David Kishik of Notes from the Coming Community (and author of Wittgenstein’s Form of Life) has up on his blog two music videos mashed-up by the video artist Kutiman (aka Israeli musician Ophir Kutiel).
But in what way, exactly, are Kutiman’s works mashups? The prevailing theories — Vague Terrain, Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory, the whole remix/copyleft movement — tend to conceive of the mashup as 1) depending on the audience’s recognition of the samples, and/or 2) interacting, on a legal level, with the copyright laws governing sampling; but Kutiman’s work does none of that. The samples are ‘found‘ fragments, a different status entirely, and the audience is in no way expected to recognize the source, or the ‘trace’, as it is frequently described. So how, then, are we to describe the effects, and beauty, of, say,”I’m New” [embedded below]?
Putting the dominant remix theory in perspective, Kutiman’s ThruYOU album (of which “I’m New” is the third track) shows just how defined by ‘referentiality’ the former has become — to the point where mashed-up texts that do not explicitly refer to, or ‘cite’, other, already known works are discounted from consideration. “I’m New” shows this plainly. The video is a mashup, but without intelligible outside reference. There are credits, yes, but the work is composed from found YouTube videos – which is why copyright considerations, and their associated sampling strategies, are for the most part extraneous to his work.
This isn’t to say that copyright issues aren’t somehow touched-upon in Kutiman’s work. They are, but in a different sense altogether from classic remix works, the most famous being Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (which mashes Jay-Z’s The Black Album with unauthorized samples from The Beatles’ LP The White Album). Kutiman, however, strategically renders the politics of sampling moot by using authorized, found samples, which involves copyright only to the extent of neutralizing its application. The same could be said for the question of ‘sample recognition’. The samples are recognizable, but in a different sense than customary. As the ‘album sleeve’ puts it, “what you see is what you hear”. Since the video sources of the remixed sounds are shown throughout, mostly in accompaniment to what is heard, recognition is maximized, though the form of intertextuality produced hardly participates in the sort of closed economy of texts that the prevailing remix theories favor.
In fact, it is from this closed textual economy, where remixes are expected to refer to and modify other well-known texts, that Kutiman liberates the mashup. Which is also why détournement, the Situationist term for the artistic, politicized reuse of popular, well-known media documents (and the term Kishik uses to introduce Kutiman’s works), is exactly what Kutiman’s work is not. There is nothing recognizable, mainstream, or parodied in Kutiman’s work or method. The sources are not used to be turned against themselves, ironically or politically. He is only interested in the aesthetic effects and possibilities of the sources, which are, moreover, decidedly folk or amateur in nature. If anything, Kutiman subjects the concept of détournement to its own law of disruption, freeing the technique of appropriation and citation from the superficial conception of subversion that has come to restrict it.
Finally, where the dominant theories focus on the mashup’s mashing-up of texts, Kutiman’s work mashes-up much more than texts. Wildly diverse traditions, aesthetics, performers, and settings — in short, whole milieux — form a cultural smorgasbord that seems to take us on a tour of the nation and of music, and all through a decidedly folk, populist (rather than popular) sensibility. Brilliant musical moments are discovered and extracted from easily overlooked, mundane sources. In place of the institution and the ‘text’, thus appear ‘the people’ and their private, unassuming talents: high school bands, recording sessions, instructional videos, private performances, industrial videos, webcam solos, and amateur rap videos all make an appearance. The album cover even recommends that you “Check out the credits for each video — you might find yourself …” And it’s this kind of endearing pulp folkism that, I think, truly recovers Benjamin’s revolutionary philosophy of montage and citation, which the dominant theories have unfortunately disposed of in twisting his words to their purposes. For these reasons, amongst others, we can also, I think, safely call Kutiman a technical master and a virtuoso, a term that today, for reasons still unclear, seems very much in search of an author.
