23, is it original? if not for Michael Jordan

We have the so called Internet Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23 which shall be (and will be) regulated very soon. I want to ask one thing first, “What is completely original?”

Starting from the late 60’s, there was a scene, which came across between art scene and pop music. For instance, Andy Warhol and Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground; The Beatles and Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake; Gustav Metzger and The Who; Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols, just to name a few. The most popular one should be the “Campbell soups”, “Mao Zedong portraits”, which were produced by Andy Warhol’s production line “Factory”. Nowadays people call it “cross-over”, in popular sense, it is “appropriation”. It sparked creativity since artists from both fields, the visual and musical side, could exchange ideas and thoughts. I propose to quote one of my previous work to illustrate how “appropriation” works by using the representation of the album – Sgt. Pepper Lonely Heart Club Band in 1967. The album was a great outcome from The Beatles and the artist Peter Blake. 

We do not need to talk about who is The Beatles I guess, and Peter Blake, he studied at the Royal College of Art from 1953–1956. He was typically interested in rhythm and blues music as a pop fan. Compare with most of the Pop Art artist in the sixties, he was not interested in commercial techniques, or idioms; nor the supercharged style of the Hollywood show business world. He was a folk artist, with traditional sense, infused with a degree of both nostalgia and sentimentalism - as befits his English heritage. 

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One of the significant phenomena inside the 1960’s pop music, was that the artists in art and music scene came together. They influenced each other from the collaboration. Sgt. Pepper was designed by Blake with the help of his then wife Jann Haworth. According to a book ‘Summer of love: psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 1960s’ (2005), the album’s sleeve was supposed to be a Dutch collective’s design known as The Fool. This would have been a psychedelic design. Yet, Robert Fraser, an art dealer and friend of The Fab Four, recommended that the group did not take the psychedelic approach, and instead, introduced them to Blake for the design. The final version was emblematic of the close personal connections among the artists: art dealers (Robert Fraser); photographers (Michael Cooper); designers (Peter Blake); musicians (The Beatles). As an artist, both The Fab Four (John Lennon) and Blake shared the same background. They had a common direction towards the album’s concept: Appropriation. The format of the sleeve Sgt. Pepper was a collage - a technique of putting materials together to create a new scene. In order to give a quick understanding between appropriation and collage, it was worth quoting Blake’s own words: ‘collage can encompass anything where something is attached to something else. It is a very board definition that includes work in both two and three dimensions: embroidery, books, furniture and clothing, even television and music’ The technique signified a concept of appropriation. The album cover evoked another world which consisted of the cultural heroes, mentors and friends of The Beatles, Blake and Fraser: such as Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Max Miller, Dion and the Belmonts, Bob Dylan, etc. This kind of Surrealist image making, was commonly adopted by the art school students during the 1960’s. Blake applied it on the album sleeves successfully. As a result, it explored a new horizon towards the aesthetics of album cover. 

George Melly, a jazz musician as well as a critic stated that the previous album sleeves before Sgt. Peppers had ‘no life on their own’. George Martin, a classical music composer as well as producer of The Fab Four also asserted that, ‘the art of the vinyl album did not have much a life before the Beatles’. It did not aim to argue that album sleeves before Sgt. Peppers are trivial, but it was believed that the Sgt. Peppers cover sleeves created a new aesthetics value of an album as a whole. It was the first cover to specify itself as an object for overt investigation ad analysis by identifying the figures. The album sleeves offered a dynamic communication between musicians and listeners (Inside the record’s sleeve a separate sheet of card was supplied featuring a picture of the fictional Sgt. Peppers, plus moustaches, badges and stripes. All the items could be cut out). Given that the basic roles of an album cover was to protect, to advertise the record, as well as serving a function of accompaniment (including lyrics and proper information about the artists and crews), the album sleeve of Sgt. Pepper, not only served the above functions but also stood as a work of art on its own.  

To call it a work of art, it has to be discussed from the original concept of the album - appropriation. The ‘cross over’ between The Fab Four (John Lennon), and Blake was reflected, not only on the visual side, but also on the musical side. Both the music and the record sleeve, worked under the concept of appropriation. They resonated with each other, in that the musical approach taken by The Beatles on the album, was echoed visually on the cover. The two shared a coherent thought, like the collaboration among the artists. With the assistance of the multi tracks recording techniques, The Fab Four sampled a range of sounds such as church bell, looping, clock alarm, etc. The layers of sounds and the visual collage signified each other. The recording techniques became part of the instruments inside the studio. The interpretation of studio worked as an artistic endeavor became more focused following the Sgt. Pepper album. 

It had been mentioned that the record’s sleeve created another world by Surrealism collage, The Beatles invited listeners to participate in order to match the theme. The Beatles reinvented and introduced themselves on the album’s opening track not as The Beatles, but the members of Sgt. Pepper Lonely Heart Club Band. The cover art confirmed the new identities. Both the album sleeves and music invited audiences to re-evaluate their assumptions about who they are. The cover weaved together images from nostalgia, psychedelic and popular culture. The album sleeves encouraged listeners to take part into imagination of the scenario in which The Beatles and Blake created. In addition, psychedelic elements inside ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘A Day in the Life’; and the mystical Eastern elements in, ‘Within You, Without You’, echoed the magical world Blake had created through the cover. All in all, the album sleeve served as the semblance of sounds, and vice versa. The record’s sleeves and the music required audiences to adopt sophisticated skills to understand the symbolism. It involved a more active participation on the reception side, and thus the communication between them was enhanced. Also, Sgt. Pepper worked as a vehicle to deliver art to the public. It transcended the boundaries between pop and art, making art reach a broader audiences inside the commercial world. 

As Melly said, ‘1960s has always been the mark time of the popular culture’ The British art schools played a decisive role inside the decade. Institutionally speaking, they gave birth to an artistic atmosphere, whilst the individuals who emerged from them brought what they had learnt to the music industry when they became professional musicians. They explored new horizons towards visual representation and music making since both artforms resonated with each other. To examine it in a deeper sense, they transcended the boundaries between them as an artist and the listeners as an audience. It was the moment when art met pop, as well as a diminishing of the gap between the two.

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We have a brief picture now on how appropriations worked. OK, I think no one denies the fact that The Beatles work is popular art, Andy Warhol T-shirt you wear is popular art, but for the Hong Kong government’s way of thinking (notice I said here is “thinking”, but not “practical” implementation, or laws or whatever, that is the "system" we need to challenge, but no any person), all the things we do, the music, the graphic, the image, the video, the words… everything, on the Internet, could be and would be a copyright issue. Internet should be something that makes mind and matter become more open. Why do we degenerate now? Messing up concept between appropriation and copyright really scares me. The things annoying me is that being a Chinese, is always being etherized on one hand, being a “perfect” person; on the other hand, for political use. That is stupid. The government advertisements told us “knowledge is power”, but they never show the implication is that, “knowledge is never outside power”. We always call for truth, but we are only within the “regime of truth”. The knowledge we acquire is not “independent” enough. Like what we were taught inside an ancient Chinese culture, study hard, and then be an official. The premise is wrong, what do you expect at the next?

What is completely original? May I ask again.