02:33 pm - Transplant
I've been thinking about what Momus has to say about recontextualisation. He presents it as something a bit edgy, a bit progressive, and ties it to the post-copyright, post-materialist crowd. And fair enough, some of it is, but does the concept of recontextualisation of art as art fall only into that domain? Isn't something as simple as having a song playing in the background of a movie an example of reappropriation/recontextualisation in theory? And is that really on the same level as an internet installation which presents other people's work in new ways?
It seems to me that the recontextualisation concept can be divided into constructive and non-constructive recontextualisation, although I don't know if those terms are appropriate, since I really don't know where the line of demarcation is.
This video recontextualises (or perhaps decontextualises, which can be just as interesting) a multi-screen ljweb youtube installation that Momus made about a year ago to accompany his cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Thatness and Thereness. And it's beautiful.
The icon I'm using to accompany this post is a recontextualisation of Yuri Norstein's Ёжик в Тумане and it's not quite so beautiful, but still maintains some validity in and of itself.
But the aforementioned example of playing a song in the background of a movie is not quite the same. It is a recontextualisation of art in art, but it plays a supporting role; the recontextualisation itself is not the end-product. This would be what I would call non-constructive recontextualisation. It's not bad, I suppose, but it does make it hard to blanket enthuse about recontextualisation culture.
Perhaps this point is a trivial argument over semantics, though.
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