Provenance is central to understanding where we’ve been. It is also crucial to the continued relevance and celebration of human-centered creative work. This essay examines the possibilities that a new provenance engenders for artists, collectors, and lovers of art, ideas, and passionate individuals.
If you are in New York, and of a certain persuasion, it is very possible that you have actively participated in the imbroglio of ‘is it or isn’t it’ concerning a statue that may (or may not) be an early work of Michelangelo, and that has recently (and indisputably) gone up for display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early reports have viewers weighing in on its provenance, invoking everything from paleographic reportage to scrotal gravitational physics to argue one way or another. It’s all quite wonderful.
The Archer by Michelangelo
But provenance – concern for origins and chains of ownership (and occasionally influence) – is increasingly a meatspace concept. It is largely incomprehensible to the legion of mashup-remixing-repurposing appropriators that populate our (mostly digital) landscape of cultural production and reproduction.
My suspicion is that this ignorance or lack of concern for provenance has less to do with education (although in a world where there is always more to learn, that’s always an issue), and more to do with the provenancial baby getting tossed out with the copyright bathwater. And, that’s too bad, because I think a re-imagining of provenance could offer another invigorating aspect to contemporary art.
Here’s how this might work.
First, some assertions. If we are to avoid straying any further into an amorphous anti-human haze of sound, imagery, and objects d’art, some recognition of creative agent – a person – is compulsory. It is not enough to be the final smith – gathering pieces from here and there and then hammering them however skillfully or not into a whole. Instead, it is a recognition that each of those pieces is the result of an individual creative act. The end product – in this case – is not greater than the parts.
Furthermore it is clear, to all but a few hardy souls, that the intellectual property regime that has structured the relationship between creative individual and market is in tatters. Rending of clothing and tearing of hair, even if accompanied by laws that make the unusual effort to pay attention to realities on the ground, won’t put the Humpty Dumpty back together again. Something else is required.
Despite the ridiculous hype and misunderstanding that has accompanied it, the concept of a reputation economy remains a reasonably satisfying way to look at a great many contemporary (and future) creative transactions in both virtual and meatspace. Provenance offers a new currency for just such an economy, one that is more flexible and artistically-oriented than those underwritten by ineffectual and unenforceable intellectual property laws and their derivative markets.
Provenance has always been about attribution and ownership, both of which have enhanced the appreciation of individual works by viewers or listeners du jour. It permits a deep contextualization of the work, that in turn, deposits additional layers of experiences and meaning. If this sounds slightly familiar, it should. Provenance is already reflecting, embracing, and encouraging elements of the current creative climate. What is a mash-up if not a layering, an alternative conceptualization, a new hybridized statement of intent? Yet, the current approach ignores this context, or at least permits only a massively attenuated version of it to emerge, almost always stripped of the originating individual.
Provenance is not yet explicitly considered in the creation or appreciation of new pieces of compound art. Despite its power to evoke a more nuanced and richer experience, provenance hasn’t found a way in. This is due, I suspect, to two forces. The first is purely intellectual, not in the point-headed, ivory tower sort of intellectual, but rather in the understanding of provenance as an agent of humanization, of artistic responsibility. The second is technical. How might provenance be best incorporated or integrated? This latter force is of especial importance because it gets at the creative project itself; it becomes part of the work.
Both metadata and steganography offer ways to think about introducing provenance into work that would enhance, rather that detract from the final product. Imagine, for instance, entering a darkened room, a single large screen flickering in the middle of the space. As the video performance begins to play, one smaller screen after another lights up on the walls around you, until you are are surrounded with the provenance – made real – of the central work. Each screen is a work of its own, perhaps with its own provenance screens, but each contributing to the work at the center. Alternatively, perhaps the provenance is visible only through an augmented reality device like an iPhone.
Other examples are limited only by imagination. Music with alternate provenance channels or narratives accompanied by their predecessor sources are obvious. And the intentional incorporation of provenance needn’t be limited to the digital, although the digital permits the obvious locus for the provenance sources; the trick becomes one of moving back and forth between the work and its predecessors.
Of course, hypertext, or hyperlinks more generally, *could* make this possible now, but the information fog created by hyperpossibilities has rendered most authentic choices anything but, leaving no opportunity for considered or meaningful discretion. Human-centered work, defined partly in the role provenance has in the experience, can’t make choice central to the experience if the artist chooses to create a work that is explicitly embedded in the altermodern lattice of influence, derivation, and inspiration.
Provenance – if we are to be honest to the world we create – stands for something, against something. It stands for the role of individuals to come together across space and time to create new works, and it stands against the brownian noise of contextless appropriation. That it offers a way to reward while ensuring creativity reinvigorates and expands in new ways the role and importance of the market.