Cover & Remix

Paradigms of Adaptation in Installation Art

Abstract

My essay discusses the problem of adaptation in installation art practice, considering two theoretical paradigms borrowed from the musical domain: cover and remix. Cover and remix’s de-hierarchizing potential and their capacity to (re)mediate the motifs and (re)inscribe them into a network of cultural exchanges make the two generic concepts particularly relevant to comment on adaptive installation artworks that proposes “forms of repetition without replication” (Hutcheon). I explain the process of adaptation as a form of mutual legitimation: of the source as an authoritative model to be followed, and of the adapted work as a viable product that equally reveres and challenges the original. Thus, instead of social or institutional legitimation, my focus is on the aesthetic mechanisms of transfers (i.e. of adaptation and therefore of legitimation) between different cultural products and their internal functioning and structure—how sources and the derived works act in relation to each other artistically and aesthetically. I claim that cover and remix, as specific expressions of the broader concept of adaptation, propose a creative strategy placed between production and reproduction. In this sense, cover and remix question any assumption of subsidiarity of the adaptation work vis-à-vis the “original” source, and consequently, reject the model of mechanical copy and that of simulacrum as they have been theorized by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, respectively. My analysis discusses these particular aspects of adaptation—across different cultural levels (“high” and “low”) and across different mediums—while also commenting on installation’s medium-specificity, more precisely, on what I call its “internal spatiality”.