Once again, I read this week of an artist suing another for using similar ideas. This time it was Anthony James and Maurizio Cattelan over sheets of metal peppered with bullet holes even though such practice has been employed by Kader Attia, Angelo Brescianini, Margaret Evangeline and Mao Tongqiang according to an Arts Hub article. Until this morning I’d never heard of any of them and no doubt each had different reasons for going down this path. As an idea it could be interpreted as commentary on war, a country’s obsession with guns or the basic aggression inherent in the human species, although on an artistic level, the copyright act does not protect ideas so much as the expression of those ideas. In Australia there is hardly an outback road sign that is not peppered with bullet holes but then again, this has nothing to do with art so much as road signs being fair game.

The same arguments of plagiarism could be levelled at any number of artists [and musicians] and commentators on social media smugly identify influences on a regular basis as a form of insult, but how realistic is it to expect originality. I, like most artists, have an extensive art library, read articles and visit galleries weekly. Who knows at this point whether what I’m doing is free from influences. I suspect not. A phenomenon I used to experience was the eight-year syndrome. I’d recognise that the approach I was undertaking had already been completely explored by someone else eight years previously – someone I’d never heard of. It was unnerving. On the other hand, biographers delight in tracking down the influences on style as a matter of course and you’d be hard pressed separating, say, the analytical cubist works of Picasso and Braque as they toiled way in unison on a bateau lavoir to say nothing of the Futurists working cubist magic just over the border, albeit for quite different reasons related to a shift from the unbearable weight of Italian culture to an industrialising society heading to war with tanks and machine guns instead of swords. Anyone using cubist eyes is going to be tarred with the same brush just as anyone using horizontal stripes of colour will be a Rothko copyist, geometric divisions a disciple of Mondrian -even though he didn’t write the thesis of neo-plasticism- and reorganising nature, a lamer version of Richard Long or James Brunt.

One of my strongest memories of art school was not, as you might expect, collaborative discussion, but the spaces walled in by oversized canvasses to prevent anyone from seeing what was going on behind them. The vociferous denials of plagiarism told their own story and the feelings of guilt at being accused of borrowing, denied the right to study the work of artists. The number of shaped, flattened-space canvases I saw that year derived from the efforts of the field painters from across the waters flooding London galleries. Most of those art students returned to their own countries at the end of three years – some to become the only exponent of the flat shape style and to be subsequently lauded as changing artistic directions. I don’t recall anyone suing anyone else over similarities but then again, few continued to practice art as a profession beyond art school and there were those who were praised for absorbing influences into the ongoing cultural expression of a dynamic culture.

In the end it doesn’t come down to influences or plagiarism at all but a heartfelt desire to have a share of the cake. The only reason artists sue each other, it seems to me, is not to protect an artistic legacy of originality but to improve the bank balance or at least to dispel any doubt about provenance in the art marketplace that might affect the bottom line. Similar ideas and similar final results are bound to occur no matter the starting point and superficial resemblance will inevitably be absorbed into an ongoing oeuvre. Every artist is an individual and the motivations, way of seeing the world and handling of materials will derive not from deliberate forgery a la van Meegeren and those turning out commercial quantities of the works of van Gogh but a combination of factors that make up memory and sensory input.

A recent TED talk on what happens to children as the result of adult intervention and the identification of ‘mistakes’ in the artistic process can also be aligned to recognising influences as something undesirable. The quest for originality as a motivating factor drives education. Only those who achieve something recognisable as altering the direction of medicine, literature, engineering and art are considered worthy. Discovering penicillin, writing Ulysses or painting the Mona Lisa will rightly be applauded but each inventor, writer of artist built upon the work and ideas that preceded them. The idea of pure, unadulterated expression is the province of children before the judgements of adults gets in the way.

Perhaps there is an element of self-heroisation in suing another artist- a strongly felt desire to prove not just worth as an individual but to claim a place in history. Often that acclaim comes well after the artist’s death and sometimes not at all. It took a thousand years for the music of Hildegard von Bingen to be recognised for its modernity and for twenty years after the death of Monet his importance was overshadowed by the reputation of Picasso whose overall influence was limited to cubist ideas and essentially a dead end, in spite of the numerous copyists. Monet’s ideas led to abstract art, to the serial works of Warhol and even to land art with the manipulation of nature at Giverny and yet his monumental lily paintings languished in obscurity in the Tuileries for decades. Even though American artists arrived in droves at Giverny to emulate the master from the advent of the 20^th century, Monet gave no thought to suing any of them or of preventing his stepdaughter Blanche from working alongside him in the fields producing more than similar work. If there is a lesson from Monet it is to ignore everything and pursue your own vision.