Irreverent yet poignant, The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset. "The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype...."—Doug Hall, 1984

In this work, there is much at play - a fake president is the very least of one's concerns. Only a few years after the Kennedy assassination, such a bold statement appropriated the style of modern (media) communication as well as the content of the assassination. Among a multitude of modern interpretations, adoptions and appropriations we see perhaps most boldly the Yes Men - 'Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.' The audacity of this group stands only second to its willingness to use corporate messaging as a blind, as a subterfuge.

The Yes Men (2003) shows the careful marketing required to allow the Yes Men to drive corporate citizenship via simple tactics: they 'agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business.' By being precisely who they are expected to be - and rarely who they actually are - the Yes Men appropriate far beyond a single medium. You can see the full movie, subtitled in Spanish, here.

So what is the difference between appropriating form, and appropriating content? When John Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt, the medium has changed entirely. One might compare this with fusion cooking, or with a figure/ground discussion. Aiden Boulder, however, has leveraged the dialogue form of Heidegger's text along with the content. Jeff Thompson is paring down both and finding that infinite line, that phase transition, between one and the other. And Sandra Gamarra speaks of adoption rather than appropriation:

En principio se llamó apropiacionismo a la práctica artística ligada al uso del imaginario existente de obras de arte para la creación de otras “nuevas”. Propiedad, originalidad y autoría se confrontan con el contexto nuevo en que se presentan. Mi trabajo, se circunscribe a esta práctica en particular, aunque, como sabemos la apropiación contemporánea admite mucho más imaginario. En este sentido la apropiación abarca tantos campos que el uso incluso de mecanismos de acción de actividades ajenas al “arte” son señaladas de la misma manera, cuando en realidad, no es una apropiación propiamente dicha, sino más bien una “adopción”. (In principle the notion of appropriation is applied to artistic practice which is tied to the use of existing imagery related to given works in the creation of other 'new' works. My work is related to this particular practice, although, as we know, contemporary appropriation allows for much more than just imagery. In this sense, appropriation opens so many more areas that even the use of 'non artistic' mechanisms are referred to in the same way when in reality this is not truly appropriation but 'adoption'). (full)

It is in exactly this sense that I turn to the projects and attempt to understand the process, both the fore and the back. I cannot recall what it was that I was reading recently when the writer's estranged father, who as I recall was in another continent, had taken the time to produce a complete version of his son's first novel on a computer disk - since his son clearly did not have such a thing. This was no Pierre Menard. Yet the questioning of medium and message, of figure and ground (McLuhan looms large) continues.

Scott MacLeod published another copy of his manuscript for Betaville this week. It reminded me a great deal of Antonia Clevedon's Bullet Pool. This work, whose significantly longer physical edition I own, started its life as a jerky tape machine's recording that was later transcribed. The tape was run back and forth and recordings taken and stilled - texts were scribed by hand and then physically cut a la Burroughs. But in all this cross-pollination and appropriation, content overtaking form, and form then dominating, could any have predicted the numeric 1 that crept in replacing an 'I' when the text was scanned from book to machine?

- Oliver Luker