Artist Graham Fagen is representing Scotland at this year's Venice Biennale with a show that takes it cue from Robert Burns's contemplation of a move to Jamaica in the 1780s and the poem The Slave's Lament, as was reported in The Herald this week.
The soundtrack to this exhibition will be an interpretation of Burns on which Fagen has worked with producer Adrian Sherwood and reggae singer Ghetto Priest. This might be news in north Italy come May, but it will be less of a surprise to those who lament the passing of Stirling's Changing Room gallery and recall Fagen's Somebodyelse show there exactly six years ago. An associated performance as part of the Tolbooth's Blend music season had Ghetto Priest working with Sherwood, his On-u-sound associate Skip MacDonald and other musicians on a set of exquisite and radical versions of Burns songs under the title I Murder Hate. The set also included The Tree of Liberty, A Man's A Man For A' That and a truly lovely A Red, Red Rose. The music was captured on a very limited edition recording made available on the Tolbooth's own label, of which I possess a treasured copy, and the gig was repeated at Edinburgh's Voodoo Rooms and reviewed in The Herald by Neil Cooper.
Clearly there is nothing wrong with an artist recycling his own shtick. In fact it is the stock-in-trade of many in the visual arts, with Andy Warhol's "multiples" perhaps most famous, but everything from the radical film making of Douglas Gordon and the installations of Ross Sinclair to the public sculpture of Andy Scott very different examples of the same personal artistic production line process. But as we have also seen this week, half-inching the ideas of another artist without due credit is a no-no in the modern world. The offspring of the late Marvin Gaye are over $7m richer after a Los Angeles jury decided that the lyrically controversial Blurred Lines, a chart-topper for Robin Thicke co-written by Pharrell Williams, ripped off the late soulman's 1977 hit Got To Give It Up for its backing track. Not a lot of tears were shed globally about this decision, I am fairly sure, as the song was fairly widely loathed for its nasty sexism, despite its popularity, and the defendants are not short of a buck or two, even if Gaye's family are surely some distance from the breadline. To my ears, it is by far the most blatant unacknowledged borrowing in popular music - my review of the new Rebecca Ferguson album in Wednesday's paper suggested a couple of uncanny echoes in the arrangements on that disc - but this was the one that wound up in court and on news bulletins around the world.
It is good that it was the audience (the jury) that made this decision rather than some panel of musicological experts. When his own film of his breakthrough play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a repurposing of out-of-copyright characters, we might note) was released 25 years ago, I interviewed Tom Stoppard at Glasgow Film Theatre and found him a little uncooperative when I tried to widen the conversation beyond its promotional purpose, but that did not diminish my regard for his work. The playwright has recently been outspoken about the dumbing-down of audiences that necessitated some revision of his new play at the National, The Hard Problem, but I am inclined to agree with the critic Ian Shuttleworth, who has suggested that the truth is that today's audience just knows stuff that is very different from the stuff Stoppard, now 77, knows and thinks more important. In the era beyond post-modernism, audiences are smart enough to recognise the worth of work that re-uses popular ingredients meaningfully, and complaining that they don't appreciate your marvellous intellect and originality suggests to me a deficiency in the artist's own language.
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