The fifth and final installment of Retraction published this week, which I'm delighted to announce: Retraction 5: Copy/Right. This installment enters the fantasmatic realm of the copy, featuring the work of Mireia c. Saladrigues, Carlos Miguel Sánchez, Vitor Magalhães, y Eva Sòria, introduced by the fifth segment of a running text I wrote for the project.
An excerpt from the introduction:
«From this vantagepoint, the copy defies the self-possession of the image – or even the object – or, let’s take it one step further, even the subject. The copy thereby confronts the central question of property, not because the copy threatens to transgress the law but because the copy exactly embodies the law. We must shift here from a framework of reproduction to a framework of repetition. The image endeavors to cover over the hole that it simultaneously creates (e.g. the holes of reference, of ornament, of illustration) while its failure to do so compels it to repeat – that is, to copy itself again.[6] This intrinsic repetition in the law of the copy shows its entanglement in the dynamics of enjoyment (in the psychoanalytic sense), the way in which the satisfying character of the image gives way to a dissatisfaction that it cannot completely overcome. Precisely at the junctures of its repetition, the image breaks from the property of a particularist vision (points of view, expressions and styles, objets d’art, artistic oeuvres and movements, art markets and collections) and enters the universality of the copy’s self-subversive structure. Here we can risk a legitimate question with which we might stipulate the crux of retraction: The images and their technologies that pervade our world today, that never deliver on their promises, and that dispossess us of the stability of our longed-for identities, how could these repeating images, these “copy machines,” precisely in their failed ambitions, become the basis of a collective project within an emancipatory politics? How could a politics of assembly be formed not on the image of an aggregation and inclusion of marginalized elements but on the structural lack of the all-inclusive, the central hole in the whole, the not-all of every totality that instigates and keeps alive the movement of an emancipatory aim?
This final installment of Retraction presents four works. The first investigates the reality of the virtual presentation of the art exhibition using 360-degree video technology and considers the differences, losses, and gains advanced by the virtual on the real. The project traces the inside-out connective tissue between the virtual and the real as a surface, in which, like the möbius strip or the Klein bottle, one cannot simply orient oneself from the standpoint of orthodox spectator behavior. The second entry introduces a full-scale art foundation in a net art project that retracts and develops the fundamental pretenses of art exhibitions in internet platforms. The third entry presents an epigrammatic text inspired by two canonical works of experimental film in which the recording apparatus significantly expands the frame of view only then, paradoxically, to retract the vision of reality into a view that transcends cinematic viewership. The last entry, written by an attorney and art historian, surveys the history, complexity and contradictions of current copyright law and intellectual property rights in relation to art, suggesting the ways in which the legal system lags behind not only contemporary art practices but also the expressed intent of intellectual property law.»