archives. And Screen Tests, the films that you were watching, set out to try and explore this conflict while enriching rather than depleting the public domain.

By using an ‘open content’ license for Screen Tests, we tried to contribute, rather than remove material from the public domain. And as the Arts Council funded the Screen Tests DVD we decided to freely give it away to visitors during the British Art Show.

The Manchester Art Gallery – I’m sorry, the archive in Manchester whom we worked with, who we had signed a contract with, when they realised we’d raised money to make the DVD, finally understood the implications of what we were doing – we were going to give away three old bits of film from their archive! And they then tried to rescind the agreement in the contract that we’d signed with them. They bullied us. They refused to negotiate and they threatened legal action if we released this DVD with ‘their’ film material included. We then had to go an intellectual property lawyer to defend our case. And it was proven – well it wasn’t actually proven, because it never went to court – but our advice from the lawyer was that we were within the terms of our contract to include the film material on the DVD.

In the end we decided not to include the Manchester ‘source’ films, because we didn’t want to antagonise the archive: we wanted to test, and make a point about the changing nature of the public and the public realm. So there’s no Manchester ‘source’ material on the DVD.

In contrast, the archives in Bristol and in Nottingham were extremely helpful, extremely happy to participate in the project, and made all their film ‘sources’ readily available.

OK, I’m sorry, I’m conscious of running out of time.

So through founding the Enthusiasts archive that you can find online, and through this project Screen Tests, we simultaneously wanted to stimulate a discussion about what constitutes the public function of collection institutions. In an age characterised by relentless privatisation, what is their public function? Is it to collect, store and protect artefacts, or is it to vividly re-imagine their public function, by allowing access and encouraging people reuse that material?

Those of us in Britain are conscious there’s a huge amount of publicity at the moment for something called Web 2.0, which is basically recognising that users are driving the content on the World Wide Web, through copying, modifying and redistributing. Things like Wikipedia, or YouTube or Flickr, where the content is being driven by the public themselves.

And also we want to challenge the lazy notions of creative practice,
to replace artistic exchanges facilitated by restriction and by artificial scarcity with those of generosity and collaboration.

So thanks to the generosity of anonymous donations to these archives, thanks to the British taxpayer, we’re able to give you

– I’m sorry, we only have a hundred left,

but as you leave after the end of this session, a hundred people will be able to pick up the last remaining copies of Screen Tests.

Thank you.

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