Blair, Paula (2015) Accommodating the mess : the politics of re-appropriation in Duncan Campbell's It For Others (2013). In: The Real and the Intermedial, 2015-10-23 - 2015-10-24, Sapientia University. (Unpublished)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In response to Marker and Resnais’s collaborative meditation on art and colonialism Statues Also Die, Duncan Campbell’s video installation It For Others takes a complex approach to presenting arguments around the commodification of art and culture. It does this by providing a kaleidoscopic discourse on the act of appropriation. An enthusiast of poststructuralist methodologies, Campbell uses appropriated images to comment on acts of image appropriation. One section interrogates constructed histories, particularly the mediatized plural histories of the Northern Ireland conflict, by examining the appropriation of a photograph of IRA volunteer Joe McCann. He was killed in 1972, soon after which a photo of him silhouetted with a rifle against the sunset overlaid with RESISTANCE was circulated. As the film shows this image appeared on Christmas stockings similar to Che Guevara’s face appearing on commercially sold t-shirts. The paper will analyse the network of mise en abyme in the film and discuss the deeper implications of hypermediated image reappropriation. Especially regarding conflict, the politically aestheticized re-presentation of media artefacts reflects a resistance to systems of official remembering and forgetting propagated by industrial and state-governed media networks.