The Copy

Catalog description

The aura of an object and the speculative nature that surrounds its copy is a tenuous relationship that spans centuries and has only become exponentially more convoluted by today’s technological ability to replicate and repeat. This arts workshop will look at how the copy, the counterfeit and the accumulation of likenesses function in contemporary artistic practices. Can the counterfeit or a facsimile have more impact and cultural value than its original? Can a collection of copies be more powerful than a collection of originals by altering the artistic intent behind it? Examples of copying and replication in visual art will be historically situated while student projects consciously work to problematize the notion of the original, its context, and the power of the copy to alter the reception of the original. The course will engage the work of artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Liz Magic Laser, Fred Wilson and Orson Welles, and include texts by scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Hito Steyerl, Arthur C. Danto, and Walter Benjamin. Students will employ myriad techniques in making copies, leading towards a small-scale mass production of their own design through conventional casting processes (e.g. mother molds, rubber, alginate, plaster), while integrating other analog, digital and conceptual approaches to collecting, altering and reproducing. Paralleling historical research, students will work through projects that amass collections and their means of display, render copies of objects toward a transgressive outcome, and situate these copies in a manner that informs their newfound context.