An unauthorized partial recording of Christian Marclays

The Clock as accessed on Vimeo, May 21, 2015.

Trespassing Hollywood:
Property, Space, and the
Appropriation Film

RICHARD MISEk
In the two decades since the first exhibition of Douglas Gordons 24 Hour
Psycho (1993), appropriationa mainstay of visual art since the mid-twentieth
centuryhas become a common feature of experimental filmmaking and artists
film and video. Many of the most prominent contemporary practitioners in these
fields (including Cory Arcangel, Mark Leckey, Christian Marclay, and Nicolas
Provost) have made their names by creating montages, collages, mash-ups, and
other transformative works from preexisting moving images. Perhaps the clearest
evidence so far of appropriations prominence within moving-image arts was the
2012 Turner Prize, in which the works of two of the four finalists (Luke Fowler
and Elizabeth Price, who won) were videos constructed mainly from archival television footage. Of course, this artistic turn is symptomatic of a broader cultural turn
that has seen media reuse spread to everyday practice. However artists audiovisual
appropriations may differ from fan-made YouTube supercuts, the two share a crucial technological precondition: the ability to copy and transform source files without a significant reduction in quality.1 Applied to video, Nicolas Bourriauds characterization of contemporary artistic practice as postproduction loops back to its
original meaning. It describes not only the creative process of selecting cultural
objects and inserting them into new contexts but also the technologies through
which this process takes place: video-editing, sound-mixing, and visual-effects (i.e.,
postproduction) software.2
The OED defines appropriation as the making of a thing private property,
whether anothers or (as now commonly) ones own. In the preface to the second
edition of Postproduction, Bourriaud suggests that the concept of artistic property as
something to be guarded and occasionally seized is obsolescent:
[A]rtists intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond
what we call the art of appropriation, which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a cul1.
The term supercut denotes an amateur montage, typically made by a fan, which assembles
similar elements from disparate source materialfor example, shots of people from different films saying the same line.
2.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans.
Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), p. 4.

OCTOBER 153, Summer 2015, pp. 132148. 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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ture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.

The Museum like the City itself constitutes a catalog of forms, postures,
and images for artistscollective equipment that everyone is in a position to use, not in order to be subjected to their authority but as tools
to probe the contemporary world.3
Since Bourriaud formulated his argument, postproduction has become a
defining feature of digital culture. Accordingly, recent commentators have begun to
suggest updated definitions of appropriation that respond to current practices. For
example, in his book In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boon defines appropriation as the
act of claiming the right to use, make, or own something that someone else claims in
the same way.4 Boons expansive definition responds to the fact that media now exist
in multiple contexts and are the object of diverse technological transformations.5
Yet despite the cultural turn towards media reuse, wherever there is appropriation there is also property. And where there is property, there are property owners
keen to protect what they regard as theirs. So media reuse has become a key site of
territorial conflict in the political battles currently being fought over the ownership of
information. The rise since the late 1990s of what digital activist Lawrence Lessig calls
Read/Write culture has led to new digital-rights-management (DRM) technologies
and aggressive assertions of intellectual property (IP) rights by media owners.6
These developments have been supported in turn by national laws and international
agreements reinforcing long and strong copyright.7 In a climate in which the dominant legal metaphor for creative works is that of property and in which property is
itself sacrosanct, it is perhaps not surprising that even noncommercial file sharing has
led to sentences of up to five years in prison.8 At the same time, advocates of open
culture have mounted their own counteroffensives, such as the Creative Commons
licensing system and the international Pirate Party movement. Clearly we are still far
away from a stable equilibrium that reconciles legal property rights with the moral
and artistic right to transform preexisting media into new work.
How have film and video artists responded to these differing views about
what constitutes our cultural commons? There are as many answers to this question as there are artists who appropriate. Yet each answer depends directly or
indirectly on how the artist has approached the question of property in the making and showing of their work. In this article, I explore the relationship between
property and appropriation in film and video with reference to two test cases:
Thom Andersens essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Christian Marclays
3.
Bourriaud, Postproduction, p. 3.
4.
Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 213.
5.
This is the definition of appropriation that I use throughout this article, unless otherwise
stated.
6.
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (London:
Penguin, 2008).
7.
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 6.
8.
David kravets, Record 5-Year Prison Term Handed to Convicted File Sharer, Wired (March
1, 2013), http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/record-filing-sharing-term/.

Trespassing Hollywood

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video collage The Clock (2011). Both involve transformative reuse of preexisting
film and television material. Yet in their overall conception, in their methods of
production, and in their distribution and exhibition, Andersens and Marclays
works are drastically different. In each case, I argue, this difference hinges on how
the two artists have engaged with the question of intellectual property.
Of course, property is also a spatial phenomenon. Though distinct and often
discussed separately, intellectual property and spatial property are closely related.
Accordingly, I also discuss the artistic appropriations of Los Angeles Plays Itself and The
Clock within a broader contextas, variously, a negotiation, assertion, and rejection
of different intellectual and spatial property rights. The political and ethical choices
faced by moving-image artists play out both creatively and spatially: both in what
source material they use and how they use it, and in where they show their work (for
example, in cinemas, in galleries, on television, on public screens, or online). In this
article, I demonstrate how Los Angeles Plays Itself and The Clock provide opposing models for how film and video artists can produce and distribute their work within a culture paradoxically predicated on both sharing and ownership.
Expropriation in Los Angeles Plays Itself
Los Angeles Plays Itself is an essay film comprising clips from almost three hundred films and television shows shot on location in Los Angeles between 1913 and
2001.9 It uses these clips to trace two parallel histories: how the urban spaces of
Los Angeles changed over the course of the twentieth century, and how the film
industry mediated this change. As its narrator notes, the film explores the idea
that if we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, maybe we
can appreciate movies for their documentary qualities. Inverting the tendency of
Hollywood films to make use of the city as a backdrop for personal stories,
Andersen makes use of his source films in order to learn about the city. For example, in a clip from L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997), a dead body sits in the
living room of Richard Neutras Lovell House, butin contrast to police officers
Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) and Wendell White (Russell Crowe)the films narrator is most interested in the corpses open-plan surroundings, and what they tell
us about the communal ideals of mid-twentieth-century West Coast modernism.
Fredric Jameson once famously asked, Is Space Political?10 The answer to
his rhetorical question is, of course, that it is. In contrast to many of the films it references, Los Angeles Plays Itself is alive to the fact that major cities are epicenters of
power and prominent sites of its expression. Andersens film engages in detail with
the various methods by which those with power have shaped and represented Los
Angeles. For example, it explores the privatization of the citys public utilities, the
9.
Movies Mentioned in Los Angeles Plays Itself Take 2, Words, Words, Words (blog), May 28,
2007, http://www.twotreatises.org/409.
10.
Fredric Jameson, Is Space Political?, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory,
ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 25569.

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city authorities systematic neglect of public housing and transportation after

World War II, and the gradual takeover of Los Angeles by private and quasi-public
spaces including the road, the shopping mall, and the office block. Los Angeles
Plays Itself is an angry film; its anger echoes that of Mike Daviss academic landmark City of Quartz (1992), which also explores the economic and political forces
that shaped Los Angeless spatial development (and, Davis argues, led to its social
impoverishment) in the twentieth century. According to Davis, Los Angeles, like
all capitalist cities, now plays out a new class war (sometimes a continuation of the
race war of the 1960s) at the level of the built environment.11 Los Angeles Plays
Itself extends this argument into media space, investigating how movies have collectively represented this class war. For example, a montage of clips of Bunker Hill
dating from the 1950s to the 70s demonstrates how Hollywood inadvertently documented the areas transformation from a lively working-class neighborhood to
the site of a speculative property boom. The irony that post-boom Bunker Hill was
used in The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) as a stand-in for a postapocalyptic
wasteland requires no elaboration.
There is no point in trying to summarize Andersens eloquent, erudite, and
occasionally vitriolic argument. If you havent seen the film, I strongly recommend
watching it and letting his narrator make the argument himself. What is worth
summarizing, however, is how the films form itself constitutes an engagement
with the politics of property. One way in which it does so, as seen in the Bunker
Hill sequence, is by repurposing movie clips; Andersens technique here exists in
continuity with politically motivated appropriation artists from Guy Debord to
Barbara kruger to Craig Baldwin. The film also engages directly with the politics
of property by focusing on historical sites of communal life including the citys
sports stadiums and long-forgotten trolley cars, rather than the private spaces of
hilltop houses and corporate offices favored by so many Hollywood movies. A
third way in which the film formally inverts the hierarchical property relations of
Los Angeles is by redistributing media space (which, in a linear film, means running time) away from the wealthy and the white in favor of the poor and the nonwhite. Andersens narrator notes: To someone who knows Los Angeles from
movies, it might appear that everyone who has a job lives in the hills or on the
beach. By contrast, Los Angeles Plays Itself lingers on films made by members of the
underrepresented majority: for example, black neorealist filmmakers Haile
Gerima, Charles Burnett, and Billy Woodberry. By privileging cultures typically
overlooked by Hollywood, the film also explores the less commonly mediated environments that they inhabitnotably, the eastern suburbs in which Gerima,
Burnett, and Woodberry have lived and filmed.
In its treatment of mainstream and alternative cinemas as equals, and in its
engagement with cultures and spaces that are usually granted only bit parts in
media representations of the city, Los Angeles Plays Itself can be regarded as a kind
11.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), p. 228.

Trespassing Hollywood

137

of media heterotopia. In his well-known lecture Of Other Spaces, Michel

Foucault initially defines heterotopias as something like counter-sites, a kind of
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be
found in the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.12
The sense that heterotopias form derivative expressions of a utopian impulse pervades Los Angeles Plays Itself. Andersen cannot transform Los Angeles into a more
humane, democratic, and communal city. However, his filmic reconstruction creates an environment that is far more inclusive than either the media space of a typical Hollywood film or the physical space of Los Angeles itself. As Hollywood films
mix with independent and underground films, beach dwellers mix with valley
dwellers, and the citys elites mix with those who exist at its economic and spatial
margins; those who make history (and make movies about it) share space with
those who suffer the consequences.
At the same time, as David Harvey notes with reference to Henri Lefebvres
concept of the right to the city, all heterotopias must still negotiate their existence within larger capitalist structures.13 The capitalist structure that most tightly
encloses Los Angeles Plays Itself is that of intellectual property. It is at this point
worth introducing Lessigs distinction between Read/Only and Read/Write
cultures. Read/Only refers to the content industries, which create products that
users read by looking at them, listening to them, or indeed reading them, but
which they cannot fundamentally alter. Because of the historic difficulty of copying moving images, the film industry more or less successfully retained control of
its products throughout the twentieth century. By contrast, Lessig refers to
Read/Write as any method of engaging with a cultural product that has a transformative effect on it: for example, reading a musical score and then playing it on
an instrument, or recutting a video.14 Following advances in computer technology
in the 1990s, which made possible the copying and manipulation of audio and
video files without a major loss of quality, Read/Write quickly became pervasive
within digital culture. In response, both the music and movie industries began to
lobby for new legislation and more aggressive litigation against copyright
infringers.15 An early result of this lobbying was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act (1998), which extended the duration of copyright to the life of an
author plus seventy years.16 In parallel, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (also
1998) criminalized the circumvention of encryption and other DRM technologies
including DVD region encoding.17 The symbiosis between DRM technology and
copyright law has continued ever since, resulting in what Jon Crowcroft character12.
Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, in
RethinkingArchitecture:AReaderinCulturalTheory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 25056.
13.
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012),
p. 152.
14.
Lessig, Remix, p. 28.
15.
Ibid., p. 38.
16.
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 17 U.S. Code 301304.
17.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 12 U.S. Code 1201.

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izes as a circular dependency in which rights holders develop more and more
DRM technologies to protect their property and lawmakers respond by prohibiting more and more forms of circumvention.18 This development in turn epitomizes a broader global tendency that has seen copyright move from what Glynn
Lunney calls an incentives-access model towards what Mark Lemley calls an
absolute protection or full value model.19 The first copyright law, the 1710
Statute of Anne, aimed to balance the social benefit of allowing access to valuable
information with the need to provide authors with financial incentives to ensure
that they generate this information in the first place. For two and a half centuries,
subsequent laws tended to further this aim. Over recent decades, however, copyright law has increasingly taken as its premise the belief that private-property
rights should extend to any information that carries potential economic value.20
According to this model, the purpose of copyright becomes that of allowing rights
holders to maximize the rental that they can earn from their property.
Perhaps by a mixture of accident and design, Los Angeles Plays Itself occupies
an oppositional position with respect not only to the spatial privatization of the
city but also to the neoliberal equation of information (in this case, images and
sounds) with property.21 The history of Los Angeles, as Mike Davis shows us, is
shaped by international capitals appropriation of spaces formerly owned by individuals or the stateBunker Hill is just one of many examples of this process.
Though publicly accessible, many if not most of the public plazas in Los Angeles
(and in cities across the world) are privately owned; the public is allowed access to
them, but only under strict conditionsnotably, as demonstrated by the Occupy
movement, the condition that members of the public not take part in public gatherings within them. Studio films also appropriate space on behalf of international
capital. Once mediated, physical space becomes intellectual property. The cinematic images of a city also constitute spaces that we are only allowed to navigate on
strict termsin particular, that we not watch them in large unauthorized groups
and that we not copy and share them. Anyone who does copy media files without
permission is, to use the industrys preferred metaphor, a pirate. 22 The
metaphor evokes the sense of objects forcibly, even violently, seized. Of course, as
has often been noted, the stealing of digital content does not entail material dis18.
Jon Crowcroft, Copyright, Piracy and Software, in Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary
Critique, ed. Lionel Bentley, Jennifer Davis, and Jane C. Ginsburg (Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 20929.
19.
Cited in Anne Barron, Copyright Infringement, Free-Riding and the Lifeworld, in
Bentley, Davis, and Ginsburg, Copyright and Piracy, pp. 93127.
20.
Ibid., p. 110.
21.
I suggest the role of accident as well as design here because in interviews Andersen himself
typically comes across as less overtly political than his narrator. See, for example, Matthias Stork, A
Film Is Alive During Its MakingAn Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen, Mediascape (Fall
2013), http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2013_AFilmIsAlive.html.
22.
For a historical account of the use of the term piracy with reference to copying, see William
St Clair, Metaphors of Intellectual Property, in Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright,
ed. Ronan Deazley, Martin kretschmer, and Lionel Bently (Cambridge: Open Book, 2010), pp. 36995.

Trespassing Hollywood

139

possession.23 The term piracy also fails to distinguish between those who copy
films for cultural or educational purposes and those who copy them in order to
sell them at prices and in quantities that impinge on their legal owners revenues.
Accordingly, I wish to suggest an alternative metaphor for the noncommercially
motivated reuse of media files: not piracy, but trespassing. In the context of current IP enforcement, if a filmmaker or artist wishes to use a piece of copyrighted
media, thenunless they are able to pay upwards of $100 per second of footage
used and employ a team of lawyers to take care of the contractsthey must trespass on privately owned media space.
This is precisely what Andersen does. A particularly resonant example of
media trespassing is provided by a sequence in which his narrator catalogues various movie cameos played by Frank Lloyd Wrights Ennis House. Perhaps best
known as the interior of Rick Deckards apartment in Blade Runner (1982), the
Ennis House is prime cinematic real estate. Its unconventional, vaguely Mayan
appearance has made it a popular backdrop across various forms of moving image,
from sci-fi movies to pop videos. Each time a producer uses it as a location, they
have to pay far in excess of the propertys rental value; this extra payment grants
them intellectual-property rights over the images of the house that they record. As
a result, once the film is released, certain private spaces within and around the
house are transformed into quasi-public media space accessible under strict
rental terms. Andersen rejects these terms. He copies footage of the Ennis House
and recontextualizes it. He does so without asking permission either from the
houses current owner or from the owners of the clips that he used. He counters
the various media appropriations of the Ennis House by expropriating clips from
the movies in which these appropriations take place. Expropriation historically
refers to the states forcible removal of property from private ownership; as a
result, it has a fairly negative connotation. But, as in the case of appropriation, perhaps an additional definition is now needed. Following Boons definition of appropriation as the claiming for oneself of that which others claim for themselves, I
would suggest that expropriation can now also be defined as the claiming for the
public of what individuals and corporations claim for themselves.24 Despite its
important place in Los Angeless architectural heritage, the Ennis House is currently closed to the public for all but five days of the year. By expropriating images
of it, Andersen declares a media open house on behalf of the citizens of Los
Angeles who have never been granted physical access to the house itself.
Andersens film polemically aligns itself with those excluded from the private
spaces owned and inhabited by Los Angeless elites. Its production also took place
23.
See, for example, Boon, In Praise of Copying, p. 177.
24.
Hlne Cixous uses the term depropriation to describe a similar process (Boon, In Praise of
Copying, p. 223). I favor expropriation, as the term has its own etymology, which is particularly useful
in reconnecting intellectual and spatial property. Also, Cixouss term does not, as far as I can tell, provide any additional way of understanding the repatriation of property that is not already implicit in the
term expropriation.

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outside the confines of Read/Only institutions. The film emerged from

cinephilic culture rather than the movie industry; it started life as a compilation
used by Andersen, a professor at CalArts, when giving talks about Los Angeles in
film. It was made without institutional funding: Andersen and his editor SeungHyun Yoo cut the film by legally squatting a school AVID suite on evenings and
weekends. And it features clips sourced from a multiplicity of (primarily consumer) formats including commercial VHS tapes, VHS tapes of television broadcasts, laser discs, DVDs, and U-Matic -inch tapes.25 Andersens recent remastering of the film also involved copying HD video footage from Blu-ray discs and
streaming videoall gathered through DRM-circumvention software.26
Not only has the production of Los Angeles Plays Itself involved
Read/Write practicesso, too, has its distribution. The film premiered at the
Toronto International Film Festival and had numerous subsequent festival
screenings.27 However, having reached the end of its festival life, it all but disappeared. I have not been able to discover the precise reasons why it was not commercially released, but the permissions culture that surrounded the reuse of
footage before the mid- to late 2000s surely played a part. Over recent years, cultural practitioners including filmmakers, journalists, visual artists, librarians, and
academics have begun to discover that the US copyright exception of fair use
can cover diverse reuses of mediaincluding works made entirely out of reused
media, works that repurpose a large proportion of a preexisting work, and works
made for profit. But before the mid- to late 2000s, unauthorized media reuse was
not yet understood to fall within the purview of fair use. Fearful of legal repercussions, distributors and broadcasters typically refused to touch documentaries
that included unlicensed footage.
However satisfying it would have been to see Los Angeles Plays Itself become
a test case for the application of fair use to film and video, this did not happen.
That role was played by several films made a few years later, including kirby
Dicks This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Sophie Fienness The Perverts Guide to Cinema
(both released in 2006). Los Angeles Plays Itself remained largely out of circulation. At last, in 2010, seven years after its premiere, it appeared on YouTube. As
the ultimate expression of Read/Write cultures distribution logic, YouTube
formed a fitting platform for the film. It at last provided thousands of cinephiles,
including myself, with our first opportunity to see Andersens now-mythic film.
Of course, although YouTube distributes user-generated content, it is itself a private media space and a site of tension between Read/Only and Read/Write
culture. The presence of Los Angeles Plays Itself on YouTube epitomizes this tension. Since 2010, uploaded copies of the film have been repeatedly subject to
takedown notices by rights holders, sometimes disappearing from one account
25.
Thom Andersen, email message to the author, November 25, 2013.
26.
Mike Sperlinger, Interview with Thom Andersen (podcast), Luxonline,
http://lux.org.uk/downloads/podcast-interview-thom-andersen (accessed November 4, 2013).
27.
Thom Andersen, email message to the author, November 25, 2013.

Trespassing Hollywood

141

only to reappear on another. Ironically, it is not Andersen (the actual author of

the film) who has issued the takedown notices, but the rights holders of footage
that appears in the film. In light of recent clarifications of fair use, it can now be
unambiguously stated that Los Angeles Plays Itself is the legal property of
Andersen and not Path, Sony, et al.28 Yet this does not stop the content industries from continuing to make territorial claims over what is not theirs.

A YouTube takedown notice

for Thom Andersens Los
Angeles Plays Itself. 2003.

It should be noted that the films narrator never makes the connection
between physical and intellectual property: He does not comment on the films
use of expropriation or on the political implications of this methodology. It
should also be noted that Andersen himself, like surprisingly many artists and even
political scientists, does not seem particularly interested in how physical and intellectual property resonate.29 However, the connection between real estate and
28.
For a detailed account of the recent clarification and extension of fair use (at least in the
US), and of how to ensure that a work falls within it, see Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use.
29.
Elinor Ostrom, a leading commentator on the physical commons, clearly intuited a connection
in the mid-2000s, when she began also to theorize the intellectual commons. See, for example, Charlotte
Hess and Elinor Ostrom, eds., Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). However, she never published any work exploring how the two are connected.

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intellectual property does not need to be expressed either by the narrator or the
maker of Los Angeles Plays Itself to be expressed by the film itself; it is expressed by
the films argument, its methodology, its mode of production and even its distribution. Los Angeles Plays Itself argues for the urban commons by occupying the cultural commons. In doing so, it demonstrates the huge cultural benefits that can result
from the expropriation of media. To those who might ask, Why should people be
allowed to copy and rework digital content for their own ends? the existence of
Los Angeles Plays Itself provides an irrefutable answer.
Reappropriation in The Clock
All artistic activities that use copyrighted material without permission implicitly
assert the existence of a media commons, which we have a right to access as more
than just consumers. This, however, does not mean that films and videos involving
appropriation are intrinsically opposed to private media property. Though appropriation film and video are rooted in countercultural forms including experimental cinema and avant-garde visual art, the uses of found footage in current artistic practice
are diverse and their purposes often far removed from Andersens.30 Furthermore, as
Andersens film itself demonstrates, works featuring Read/Write practices may
themselves become integrated into Read/Only culture. Christian Marclays The
Clock is among the most prominent recent examples of artistic appropriation, and it
exemplifies the paradoxes that underpin the practice. In this section, I examine the
production and exhibition history of The Clock in order to provide an overviewand
critiqueof the institutional and economic context within which gallery-based appropriation film- and video-making currently exists.
The Clock is a 24-hour single-screen video installation comprising a montage
of film and television clips, all of which include visual references to time. As
Jonathan Romney observes, these may include direct references to time (shots of
clocks and watches, and of characters looking at and responding to them) or indirect markers of time passing (such as candles burning and characters waiting).31
Every shot of a timepiece in the video shows a time that coincides with the time of
viewing: A shot of a clock at noon, for example, will appear onscreen at noon. As
in Los Angeles Plays Itself, the multiplicity of clips in The Clock results in what
Martine Beugnet refers to as a kind of journey through the history of the moving
image.32 The nature of this journey, however, is quite different. The journey in
Los Angeles Plays Itself is a narrated one. The voice-over provides us with a path
through the clips; discussion always relates directly to what we are watching. By
30.
It is notable that the first work to bear close resemblance to contemporary video collages is
by a visual artist not a filmmaker. In Rose Hobart (1936), Joseph Cornell recut a print of East of Borneo
(1931) to create a short film structured around close-ups of Rose Hobart, the films lead actress.
31.
Jonathan Romney, What Time Is It Where?, Sight and Sound 12, no. 4 (May 2011), pp. 3031.
32.
Martine Beugnet, Firing at the Clocks: Cinema, Sampling, and the Cultural Logic of the
Late Capitalist Artwork, Framework 54, no. 2 (Fall 2013), p. 197.

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contrast, The Clock features no voice-over. Its guiding logic is not narrative but spatio-temporal, its effect not critical but experiential. In a sense, the precise content
of the disparate fragments of film and television history that Marclay uses is not
important; what matters is that they contribute to create a sense of what he calls
false continuity. 33 Understandably, in contrast to Andersens encyclopedic
knowledge of Los Angeles films, Marclay was not familiar with most of the films he
compiled; every day, he received video clips from his six researchers andlike a
skilled DJ segueing from one track to anotherseamlessly inserted them into his
timeline.34 In a sense, then, while Los Angeles Plays Itself opposes the film industrys
appropriations of Los Angeles, The Clock can be regarded as existing in continuity
with them. Just as Hollywood plunders Los Angeles, The Clock plunders Hollywood.
It decontextualizes and de-territorializes its source films and turns them into constituent parts of a self-referential mechanism: a 24-hour video called The Clock that
itself constitutes a clock. The viewers journey is as much through Marclays constructed time-space as it is through moving-image history.
Despite the two works many differences, The Clock shares with Los Angeles
Plays Itself a Read/Write production history. Marclays working practice was
essentially artisanal: His engagement with his source material remained direct
throughout his three-year production process. He made The Clock without the
hierarchical workforce that is typically involved in even low-budget film projects;
the only other significant creative contributor to the project was his sound
designer, Quentin Chiappetta.35 In addition, Marclay made the work entirely
from ripped DVDs and edited it himself using Final Cut Pro.36 Like Los Angeles
Plays Itself, The Clock is thus premised on the existence of a shared cinematic
imaginary: It draws on it, and is itself an expression of it. Marclay approached his
source material as if it were in the public domain. However, he did not then follow the share alike principles of Read/Write culture; instead, he created a
commercial product. The Clock is not only a cultural appropriation but also an
economic appropriation. Marclay took thousands of copyrighted clips and effectively said, These are mine. Having expropriated them from their copyright holders, he then reappropriated them for himself and made a small fortune as a result.
How was Marclay able to pull off this sleight of hand? He did so by transplanting his material from the film world to the art world. Had he chosen to
make a film, like Andersen did, he would have found himself with minimal
opportunities to monetize his work. The economic model for the film world is
mass distribution: In order to recoup their high production costs, film studios
disseminate their products as widely (in as many ways and on as many media
platforms) as possible. As Jonathan Walley notes, experimental filmmakers have
33.
Romney, What Time Is It Where?, p. 30.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Daniel Zalewski, The Hours: How Christian Marclay Created the Ultimate Digital Mosaic, The
New Yorker (March 12, 2012), http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski.

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also historically followed this distribution model, relying on rental fees from
film institutes, festivals, and societies.37 For example, the revenue that Andersen
earned from Los Angeles Plays Itself during the films first decade was directly
proportional to the number of cinema screenings it had. Of course, as experimental films have historically had nowhere near the scale of distribution of
commercial films, their potential for generating revenue through screenings
has been limited. Nor is there any evidence that the recent abundance of videoon-demand platforms has yet provided non-mainstream filmmakers with significant extra revenue.
The art world provides an alternative economic model, based on scarcity,
which inverts the mass-distribution logic of the film world. Ceteris paribusthe
fewer copies there are of an artwork, the greater its value. Rather than distributing
multiple low-cost copies of a work, the artist has historically distributed one highcost copythe original work itself. Of course, with artists film and video, the artwork is itself a copy, and technologically vulnerable to further copying. As Boon
has discussed, the concept of copia (from the Greek for abundance) finds renewed
life in the context of digital media.38 The film industry embraces copia, monetizing
its products by creating multiple copies of them across multiple platforms; however, precisely because it does so, it also has to spend huge amounts of money to prevent others from doing the same. Conversely, artists moving images resist copia.
Since the 1990s, the distribution model has involved treating copies of films or
videos as art objects through editioning.39 A notable feature of editioning is that it
provides an incredibly effective means of protecting the artists intellectual property. Erika Balsom writes, When one buys an edition, one purchases a rather curious combination of rights, content, and technical supportthe specifics of which
are closely regulated by the contracts accompanying this acquisition.40 In this
context, artists typically do not even need to invoke copyright. Instead, contracts
combine with buyers vested interest in maintaining the auratic quality of their
property to result in a degree of protection from copying that Hollywood executives can only dream of.
The distribution history of The Clock exemplifies the above process. Marclay
restricted access to his work by editioning six copies. He sold five to institutional
buyers; the edition bought by LACMA changed hands for $467,000presumably the
others went for a similar sum.41 The sixth edition apparently exists on a stockbro37.
Jonathan Walley, Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde, in Art and the Moving Image: A
Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), pp. 18687.
38.
Boon, In Praise of Copying, p. 53.
39.
The parallels with the creation of artificial scarcity by California water companies in the early
twentieth century (on which Chinatown is based, and which Andersen discusses in detail) are resonant.
40.
Erika Balsom, Original Copies: How Film and Video Became Art Objects, Cinema Journal
53, no. 1 (Fall 2013), p. 99.
41.
Jori Finkel, LACMA Acquires The Clock by Christian Marclay and a Sculpture by Ai
Weiwei through Annual Collecting Event, Los Angeles Times, April, 18, 2011,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/04/last-month-culture-monster-reported-thatthe-la-county-museum-of-art-wasworking-to-acquire-christian-marclays-2010.html.

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kers desktop in the form of a screensaver.42 Marclays institutional buyers have in

turn perpetuated this restricted access by exhibiting his temporally expansive artwork for relatively brief stretches of time. Like a timed rerelease of a Disney classic,
each time The Clock comes round, it becomes a media event all over again. When it
was shown at MoMA between December 2012 and January 2013, it attracted 40,000
(paying) visitors in one month and involved typical waiting times of three hours.43
As Balsom observes, The queue for The Clock fulfills the same function as the
queue outside the Apple Store: it endows an experience with an aura of exclusivity
and thereby heightens its appeal.44
Intellectual property here again interlaces with spatial property. The exclusivity that Balsom refers to is spatial as well as temporal. An artwork whose value
depends on artificial scarcity can only be presented to the public within a closely
guarded private space: a physical space such as an art gallery. For a valuable work of
film or video by an artist, exhibition in a private but publicly accessible media
space such as a museums website is still too public. So, for example, the only way
one can access MoMAs extensive digital collection of artists films and videos outside a gallery is by booking a visit to the museums archives and sitting at a computer on-site. The museum building functions as a showroom and vault for film
and video works as much as for physical art objects. In the specific case of appropriation films and videos held by museums, media are initially de-territorialized
(for example, released from the region-specific encoding of DVDs or Blu-rays) and
then re-territorialized. Both metaphorically and physically, the works become the
subject of capitalist enclosure. Unsurprisingly, so far, The Clock has only been
exhibited within its owners properties.
There have been a number of opportunities for The Clock to be exhibited in
public spaces, including Grand Central Station in New York, and projected in publicly visible spaces like an exterior wall of LACMA. Interestingly, Marclay has vetoed
these ideas. In a recent interview, he cites aesthetic issuesfor example, the difficulty of projecting the work in daylight and of preventing its sound mix from
being overwhelmed by city noise.45 These are valid concerns. As Balsom emphasizes, the above ideas emerge from institutions desire to generate media events
and would risk turning the artwork into an advertisement for a museum.46 At the
same time, I wonder if Marclays repeated refusal to allow his work to be seen in
public spaces also stems from an anxiety that this might allow people to film its
entire duration, to copy and distribute it, and perhaps even (the horror!) play it at
the wrong timeand so compromise its commodity status. By refusing requests for
public screenings, Marclay is protecting not only his own work but also his
patrons investment. So The Clock continues to make infrequent, albeit regular,
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.

Zalewski, The Hours.

Erika Balsom, Around The Clock: Museum and Market, Framework 54, no. 2 (Fall 2013), p. 186.
Ibid., p. 178.
Zalewski, The Hours.
Balsom, Around The Clock, p. 189.

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appearances on the artistic calendar. At the time of writing, it is not being exhibited; its public presence is restricted to a few short, covertly filmed videos made by
gallery visitors and posted on YouTube. Like Los Angeles Plays Itself, The Clock started life as a media trespass. It has now become a media property that is itself trespassed upon.
Unsurprisingly, the question of how artists films and videos are distributed is
becoming an increasingly discussedand contestedquestion. Speaking personally, I do not question either Marclays effort and artistry or his claim to authorship over his work. As anyone who has experienced The Clock will admit, it is far
more than the sum of its intricate parts. Nor do I begrudge Marclay his profit. In
contrast to extra-territorial corporations like Apple and Amazon, I assume, he paid
tax on it. What I do question, however, is the restriction of access to works whose
circulation in contemporary culture would benefit both them and it. Locked in a
digital vault, too much artists film and video becomes cut off from the oxygen of
public exposure. An unfortunate further consequence of the restricted access is
that the cultural hierarchies historically associated with the exhibition of fine art
are reinforced. If youre part of the cultural elite and regularly visit major biennials, youll probably get to see some of the best artists film and video currently
made. If you happen to live in a global city (for example, London, New York, or
Los Angeles), you may get to see it. Otherwise, you almost certainly wont.
To me, the artificial scarcity of The Clock is particularly regrettable. The rarefied
nature of much art makes it suited to the exclusive spaces of the art gallery, frequented by those for whom the art is made. By contrast, the multitude of articles and features about The Clock in mainstream media, together with the crowds accompanying
its every public appearance, suggest that its potential appeal is huge.47 Catherine
Russell speculates that perhaps one day, in a world where copyright holders and
proprietary museums relinquish their hold on the image-bank, The Clock will migrate
out of the gallery and find its true home on the Internet.48 Its an exciting prospect:
Imagine a website that played The Clock around the clock, day after day, without
break. Over time, it might become a digital landmark as universally recognized as
Big Ben, the clock that chimes midnight in Marclays montage. Perhaps The Clock
might also be released in cinemas, so crossing back into the film world and finding a
place for itself among the works from which it was made. However, for a range of
reasons including contractual obligations, Marclays own preferences, and art institutions interest in safeguarding their property, it is unlikely this will ever happen. For
47.
An interesting twist to the exhibition history of The Clock is provided by an October 2014
amendment to the Uks 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (30A), which includes the new copyright exceptions of parody, caricature, and pastiche . . . thereby making Marclays reappropriation
retroactively legal. Ironically, in a parliamentary legislation committee discussion of the amendment,
David Willetts, minister for universities and science, cited The Clock as evidence for why the law needed
to change. Unfortunately, the newly clarified legality of The Clock has not made it more accessible.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmgeneral/deleg10/140709/140709s01.htm.
48.
Catherine Russell, Cinema as Timepiece: Critical Perspectives on The Clock, Framework 54,
no. 2 (Fall 2013), p. 175.

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The Clock to have even a chance of escaping its imprisonment in the gallery, someone will have to record a 24-hour bootleg.
Of course, 40,000 visitors in one month is a huge number for a video installation, but lets put this in perspective. A tally of all the YouTube postings of Los
Angeles Plays Itself that are currently live results in a figure of more than 100,000
views. That number would probably be several times larger if one were to count
the various postings that have been removed over recent years in response to corporate takedown notices. In addition, the films availability has recently increased
even further. Thanks in part to the clarification and strengthening of fair use since
the mid-2000s, in October 2014, Los Angeles Plays Itself was released commercially at
last by the Cinema Guild, an independent-film distributor. It is now available internationally on DVD, Blu-ray, the distributors VoD channel, and even Netflix. I
doubt Andersen will be able to buy himself a hilltop home with the proceeds. But
at the very least, the popularity of Los Angeles Plays Itself is surely enough to cause
any film or video artist to reflect on whether there may perhaps sometimes be a
trade-off between maximizing the economic value of their artwork and maximizing its cultural value.
I conclude by returning to Bourriauds suggestion that artists have collectively moved toward a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal:
sharing. Does this collective ideal really exist? It is certainly present in many areas
of grassroots digital culture and has become incorporated into ever more Internet
art, including Chris Milks interactive websites. However, when there is a chance of
earning rent from their work, artists often refuse to share. Lawrence Lessig refers
to a 2007 exhibition at White Cube by Candice Breitz, featuring fans singing John
Lennon songs. The organizers tried to get clearance to use the music, but the
process proved intractable. At one point, they even asked a sympathetic curator
who personally knew Yoko Ono to intervene. Onos reply, however, was
Permission is vital, legally.49 In this instance, we see the unfortunate but economically inevitable situation in which appropriation causes two artists to face off from
different sides of the Read/Only and Read/Write divide.50 Eventually, though
Breitz failed to secure permission, the exhibition took place anyway and there
were no legal repercussions. Sanity prevailed.
One can only hope that sanity will continue to prevail despite the spread of
DRM technologies and that artists will continue to be able to draw on the media
landscape as freely as they do now. But it might not. It is up to us as theorists, critics, and practitioners to continue demonstrating the importance of appropriation
to the evolution of culture. Perhaps one way for appropriation film- and videomakers to do so is by engaging with the share alike principles of Read/Write
culture. I am certainly not arguing that we should give away our work; most of us
49.
Lessig, Remix, p. 5.
50.
Incidentally, White Cube is also Marclays gallery. The tensions between Read/Only and
Read/Write culture are so pervasive that even the same gallery may find itself operating on different
sides of the divide.

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already earn precious little from it as it is. But perhaps more appropriation artists
might consider making work available via online galleries rather than pretending
that the Internet does not exist.51 Or they might consider Sven Lttickens idea of
conceptually separating editioned copies from lower-quality viewing copies and
being less precious about the circulation of the latter.52 Or, as Balsom suggests,
they might consider giving free editioned copies to not-for-profit distributors such
as Lux, from whom people could then rent them. Through such actions, they
could at least begin to mitigate their reappropriation.
There is also a bigger issue at stake here. Bourriauds belief in an artistic culture moving toward the free exchange of creative resources was typical of the idealism that accompanied the early years of the Internet. However, as developments
over the subsequent decade and a half have demonstrated, the centuries-old battles over intellectual property now rage more intensely than ever. Whether our culture moves toward the ideal of sharing that Bourriaud implies is already with us, or
toward greater regulation and restriction of access to cultural works, remains in
the balance. Zygmunt Bauman has observed that struggles over what constitutes
public space are crucial to the future of civilization.53 The same can be said of public media space. In the currently fluid ideological and legal context, the myriad
decisions that artists make in relation to what source material they use, how they
use it, and where they exhibit it all have political resonanceregardless of
whether they realize it. Marclays motivation for keeping tight control over where
and how The Clock is exhibited may be aesthetic. But the way in which he and his
gallery have approached the production and distribution of The Clock plays out in
miniature the ongoing enclosure of our cultural commons. It also forms part of a
broader tendency that includes such seemingly disparate activities as the increased
technological regulation of how we use our digital devices, the migration of scholarship from universities to the password-protected websites of commercial publishers, and even the privatization of public assets. By contrast, Los Angeles Plays Itself
simultaneously draws on and contributes to our shared culture. At one point in
the film, Andersens narrator expresses the hope that Hollywood movies may one
day more closely resemble Los Angeles itself. My own hope is that the distribution
and exhibition of all art that uses extant media may one day more closely resemble
that of Los Angeles Plays Itself. My fear is that it will ever more closely resemble that
of The Clock.

51.
It is notable how much less primary information (personal websites and blogs, interviews,
documentation, trailers, clips, etc.) one tends to find when searching online for contemporary film or
video artists than when searching for contemporary filmmakers. Artists often seem to apply the principle of artificial scarcity to themselves as well as their works.
52.
Sven Ltticken, Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Moving Images, e-flux journal 8
(September 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/viewing-copies-on-the-mobility-of-moving-images.
53.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Press, 2000), p. 39.