UNLICENSED investigates contemporary culture’s obsession with bootlegging by turning to designers and artists who exploit this phenomenon in their practices. Read more.
As part of our series on creative bootlegging, we interview BLESS, lead by partners Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag. Since 1995 BLESS has succeeded in consistently being inconsistent, seamlessly moving between areas of fashion, home goods, product design, performance, installation, and contemporary art… often thriving in the blurry boundaries of each.
“What’s left if you take away the fashion from a fashion magazine?” Continuing UNLICENSED, our series on design and bootlegging, graphic designer Line Arngaard and fashion researcher Sonia Oet discuss A March Issue, their 372-page, spread-for-spread remake of an issue of British Vogue—with all models wearing a “default” wardrobe of blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
The printed and collaged garments of Elisa van Joolen represent a new form of “open bootlegging” where the companies involved are not only aware but included in the making of a piece. In her working process, conversation plays a an integral role in each step of production, causing participants to reconsider ideas about value, ownership, and labor. Continuing UNLICENSED, our series on design and bootlegging, Ben Schwartz speaks with van Joolen about her projects 11×17 and One-to-One, along with the implications of bootlegging in the name of kindness.
In 2017, Werkplaats Typografie curated a project space at the New York Art Book Fair around the idea of bootlegging, in which students sold objects of desire behind a curtain in the MoMA PS1 boiler room—accessible only if you knew the codeword: “cherry.” One of those students, Malin Gewinner, has continued to explore the concept of bootlegging and the flexibility of copyright in her own practice.
As a part of his design practice, Mark Owens often writes about the intersection of design, music, and material culture. While his writing touches on subjects from Brutalism to Times New Roman, his specific relationship to punk and hardcore subcultures has given him a unique perspective on the recent bootleg phenomenon. In the following interview, Ben Schwartz chats with Owens about fan recordings, imaginary collaborations, and the value of “plunderphonics.”
Shanzhai Lyric is a “poetic research and archival unit” that documents and transforms awkwardly translated slogans from Chinese bootleg T-shirts into an ongoing poem. Continuing our series UNLICENSED, Ben Schwartz speaks with members of the Shanzhai Lyric project team about bootlegging, global hierarchies, shininess, and the “detritus of consumerism.”
When it comes to bootlegging, Experimental Jetset prefers the term “cover versions.” The linguistic distinction is crucial when talking about the studio, as it bends the concept into homage, allowing for work to vibrate between the original and Jetset’s own interpretation. Launching UNLICENSED, a new series on bootlegging in graphic design, Ben Schwartz interviews the Amsterdam-based studio.
For many designers the term “bootlegging” resonates with our impulse to exhume the past, our ongoing quest for production of meaning, and a desire to both participate in and critique the broader industries that commodify the artistic act. Here Christopher Schulz and Jordan Nassar discuss how a T-shirt can be a publication, how bootlegs create community, and the radical spirit of generosity that curator Shannon Michael Cane brought to the world of printed matter.
ABOUT UNLICENSED
Over time, the term “bootlegging” has evolved beyond illegal copyright infringement and moonshine to describe, in essence, a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft—which previously felt comfortable in the academic context of the art world—are being reimagined in the worlds of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Bootlegging has become fetishized within creative fields as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts, publishing ideologies to acts of high fashion détournement. For many designers, the term seems to resonate with our impulse to exhume the past, our ongoing quest for production and transmission of meaning, and a desire to both participate in and critique the broader industries that commodify the artistic act. It also begs a variety of questions regarding two ideas that are both core to a museum’s mission: history and context. How might the idea of bootlegging relate to a cultural institution’s brand and design practice? Is it possible to bootleg ourselves as a means of archiving our legacy while contextualizing it in the present? Can strategies be developed in which organizations leverage their past in generative and unruly ways to better understand who they are? What happens when a visual identity is thrust into uncomfortable and potentially illicit scenarios? We found our internal conversations touching on everything from copyright, politics, and race to maker culture, fandom, and memes. To get some insight into contemporary culture’s obsession with bootlegging, we turned to designers and artists who exploit this phenomenon in their various practices.
