Back in 2007, Harper’s magazine ran an article called “On the Rights of the Molotov Man” that I’ve always remembered. It’s about image culture, and specifically the fraught tale of a particular photograph, recounted through two separate essays: The first by artist Joy Garnett, the second by photographer Susan Meiselas.
Garnett explains how, in 2003, she was trying to find a way to critique the Bush administration’s militarism, and began searching the Internet for images of politically inspired violence, where, among others, she found one of a Molotov cocktail-throwing Sandanista. Later, she used this photograph as the basis of a painting, which was shown in a gallery in 2004. Predictably in this age of copyright conflict, the Magnum photography agency sent her something approaching a cease-and-desist, but which ultimately came down to two points: (1) that the original photographer should be credited, and (2) that permission would have to be sought for future uses. The latter piqued Garnett, who saw it as a sort of backdoor veto-power that would censor her, and she reached out to like-minded artists on Rhizome, ultimately (and accidentally) producing a wide-spread Internet-based protest movement in which the image was time and again re-appropriated by the protesting artistic community.
Her story, then, seems of a stereotypical kind with which we’re familiar these days: An artist working in mixed and new media adopts a found image to use as part of socially conscious protest artwork, and the intellectual property lawyers clamp down for unauthorized use. We live in a “re-mix” culture; Garnett is an artist of the “Poor Image” for whom the products of late-capitalist media culture serve as the raw material for artistic production; the entire idea of control of this image is a tragically ironic, defanging the very content it pretends to protect. And the political dimensions of this were not lost on the protesting artists. Here was an image of political protest, appropriated for another protest action, which in turn was being suppressed in the name of “intellectual property,” as though the photographer was the sole author of content, rather than the photo-journalistic subject and his political gesture.