The Turner Prize exhibition, which runs to the end of this week, became controversial when a painting by Glenn Brown was accused of resembling the cover of a Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi novel. But this is hardly the first case of repetition in art. Last year, Tracey Emin's messy bed was considered shocking and caused many dinner-table conversations on the definition of art. But would punters be equally shocked to learn that another artist exhibited the same thing more than 20 years ago? The Turner Prize is meant to be about new art, but how new is new?
There are many Doppelgangers hanging in the art closet. 1993's prize winner Rachel White read's negative castings of rooms and furniture were pre-empted by 1960s artist Bruce Nauman with A Cast of the Space Under My Chair. Tracey Emin's Every Part of Me is Bleeding in 1999, a work of twisted neon words, closely resembles Ian Hamilton Finlay's neon poetry from a few years before. Damien Hirst's famous spin paintings had been done by the not-so-famous Alfons Schilling in the 1960s. Earlier this year, Hirst was involved in a legal wrangle over his sculpture Hymn, a gigantic replica of an educational toy.
Brown's piece, which was splashed over the English papers alongside the book jacket by Anthony Roberts, bears more than a striking similarity to its predecessor. In fact, its full title is The Loves of Shepherds 2000 (after Anthony Roberts).
If this was a pop song, it would have to be cleared with the original artist to avoid a lawsuit. But this is visual art. Real art. And artists are allowed to take their inspiration from anywhere, right? But whereas no one worries too much whether the aural wallpaper of pop breaks new ground or tests our perceptions, contemporary art is meant to be new and original.
"There's nothing new under the sun," says Norma Binnie, former director of the Gardner Arts Centre at Sussex University. She should know. In 1977, while Tracey Emin was a young girl playing on the beach in Margate, on another part of the English coastline Binnie was erecting her installation The Spirit of Hove. It was a comment on the squalid conditions pensioners were living in and consisted of an unmade bed, featuring urine stains, the lot. The work caused an outcry, as Emin's did last year.
To be fair to Glenn Brown, he used many other artists' work, just as Warhol borrowed images. When the controversy broke, Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of the Turner Prize, defended Brown, saying: "We certainly know that Glenn Brown has frequently used the work of other artists in developing his own work, but that is true of Picasso, who borrowed from Rembrandt . . . this is not new."
But repetition in art is not just about plagiarism versus inspiration. It can happen by accident too, as with Emin and Binnie. Great minds think alike. What if two individuals have the same idea on different sides of the planet or 50 years apart from each other? Is their art invalid?
In 1998, two artists independently produced sculptures representing Harold Edgerton's 1936 Milk Drop photograph. The second was withdrawn from exhibition to prevent embarrassment.
In 1997, Cerith Wyn Evans and Anish Kapoor both exhibited circular mirrors, one with Sensation and one at the Hayward Gallery. Both mirrors were claimed to create a feeling of unsettling distortion for the viewer. One was concave. The other was convex.
We still hold on to the idea that artistic expression is, and should be, unique. Harold Bloom said it was this "anxiety of influence" that propelled art and culture forward. "Art isn't created in a vacuum," says Louisa Buck. "Any artist who's reasonably well informed will know about precedence. Rachel Whiteread, I'm pretty sure, would have known about Bruce Nauman. It's a famous piece, but they use it from very different standpoints."
But sometimes if more than one person has an idea, the idea's not that ingenious in the first place. Instead of the cliched criticism of modern art that "anyone could paint that", the criticism now becomes "anyone could have thought of that".
When I was a cheeky graduate in Australia and had never heard of the buzz names of the Sensation artists, I put together a "fake" exhibition with a friend. As well as featuring images of cows and Barbie corpses arranged in uncompromising positions (the Chapman Brothers on a smaller scale?) we displayed a plaster mould of my teeth ("found art", of course) and called it (intone gravely) Installation. As our friends cooed enthusiastically, we began to appreciate the merits of our own art. The line between what is art and what is not is thin.
If it has all been done before, where has art left to go? That's up to the artists to show us.
commentbox@irish-times.ie
