Operational Handbook on Making Art 02: Steal Without Shame

Incoming material / prior contamination

Nothing arrives clean.

Not paintings. Not songs. Not stories.

Not you.

By the time you make anything, your head is already full of other people’s debris. Record sleeves, films you barely remember, street signs, old adverts, things your parents said, things somebody shouted in a pub, schoolbooks, logos, folk tales, cheap packaging, graffiti, television, religious pictures, bits of language that lodged somewhere twenty years ago and never left.

Most of it got in without asking.

Good.

Culture is used material.

Treat it accordingly.

You are not starting with an empty page.

You are starting with a world that has already been printed on.

Advertising has spent billions putting images into your head. Politics has covered the street in slogans. Companies have stamped their names across almost every available surface. History left signs, ruins, machinery, maps, warnings, songs and rumours lying around everywhere.

Take some of it back.

Not respectfully.

Usefully.

The interesting part is not where the material came from.

It is what happened to it after you got hold of it.

Transmission record / ownership unavailable

Folklore has been doing this for centuries.

Somebody tells a story. Somebody else tells it again.

The location moves five miles.
The dead man becomes a woman.
The black horse becomes a black dog.
Someone adds a witch.
Someone removes the church.
Somebody’s grandmother insists the whole thing happened behind the Co-op.

Two hundred years later nobody owns the story.

Nobody even agrees what the bloody story was.

Yet somehow it survived.

Things do not have to remain intact to remain alive.

Sometimes changing is how they stay alive.

Authorisation / conditional

Steal without shame.

But steal properly.

Taking somebody else’s finished work, changing almost nothing and hoping nobody notices is not cultural sabotage.

It is admin.

At least admin usually leaves a paper trail.

If all you have done is make somebody else’s work harder to trace, no operation has taken place.

And if your grand act of artistic theft consists of finding somebody smaller than you and stripping their work for parts, you have chosen a particularly dull target.

There is better material everywhere.

Go after the stuff that already occupies your head. Authority. History. Advertising. Official language. Familiar symbols. Things repeated so often they have started to feel like weather.

Then move them.

Take something.

Take it somewhere.

That second part matters.

Cut it. Misremember it. Translate it badly.

Put the saint on a bus ticket.
Put the council notice in a love song.
Take the tiny object in the background and make it enormous.
Give the respectable thing a filthy job.
Give the disposable thing a gold frame.
Move the event to the wrong town.
Give it the wrong century.
Remove the part everybody thinks matters and keep the stupid bit nobody noticed.
Give it the wrong name.
See what survives.

You are not its caretaker.

ASHMOUTH ASSEMBLY NOTICE 02/A

CULTURAL SALVAGE IS AUTHORISED.

ABSOLUTE ORIGINALITY HAS NOT BEEN LOCATED.

SEARCH OPERATIONS HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED.

DIRECT COPYING WITHOUT FURTHER ACTIVITY HAS PRODUCED NO NEW INFORMATION.

PROVENANCE: INCREASINGLY UNCLEAR.

SOURCE MATERIAL REMAINS AVAILABLE THROUGHOUT THE SURROUNDING ENVIRONMENT.

PLEASE TAKE SOMETHING ON YOUR WAY OUT.

If you find something you love, do not stop at the surface.

Find out what it was looking at.

Then find out what that was looking at.

Follow the wire backwards.

A band leads to another band.
A painter leads to an older painter.
A film leads to a photograph.
The photograph leads to a religious image.
The religious image leads to a story somebody was already telling five hundred years earlier.

Keep going. Eventually you will arrive somewhere completely different from where you started. Good.

Raid the family tree.

One source can become an imitation.

Ten sources begin to lose their alibis.

Let things contaminate each other.

The more incompatible the sources, the less chance any single one gets to remain in charge.

Stop looking only at art.

Art already knows somebody is looking at it.

The useful stuff is often somewhere else.

Read the warning label on the back of the machine.
Keep the parking fine.
Photograph the hand-painted sign somebody repaired with the wrong colour.
Keep the takeaway menu.
Nobody knows why.

This is how archives begin.

In twenty years somebody may describe it as an important example of regional visual culture.

They will neglect to mention the garlic sauce stain.

Supply inventory / low prestige

The rubbish is not at the edges.

Old instruction manuals are good. So are industrial diagrams for machines that no longer exist, pub carpets, council letters, badly translated packaging, local newspapers and things written by people who were absolutely not trying to make art.

A planning notice can sound like a threat.
An appliance manual can contain accidental poetry.
A supermarket label can have better typography than an exhibition catalogue.
A typo can improve a word permanently.

Listen when somebody gets something wrong.

Misheard lyrics. Misremembered names. A child misunderstanding what a sign means. Someone confidently telling a local story that happened in a completely different town.

The mistake may contain better material than the correction.

Official language is especially generous. It spends enormous effort trying to sound clear and frequently becomes sinister by accident.

Keep it.

The rubbish is the supply depot.

Keep a heap.

Physical, digital, both.

Stuff you cannot explain. Images you may never use. Phrases with no obvious purpose. Screenshots, scraps, maps, packaging, warning symbols and photographs of things repaired badly.

Do not organise it too well.

A perfectly indexed archive knows what everything is for.

That is dangerous.

If you can find everything immediately, you may have accidentally created an office.

Let unrelated things end up beside each other.

Something collected three years ago for no obvious reason may suddenly become useful because a completely different thing has fallen on top of it.

This is not research.

Research usually knows what it is looking for.

This is salvage.

You are allowed to pick things up because they feel suspicious.

Target selection / admiration optional

Do not steal only from things you admire.

That is far too comfortable.

Take something you hate.

An ugly typeface. A terrible advert. A corporate phrase that makes your teeth hurt. A song you wish had never been recorded. Packaging so hideous it has somehow crossed into magnificence.

Find the useful component.

Something can be awful and still contain excellent parts.

Strip the copper out.

Leave the rest at the roadside.

Do not send a thank-you note.

This is salvage, not worship.

You do not have to reproduce the values of the thing you took from either.

A patriotic poster can become an insult to authority.
A luxury advert can become cheap and grubby.
An official warning can become an invitation.
A corporate slogan can become an accusation.
A religious image can acquire an entirely new miracle.
A song you hate can become useful noise.

The source does not have to approve of what it becomes.

Ideally it should have to look twice.

Originality is a poor place to begin.

Transformation is more useful.

The question is not

Where did you get that?

The better question is

What the hell did you do to it?

If the answer is “not much”, go back in.

If the combination feels tasteful, introduce something inappropriate.

Taste has prevented a great deal of perfectly good trouble.

If everything fits perfectly: Make it worse.

There is an actual method in this.

The obvious combination usually gives you the obvious result.

Two things that already agree have very little to discuss.

Force the wrong things into the same room.

Then wait for the argument.

Something changes meaning. Something gets damaged. Something becomes funnier than it had any right to be. Something harmless starts looking threatening. Something serious turns out to have been ridiculous all along.

Occasionally something crawls out that you did not invite.

Do not immediately fucking improve it.

Keep that.

01One thing you genuinely like.

02One thing you dislike.

03One thing you found by accident.

Do not spend all afternoon choosing them. Use what is near: an image, phrase, object, sound, photograph, newspaper clipping, piece of packaging, local story, warning symbol, receipt, screenshot or scrap off the floor.

Make one thing using all three.

Change the purpose of at least one. Promote something insignificant beyond reason. Remove something that looked essential. Put the wrong words in the wrong mouth.

If one element feels important, treat it badly.

If another feels disposable, give it authority.

If they fit together too easily: Make the relationship worse.

You are looking for the fourth thing.

The thing that was not present in any of the sources before they collided.

Do not try to predict it. That would rather spoil the operation.

Operation complete when

All three sources have been compromised.
At least one has lost its original job.
Something has appeared that none of them contained alone.

Record of activity / evidence retained

Do not clean the crime scene.

Keep the sources.

Keep the result.

Put them beside one another and look at the distance travelled.

If you can still see three borrowed things politely introducing themselves, the operation is incomplete.

Interfere again.

“Where the fuck did that come from?”

If you look at what you made and think that:

Good.

Document the evidence.

Do not clean the crime scene.

Distribution instruction / return to circulation

Post the result somewhere it can be found, copied, misread or carried away.

Credit living sources where credit is due. Do not attach a defensive essay explaining every seam.

If somebody takes a fragment and moves it again, the operation has continued without you.

Everything has ancestors. Let it.
Do not waste your life trying to become culturally immaculate.
You have already been contaminated.
Make the contamination useful.

Take the image. Take the sentence. Take the broken fragment nobody else wanted.

Take something respectable and give it bad company.

Culture is used material.Take something.
Take it somewhere.

Then see what comes back.

Steal WithoutShame

Nothing arrives clean.

Folklore has been doing this for centuries.

Steal without shame.

The rubbish is not at the edges.

Do not steal only from things you admire.

Force a collision

Do not clean the crime scene.