Suns from Flickr by Penelope Umbrico.Kandinsky? Nope, not even close. Upon further examination, it becomes evident that this colorful collage is a compilation of hundreds of individual glossy photographs. The author of this piece is conceptual artist, Penelope Umbrico. Through this piece, Umbrico explores issues of authorship in a time when the word “Google” functions as both a noun and a verb. Umbrico’s Suns from Flickr responds to the effects of an increasingly global world in which ideas are uploaded, downloaded, exhibited, and discarded over wireless airwaves, and it is no longer sufficient to pin artists under the same age-old definitions of static authorship.
For this piece, Umbrico conducted a search for the word “sunset” on the photo-sharing website, Flickr. Her search returned over three-million photographs taken by other Flickr users. Umbrico then downloaded the images, isolated the suns from each photo, and printed them as individual photos, several hundred of which are included in this piece. Displayed side-by-side in a large rectangle, each photo loses its individual identity and context, and becomes part of a greater whole, under new authorship. Through this process of decontextualization, Umbrico cuts the umbilical cord between each photograph and its original author, and in doing so, questions the notion of a static authorship. With Suns, Umbrico suggests that perhaps our definition of authorship needs to be redefined to catch up with the transnational cross-pollination of ideas that occurs in every moment of the 21st Century.
Umbrico is certainly not the first artist to destabilize the traditional role of the author through a process of decontextualization. Marcel Duchamp destabilized notions of art and authorship with his famous urinal, and later, Andy Warhol posed similar questions by decontextualizing the Campbell’s soup can. However, Umbrico’s Suns adds a new element to the equation: the Internet. In these days where Wikipedia reigns, is there really such a thing as a stabilized and singular author? And more importantly, does it matter? While I believe that authorship will always matter, and artists must always be accountable for their claims to authorship, Umbrico’s Suns draws attention to the urgent need for a reevaluation of authorship in relation to the rapid globalization of the art world as a result of the Internet.
P.S. Another thought on this piece that I've had since I wrote the above paragraphs: I helped Penelope install this piece for an exhibition a few months back, and I found it interesting that she had a group of us (mostly students) installing the piece, one photo at a time. She let us pick each photo form a stack of hundreds, and choose where we would glue it to the wall. That created an element of chance in the creation of the piece. It is different each time it is installed. In addition to chance of aesthetic organization, the physical construction was not done by Peneleope alone, but by a group working together. All of this comes together to underline her questions of collective authorship.
