Week Three - Notions of Originality and Bricolage

“He who imitates must have a care that what he writes might be similar, not identical…”

--Petrarch, Le familiari, XXXIII (14thc)

There is a fine line between stealing someone else’s work, and being inspired by it to create an idea derived from the original. It is like taking a concept and turning it on its head. However, the questions we have to ask is what originality means in abstract terms and how do you recognize it in material terms. Even with the copyright laws, we still remain undecided about whether the work of art was a copy by the artist of an original, or just an idea taken to prove a point in today’s world. This could be due to the fact that people are aware of the themes and historical concepts of previous artworks especially if it were by a Master, and the artist uses that to his advantage to put across the message in a more modern context. Here I use the example of David Lachapelle’s work The Rape of Africa. The idea is a direct reference from Botticelli’s work “Venus and Mars” (1483). While the original painting touches upon the vulnerability of the male sex portrayed by Mars, the Roman God of war, who has fallen asleep having removed all his armour as Venus, the goddess of love watches over him letting little satyrs play with his armoury. This captures the theme of war being conquered by love.

Venus and Mars - Bottecelli

“I feel that we are living in a very precarious time, with environmental devastation, economic instability, religious wars and excessive consumption in times of instability.” These are Lachapelle’s words to describe his artwork. However, though it resembles the original in setting, his interpretation of his own work is that by proposing a black Venus depicting Africa, who is completely powerless, unable to fight against being treated as property and to the destruction of her land through war and mining while Mars lies satiated by his victories and plunder. It also provides a very bone-jarring imagery of young children with deadly weaponry.  Through this he engages his work with concepts such as “consumerism and cultural 

hierarchies”.

Lachapelle's 'The Rape of Africa'

So even though the artwork was directly derived from an original, we would not call it thievery as or con because it was never meant to be an exact replica, but just the setting of the painting was used to portray somewhat same themes in contemporary times. This is known as Bricolage, the act of creating something out of things that already exist to create a new imagery. In a sense, we can say that Lachapelle has done something of that sort using the existing painting of Botticelli to create a new imagery while keeping the essence of it. Bricolage has become a very common thing in contemporary times as more and more artists and designers decide to use the existing originals to derive their works from. This is not being done for the purposes of cheating. It is very important that people know the history of a particular piece of art as its use in a contemporary art form could then have a meaning for people, without whom it would be completely meaningless, and the designer would have failed to get the message across, as the message lays in the knowledge of the original.

It is becoming a great deal as great works of art are recontextualized in a serious form, used again from the historical into modern times. It’s not just the artists such as Lachapelle who use them in their artwork but also magazines are deriving photo shoot ideas from them. For example Andy Warhols famous pop art Marilyn is depicted in Tank magazine by Matteo Bertolio. It is just that the more we delve deeper into each piece of art, be it old or contemporary, it’s surprising how many different themes we come across each time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.