by Harry Heuser
This is the introduction to a series of lectures and seminars I created and delivered as part of my undergraduate module Adaptation: Versions, Revisions and Cultural Renewal. It has been abridged and edited for publication here. The published series consists of six talks, accompanied by select presentation slides that may be accessed separately but were designed to be presented in the following sequence. Seminars, being unscripted and interactive, are not included here.
- Creativity: Genius, Inspiration and Influence
- Canonicity: Touchstones, Traditions and Individual Talent
- Seminar—Revisiting the “Masters” (not published)
- Adaptability: Narrative, Performance and Audio-Visualisation
- Seminar—Examining Relationships of Form and Content
- Appropriation: Relevance, Reflexivity and Post-modernity
- Seminar—Defining Dada, Kitsch and Camp
- Recycling: Trash, Transience and Ecology
Introduction to “Creativity: Genius, Inspiration and Influence”
In this introduction I am going to tell you what the series of lectures and seminars is about, how it is structured, what I hope you might get out if it, and why I created it in the first place. But, before I do that, I would like to begin with a short exercise.
I would like for you to take a sheet of paper and jot down five to ten words or phrases that come to mind when you hear the first word in the title of this series of lectures and seminars: “Adaptation.” Spend just a few seconds creating the list. Write whatever comes first to mind.
Now, put that list aside – but bring it to our first seminar next week. I want for us to see and share what our initial responses are to that word.
In the meantime, think about your expectations of a course with such a title: “Adaptation.”
Now, let’s have a look at the full title. Adaptation: Versions, Revisions and Cultural Renewal. Version. Revision. Renewal. Perhaps, some of those words are on your lists already. Do these additional words match your definition of “adaptation”? Or do you feel, perhaps, that “adaptation” is more a matter of repetition, of returning to something preexisting?
Does this example match your definition of “adaptation”? Or would you use another term to describe what the twenty-first century artist Paul Scott does with an image created by Thomas Bewick in the eighteenth century and using a different medium?
“Adaptation” is not a term traditionally used to describe art practices or works of art. We are more likely to refer to a movie being an adaptation of a novel than we are to call a painting an adaptation of a photograph or a sculpture an adaptation of a song.
Built into that is an academic bias against some creative practices that have long been excluded from discussions about so-called “art.” In an art historical context, we might say that the creator of an object was “inspired” by the work of another, or that she or he copied a motif, appropriated an image and emulated a certain technique.
Clearly, there are a lot of alternatives to “adaptation” at our disposal. But do these words mean the same thing? Do they all translate into “adaptation”?
In her 2017 study Modern Painters, Old Masters, which is subtitled The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, the well-known art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn lists “adaptation” as one of the many words that express a “relationship between two works of visual art.”
Other words she uses in her study include “plagiarism” and “parody,” “imitation” and “conversation,” “copy” and “critique.”
I have added a few more word that are not on Prettejohn’s list into the mix. Some of them are more complicated and specific than others: “Version,” “variation,” “spolio,” and “detournment.”
Of all the words available to her, the one that Prettejohn chose for the subtitle of her book is “imitation.” Not “adaptation.”
When researching “adaptation,” you will likely be directed to sources written in disciplines such as literature, drama, film studies, in science and the social sciences. It is common to say, for instance, that a life form undergoes adaptation to adjust to a changing environment.
Most of us can relate to that definition of “adaptation” – both in biological and social terms.
After all, we all had to adapt to a pandemic, and we continue to watch the virus to see whether it mutates and how it adapts.
Some museums, being closed to the public, responded to the lockdown by creating images from works in their collection, digitally modifying the composition by adding a prominent feature to which we can all relate, in order to draw attention to the challenge museums face, and making these altered reproductions available for sale in their online shops.
I chose the word “adaptation” for the title of this module because I want to suggest that it is responding to the changing discipline of art history.
I am also aware that many of you are not art history majors, that you may define yourself as a practitioner or that you may be studying art history as part of a joint-honours degree scheme.
The module is designed to be interdisciplinary and, even though this is paradoxical because you are enrolled in an art history class, transdisciplinary.
The module tests the boundaries of what can be taught in an art history class, and what art history is as a discipline.
It is a response to my own liberal arts education and the fact that when I studied English Literature, for instance, I read William Blake’s poetry but was never encouraged to look at a print by William Blake, such as this one, which translates the metaphor of reaching for the stars.
In my writings, I aim to contest the notion of academic disciplines, which is why I wrote a study about the immaterial culture of radio, which that is left out of most books on drama and literature, despite the fact that radio plays were at one point in history the most popular and influential source of education and entertainment.
More about that in Lecture 3.
Adaptation: Versions, Revisions and Cultural Renewal encourages you to relate cultural products such as films and stage plays, along with non-visual culture and literature, to what is traditionally understood to be art practices, products and media (such as painting and sculpture).
This series of lectures and seminars invites you to explore relationships between media, and between content and form. It is something that any painter, printmaker or photographer needs to think about during the creative process: why this medium and not another. What would happen if I changed the medium or mixed media? Is a medium a vehicle for a message? Or have I chosen a certain medium because no other medium suits my aims?
This raises a central question I would like for us to explore: when products of material or visual culture are adapted, can they still mean or do what they were meant to do in the medium in which they were initially created?
Adaptation is an emerging field of study: mediality, intermediality, transmediality. What happens during the process of adaptation and as a result of it? Does a product of culture have what some call an “essence” that can be conveyed independently of any medium? What is the essence of a movie, for instance: is it its plot, the cinematography, the script, or an atmosphere it conveys, a feeling it evokes?
Adaptation is a process of taking something – although not necessarily physically –and remaking it.
And throughout this series of lectures and seminars, we are going to explore what it is that is being taken – be it an idea or a motif, how it is remade, when it was made and remade, and how changing historical contexts are reflected in the works being made and remade, why something is being remade and how that process of remaking is motivated, and why we might be looking differently at something that we know is remade rather than made.
Making. Remaking. What is the distinction? Is it a useful distinction to make? Does that distinction imply a value judgment?
We are going to address these questions in a series of lectures and respond to them in a series of seminars.
Throughout, we are going to compare and contrast versions. Look at these two objects, for instance. Which came first? How can we tell? Does it matter? Why and to whom?
When we say “comes first,” we generally refer to the chronological order in which works are created. But what about the chronological order in which we experience the works, the order the order in which we are influenced by them and the order in which those works create memories for us?
Almost inevitably, our impulse when we compare is to judge which one is “better.” Why is that? Can or should we resist this impulse?
In this case, the work on the right, by Jeff Koons, was the subject of a famous – or, rather, infamous – copyright law suit brought by the creators of the work on the left, which comes, in terms of its creation, chronologically first.
Adaptations are derivative. They are based on something that existed before them, whether hundreds of years ago or last Friday. As a result, they traditionally were – and often still are – deemed inferior to so-called originals. What comes second is rarely being appreciated as “first-rate.”
Is what comes second always “second-rate”? Can an adaptation “improve” or build on a work, as the subtitle of this module invites you to consider?
What other ways of interpreting are open to us besides determining what came first or judging what is “better”?
As a process, adaptation is often considered to be more re-productive than productive.
Adaptations are often unfavorably compared to their source material, as in comments like “the book was better than the movie.” Adaptations are judged in terms of what they presumably lack: a lack of imagination, an absence of certain qualities of the source material or, worst of all, the loss of its raison d’être, its reason for being there in the first place.
What does Grayson Perry, for instance, bring to the works he adapts? The motivations for adaption are often suspected to be commercial, as adaptations broaden the market in which a product may be consumed.
Is that what Grayson Perry is doing: cashing in? Changing the medium, updating the message, Perry does not simply copy Masaccio, not that that would be simple. Unlike imitation, adaptation is an act of cultural renewal.
Adaptation is the reuse, interaction with and referencing of works of culture in different media and in different contexts. It is often a process of translating a cultural product in contemporary terms and of thereby giving it renewed relevance.
The translative process is both deliberate and acknowledged. To call a work an “adaptation” implies its producer’s awareness of the version on which it is based.
The Adventures of Sherlock, in these instances here, are not secretly copied or plagiarised. The source is acknowledged – and adaptation, in order to happen, must be recognised and recognisable as such.
The source is openly identified. Just as it is here, in another work by Paul Scott: Cow in a Meadow After Damien Hirst (2014). Is this referencing of another work perhaps too tenuous to be considered an “adaptation.” And yet, Scott’s title insists that we see his work in relation to the work by Hirst, which came before it.
To what degree is the source material recognizable. To what degree is it transformed? Is there an “essence” of Tintin that remains in these various adaptations?
Besides the narrative and the character, what else is being translated? Is Cosplay, the professional dressing up as a fictional character, an act of “adaptation”? I don’t know why this image of me dressed as Tintin is the first one to show up when you google my name – but that may be poetic justice, considering that I am teaching this module.
Again, what changes when the medium changes? Is “essence” a specific, transferable quality? Or is it a certain something – definable or not – that we individually value most in a particular work?
So, studying adaptation requires us to explore the relationship between object and idea.
The term related to “adaptation” that is most widely used in art theory is “appropriation.”
There is an anthology with that title on our reading list. Appropriation, which we are going to consider in greater detail in lecture and seminar 4, suggests an act of taking what may not rightfully belong to us. The lawsuit against Jeff Koons comes to mind.
Appropriation is a wilful, politically motivated act of reclaiming something for ourselves. In this case a female artist is commenting on a male artist’s work, as well as on the male artist’s “adaptation” – if that is the word – of changing his physical appearance by getting a “nose job,” thereby obscuring his origins or removing a feature that is stereotypically associated with being Jewish.
Appropriation may look like a simple translation – and a rather commercial or superficial or even kitschy one at that – but it is a complex performance and can be deeply personal and self-conscious.
Adaptation is “interpretation” – a way of reading culture or perhaps a deliberately misreading of culture – as is the case with “Camp.” It can also be an attempt not at translating but at tearing down the culture that an object represents, as was the case in Dada.
These are strategies and motivations we shall consider in seminar 4.
Throughout this series, we are going to consider motivations and contrast aims that underlie acts of translation and adaptation.
Before I started my doctoral thesis on the relationship between media – film, radio and literature – I wrote an MA dissertation on “translation”– and I continue to draw on both those studies.
Translations are interpretations of the ideas that underlie the work being translated. We rely on translators to bridge and move ideas across cultures – and that is what translare means in Latin, “moving across.”
Translations are expected to communicate the views of the creator whose work is translated, not the view of the person translating. Translators are not neutral, but their translative act needs to become invisible in order for a translation to perform its role. The translation becomes readable as if it were the original. We expect translations to be faithful copies of an original, even though that is impossible considering the change of context from one culture to another.
Adaptors, unlike translators, are granted – within legal limits – the license to impose their views and change an original for their own ends.
You may remember this work from my final lecture as part of Looking into Landscape. It is clear that Chris Jordan is not translating Seurat but that he is using our familiarity with Seurat’s work to convey his own political message, …
… a warning about plastic pollution.
Caps Seurat, Chris Jordan
Adaptations are expressions of change – and one reason they are useful to us is that, by adapting something familiar, we can create a dialogue about what has changed and what we believe needs to change. Adaptations are often intended to bring about change: changes in attitude, changes in politics, changes in the way we live or think about the past and adapt to the world for whose changes we are at least to some degree responsible.
Broadly speaking, then, “adaptation” means repurposing. It is the recycling of a cultural product and its transformation from one medium into other media, and from one context into another. Adaptations are openly impure: they are not one of a kind but two or more things and ideas at once, mingling with one another.
They may be corruptions of cultural products we might think of as original. Or they may be promptings to revisit what we thought we were done with.
So, I have just given you an overview of this series – in chronological order – and the questions we are going to raise. Bear in mind that I do not have – and do not want to have – the answers, let alone the last word on the word on “adaptation.” We are going to debate the term, its meanings, uses and limitations.
Now, let us have a quick look at how your engagement with the subject is being assessed. Basic information about assignments and assessment is provided on the syllabus. In addition, I posted detailed descriptions of and guidelines for each assignment on Blackboard. So, please download the syllabus and review it in preparation for our next meeting.
As you can see, there are three assessed elements: A presentation, a bibliography, and an essay.
You are probably familiar with assignments 2 and 3 from previous art history modules, including Looking into Landscape. So, let me focus on what I mean by Presentation. It is a creative project in response to the lecture topics. For each seminar, I am going to give you a project, which you can do as part of a team.
And some of those projects you may choose to turn into assignments 1, 2, and 3. Again, all this is explained in the syllabus. Seminar project 2, in particular, lends itself to assignment 1.
To make this less abstract, let me show you just a couple of examples of seminar projects by students who came before you:
Seminar project 2 asks you to respond to a canonical oil painting by recreating, updating or revising it using a medium other than oil painting.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night was chosen by students in 2016, the first time I taught this module, and again in 2018. The cake was delicious, by the way. We cut it up and ate it during the seminar.
Now, this being an art history equivalent module, I cannot assess you on the basis of your baking skills, or your skills creating collages and photographs, and sculptures. What I therefore ask you to do is to write a brief statement explaining what you did and why you did it, and how that corresponds with your definition of “adaptation” or your attitudes toward it.
What I ask you to do is to write a brief statement explaining what you did and why you did it, and how that corresponds with your definition of “adaptation” or your attitudes toward it.
Whether you are a second-year fine art student or a third-year art history student writing your dissertation, or a joint honours student trying to connect the research you are asked to do in different fields, I hope you all can make practical use of this module and adapt its content according to your particular degree schemes.
To this end, all assignments are tutor-negotiated, so I can assist you in interpreting our subject in ways that suit your interests and careers.
That concludes my introduction to this series. Please continue with the second presentation – the lecture proper – at the end of which you will find instructions for the first seminar project.
Perhaps, wait a while before you proceed to take some time to revisit the list of words you created in response to the term “adaptation” and to consider how you might revise or expand on that initial list after reviewing this presentation.
I am very much looking forward to working with – and for you – as we explore the meanings, methods and boundaries of “Adaptation.”
This presentation is followed by Part 2: Creativity: Genius, Inspiration and Influence
Harry Heuser 