Cut: Film As Found Object In Contemporary Video

by Lawrence Lessig, Stefano Basilico (Editor), Basilico Stefano (Editor)

The moving picture, film, and television have exerted an unmatched influence throughout the twentieth century, equally documenting and constructing our reality. It is the peculiar power of the moving image that while it may be depicting a fiction, our viewing of it is real and therefore the experience and memory we take away from it is filed away with all the other events and memories that have actually happened to us. The artists in Cut have taken the material of their reality--the movie and the news program--and manipulated it to reveal its power to communicate and shape reality. Clearly indebted to the appropriation strategies of the 1980s and sampling in hip hop and rap music of the 1990s, these artists are united by their gestural use of editing. Whether through looping, repetition, erasure, or compression, their active manipulation of their medium recalls the importance that action was given by Richard Serra in 1968, when he published “Verb List,” a list of actions that a sculptor could use to create to roll, to crease, to fold, to cut, etc. Cut explores the actions through which artists create videos. Through the physical manipulation of the most familiar of media, they restructure reality, making the familiar unfamiliar and instilling in the viewer the opportunity to comprehend and distinguish a new reality. Included are works by Candice Breitz, Omar Fast, Douglas Gordon, Michael Joaquin Grey, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy and Paul Pfeiffer.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2004

About the author

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons, and serves on the Scientific Board of AXA Research Fund. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he has received numerous awards including a Webby, the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Scientific American 50 Award, and Fastcase 50 Award.

Once cited by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era,” Lessig has turned his focus from law and technology to “institutional corruption”—relationships which, while legal, weaken public trust in an institution—especially as that affects democracy.

His books are: They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (November 2019), Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (May 2019), America, Compromised (2018), Republic, Lost v2 (2015), The USA is Lesterland (2014), One Way Forward (2012), Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (2011), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008), Code v2 (2006), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999).

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge University, and a JD from Yale.