The art of copying: from mimesis to cloning
By Francesca Piovano
Indeed the idea of copying and of replication, cloning in other words, is at the very base of the history of western art and civilisation. Well before the mechanical and digital era and mammal cloning, Plato and Aristotle, in order to interpret the world and the role of art in it, introduced the notion of mimesis, which for them was the imitation of ideal forms. For Aristotle mimesis represents the eternal and enables us to understand the universal. Plato’s position is more complex and ultimately much more significant for our post modern thinking. According to Plato, mimesis involves a difference in the repetition —not all copies are the same, art for instance is made of copies of copies (simulacra). This premise, which for Plato is epistemologically negative as simulacra, take us further away from identifying with the eternal but proves to be very valuable in the age of electronic reproduction. Deleuze for instance, calling into question the very notion of the copy and model, proclaims that the true platonic distinction lies between two kinds of images: the copy and the simulacrum. The concepts not only of artistic authenticity and of uniqueness, but also of originality and identity are in this way rendered totally obsolete. This conceptual repositioning is certainly crucial to digital aesthetics. Digital art is not based on an absolute model, but on possibilities, cloning, variations and collaboration, each digital work can be both original and an infinite copy and can be simultaneously represented in more than one place.
‘Clone’, an exhibition of four artists that takes place in Rome simultaneously in four galleries, tackles many issues connected with cloning, repetition, montage and digital appropriation, not only because the artists’ main theme is ‘cloning’, but also because the exhibition is itself conceptually structured on the basis of copying and duplication. The four shows, in effect totally identical, present a work by each of the four artists and three re-elaborations of the work done by the other artists. In total there are sixteen pieces, all computer generated and all copied in order to be shown in the four galleries. The invited artists are Fabiana Roscioli, Luca Curci (both based in Rome), Richard Journo based in Rome and London and Janek Simon from Krakow (Poland), all coming from an artistic practice in digital media and all very conversant with computer generated images. For Curci, Simon and Roscioli cloning is directly connected with the human body. From the endless duplication of a female body (Roscioli), to a genderless and colourless cohort of perfect bodies (Curci) to an empty ethnic robe with an internal cable connecting a battery to a green light (Simon) we are confronted with an iconography that anchors back to science fiction literature where clones are usually people with no individuality, conscience or emotions.
Curci’s models and Simon’s empty robe in particular, indicate that in our times of virtual encounters, the human body might be set free from its traditional limitations of gender, sex, age, race, and sent to inhabit the transparent world of computer data. The approach of Richard Journo to cloning and its implications is more layered and subtle. The notion of replication is embodied by the face of a little girl where the left half has been copied and turned over on the right side, so that whomever is looking at us, although slightly enigmatically, is still a very recognisable person with all her life in front of her. The portrait, though, is flattened and almost screened off by the more or less transparent stripes of a bar code similar to the type applied to consumer goods all over the world. In Journo’s work the comment on cloning is shifted from the human sphere to the standardisation of the global market.
The different starting points of each artist make their re-elaboration of each other’s work remarkably interesting and dynamic. If we take for instance Curci’s work, we see that the post-human bodies become through the treatment of Simon a group of crashed cigarette-ends all standing in a quite sculptural presence. As cigarettes have often been used by artists as a potent symbol of our culture and post culture- Sarah Lucas’ Fag Show which was made entirely of cigarettes comes to mind – looking at Simon’s stubs one can not keep from thinking that that the world as we know it is at its very end. On the other hand, in Journo’s more lyrical interpretation of the same work, where one of the clones is given a bit of colour and made pregnant, there is a gleam of hope for the future of human race.
The four artists in ‘Clone’ exhibition have valiantly taken up the challenge that Dolly the sheep had thrown into the open and explore some possibilities of how a world full of Dollys would look like. Naturally they don’t give us any moral solutions, but by imagining potential scenarios of a ‘cloned-up’ world, they help us to come to terms and adjust to a new world order.
