It began with an e-mail and a JPEG. The e-mail was sent on
August 3, 2007, by Eric Fredericksen, director of Western Bridge,
the exhibition space for the art collection of Bill and Ruth True. The
Trues had recently purchased a work by Lead Pencil Studio, two of
Seattle’s leading emerging artists. The recipient of the e-mail was
their dealer, Scott Lawrimore. It read:
Hi Scott. We came across this image of Mariele Neudecker’s 2000 work
‘The Internal Slipping Out into the World at Large’ at Barbara Thumm
gallery, and am [sic] troubled by the resemblance between it
and the LPS work Bill and Ruth are acquiring. What do you think?
Translation: Did your artists copy to make this work of art that my
boss just bought?
Lead Pencil Studio (LPS) is the name used by Annie Han and Daniel
Mihalyo—the defendants, as it were. They won a Stranger Genius
Award in 2006, the same year they created a massive outdoor
installation on the border of Washington and Oregon using a prestigious
Creative Capital grant. Not long after that, they won the Rome Prize
for architecture.
Mariele Neudecker was relatively unknown in Seattle until this, but
a lot of people saw Lead Pencil Studio’s solo show at Lawrimore Project
last spring. It wasn’t until after the show closed—and the Trues
had purchased Arrival at 2AM from it—that an assistant
curator at Seattle Art Museum came across images of Neudecker’s The
Internal Slipping Out into the World at Large while doing research
for an unrelated exhibition.
This was the image attached to Fredericksen’s e-mail. It depicted
fluorescent fishing line streaming down from two Gothic windows like
beams of light materialized.
In Arrival at 2AM, thousands of strands of light-blue nylon
thread streamed down from two windows, like moonlight materialized.
The uncomfortable question stood: “What do you think?”
Lawrimore forwarded the e-mail to Han and Mihalyo, who said they’d
never heard of Neudecker or seen her piece. After some back and forth,
this came to seem like an unpleasant coincidence to all parties. Nobody
had reason to think the artists were stealing from another artist,
especially since the artists didn’t know each other and there were
significant differences in the ideas behind the two pieces. Plus, one
was an enterable installation while the other was a smaller
freestanding sculpture. Chapter closed.
A week later, Han and Mihalyo left for Rome. To the Rome Prize
committee, they’d proposed to spend their expenses-free year in the
city making three-dimensional portraits of Roman spaces using a laser
3-D scanning technology used by surveyors, called lidar. They’ve spent
their career so far revealing the ways spaces are defined, and their
two most well-received projects in the Northwest are Linear
Plenum (2004), a field of strings that filled Suyama Space, and
Maryhill Double (2006), a full-sized skeletal copy of a
remotely located museum on the border of Oregon and Washington.
But five months later, the accusation of copycatting came back.
On January 30, Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina
Hackett posted on her blog the old JPEGs that had passed between the
artists and their collectors. But this time she added a new
accusation.
Hackett wrote that Lead Pencil Studio’s latest work, Without
Room, an installation currently in a North Carolina museum, looked
just like an installation by Seattle artist Roy McMakin, Lequita
Faye Melvin, that showed at the Henry Art Gallery in 2004. Both
pieces involve gray furniture and both pieces, Hackett believes, are
referencing the modernist monochrome reliefs of Louise Nevelson. “But
Lead Pencil’s use of Nevelson is precisely the same as Roy McMakin’s.
It’s McMakin’s move, his field and his plow,” she wrote.
Hackett continued: “Maybe Lead Pencil’s Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo
hadn’t seen the Neudecker. I know that they’ve seen Roy’s work. He and
they all live in Seattle, which is not that big a town. As I’m typing
this, for instance, e-mails are circulating in Seattle art circles that
make the same comparisons and draw the same conclusions. Just as I was
thinking about it, I realized I had plenty of company.”
This unnamed company included important people. At the top of the
list: Seattle Art Museum’s modern and contemporary curator Michael
Darling. “There’s a lot of things that look like other things in their
work,” Darling said of Lead Pencil Studio in a phone interview last
week.
Darling may have some cause to take offense at the resemblance to
McMakin’s work, because he has had a long and close relationship with
it and respect for it. Five years ago, when he was at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he curated an exhibition of McMakin’s
work. That retrospective’s centerpiece was Lequita Faye
Melvin, a gathering of gray furniture named after McMakin’s
grandmother, representing the artist’s memory of her belongings.
It isn’t only the McMakin and the Neudecker overlaps that have left
Darling cold on Lead Pencil Studio, he said. They also use the same
type of webby metal as British sculptor Antony Gormley.
“It starts to smack of coattail-ism,” Darling said. “To use that
other person’s aura in a self-beneficial way—that’s when it
starts to seem derivative. Those examples make me suspicious. What’s in
it for an artist to do something that somebody’s already done?”
At this second revelation, the Trues faced an especially complicated
situation. They don’t have a personal connection to Lead Pencil Studio,
but they do own Lead Pencil’s Arrival at 2AM. On the other
hand, if the Trues are identified with any single artist, it’s McMakin.
McMakin designed Western Bridge, as well as the Trues’ home in Madison
Park and much of their furniture. In fact, they’ve hesitated to buy
pieces by other artists who work with furniture, because they know
those might be mistaken in their environs for McMakins.
The other day at Western Bridge, I asked Bill True how he felt about
the similarities between Lead Pencil Studio’s works and McMakin and
Neudecker’s works.
He hesitated. He didn’t feel good.
“Just looking at the JPEGs—that first glance—it’s too
close,” he said. “In my mind, all of the pieces are tainted.”
He added, solemnly, as if this were the worst part, “I don’t think
anyone did anything wrong.”
•••
What’s wrong and what’s right in terms of originality and art is a
matter of serious debate. If no one did anything wrong, then how can a
work of art be tainted? Which is worse, theft or ignorance?
“We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of
them,” Jonathan Lethem wrote in a Harper’s essay last year
called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” an essay comprising
sentences lifted from other places. In one of the few sentences in that
essay that wasn’t sourced, Lethem proclaimed: “Art is sourced.”
The point is that there is no such thing as a “clean” piece of
writing or art. An artist’s only imperative is to be informed about
what came before, Lethem argued, in order to steal better.
Outright, daylight theft is best, Fredericksen agreed recently.
Accidental copying—the kind Lead Pencil were guilty of with the
Neudecker piece—is worst, precisely because it is so uncanny,
Fredericksen said: “It’s a doppelgänger. That’s a classic horror
story.”
Except what constitutes a copy? Is there a difference in art akin to
the DNA difference between a fraternal and an identical twin? What
about mere siblings? If artists acknowledge influences more overtly
rather than less, does it protect them? Cases of artworks looking
intentionally similar through acknowledged influence or overt
appropriation are obvious and well documented, but cases of artworks
looking accidentally similar are not all that uncommon,
either—and present more complicated problems.
In the case of Originality vs. Lead Pencil Studio, what muddies
matters is that the debate revolves around works of art the people
involved in the debate haven’t seen in person. When this happens, the
narrative easily turns to issues of loyalty, of curator versus curator
and critic versus critic. (After all, Hackett and I are competing
critics, and I have found much to champion in Lead Pencil Studio’s body
of work. Also, I haven’t seen McMakin’s Lequita Faye Melvin.)
In the absence of personal experience, you’re more likely to believe an
artist whose work you believe in, but professional loyalty
should not be confused with nepotism: It comes from a place of having
truly been convinced by an artist’s work.
Beth Sellars, curator of Suyama Space, has a similar relationship to
Lead Pencil Studio as Darling has to McMakin. She says Lead Pencil
Studio’s critics “need to back off,” and to consider their whole body
of work instead of isolated pieces.
“Did Michael Darling go to Maryhill?” she asked. “Has he actually
talked to Lead Pencil about their North Carolina piece, or seen it? Has
anyone actually seen the Neudecker?”
The answers to those questions are no, no, and no. The general
half-knowledge of these works seems to argue for a certain amount of
circumspection when it comes to making sweeping judgments. Asked about
Maryhill Double, Darling readily conceded that he has only
seen one show of Lead Pencil Studio’s work: “I’m not a bona fide expert
on it,” he said.
•••
But that doesn’t make the resemblances any less striking. JPEGs of
McMakin’s Lequita Faye Melvin show close-ups of gray-painted
furniture—dressers, lamps, chairs. JPEGs of Lead Pencil Studio’s
Without Room show gray-painted furniture and clutter set on a
platform in the middle of a gallery.
So what happened?
Reached by phone in Rome, Han and Mihalyo said they didn’t go to
McMakin’s show when it was in Seattle, although Mihalyo went to
McMakin’s lecture. They were in disbelief at the charges.
“Artists would never redo work that’s already been done,” Han said.
“It’s just not in our interest. Also, for an artist to take something
from another artist who lives in the same city as us, who we like, and
who is collected by the same collector? We’d have to be pretty stupid
to do this.”
To them, the comparisons are surface level, based on close-up JPEGs
that make the pieces look similar when they’re really not. As with the
Neudecker case, Lequita Faye Melvin and Without Room have significant conceptual differences.
Lequita Faye Melvin is a reconstruction by hand of the
furniture McMakin remembers from his grandmother’s home. Some of the
furniture is out of proportion, as if seen from the perspective of a
child. When Lequita Faye Melvin was shown at the Henry in
2004, the objects were displayed in a jumble, the way furniture is
pushed together when it’s in storage. If a private collector buys
Lequita Faye Melvin, McMakin intends the objects to be
scattered throughout the collector’s own personal belongings. (It’s for
sale at McMakin’s New York gallery, Matthew Marks; James Harris Gallery
represents McMakin in Seattle.)
Without Room, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum of the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is an exact replica of the
crowded living room of an anonymous woman who lives in Greensboro. The
woman was selected from a pool of volunteers who responded to an ad by
Lead Pencil Studio calling for someone who lives in a small space.
Museum staffers went into her home and documented every object, then
the artists scoured second-hand stores for precise approximations of
all of her belongings (a Michael Jackson doll was substituted for a Pee
Wee Herman doll). They coated the objects gray and reconstituted the
crowded room—without walls—on a platform. A gray rectangle
painted on the ceiling demarcated the room. The only critic to review
the show, Travis Diehl, writing for the campus newspaper, described it
as “a living room rendered lifeless.”
The difference: Lead Pencil Studio’s Without Room was a
precise, jam-packed space designed by real use. McMakin’s Lequita
Faye Melvin was a jumbled, evocatively imprecise memory
closet.
On the phone from Rome, Lead Pencil Studio said they count McMakin
as an artist they admire, but not really as an influence. For
Without Room, they cited other influences, including Margaret
Roberts, an Australian installation artist who uses swaths of paint to
alter interior spaces, and the lidar technology they’re using in Rome,
which translates built environments into flat, unspecific gray
surfaces. (They’ve been on the other side of this scenario, too. In
2004, the same year Lead Pencil Studio filled Suyama Space with green
and white filaments, Predock Frane Architects filled a gallery at the
Venice Biennale with green and white filaments. Lead Pencil Studio
decided to chalk it up to coincidence.)
McMakin has mixed feelings.
“When I saw those pictures [of Without Room], it felt
peculiar—to use an incredibly vague word deliberately,” McMakin
said in a phone interview. “I think art is a very fluid thing, and I
don’t know them as artists in a very deep way. I don’t know. But what
they’re doing is a setup for things feeling odd to people, not a setup
by intentions but by circumstances.”
As for Neudecker, who is based in Britain, she responded to the
comparisons by e-mail. Her windows explore romanticized imagery, she
wrote. They are adapted from a nostalgic black-and-white postcard of
light streaming through windows at Grand Central Station. Lead Pencil
Studio’s windows, when exhibited at Lawrimore Project, were hung so
that the angle of the strings corresponded directly to the way light
would enter Lawrimore Project if the windows were real. Lead Pencil
Studio were Lawrimore Project’s architects; they were commenting on
their own architecture.
“Really interesting question. And sort of happens a lot, I reckon,”
Neudecker wrote. She said she couldn’t pass any judgment without being
able to compare the pieces in person.
•••
The two cases that have been lumped together are not the same, said
Liz Brown, chief curator at the Henry Art Gallery, and the lumping
together leads her to think that, on some level, there’s some “joyful
backlash” going on against Lead Pencil Studio. She has seen nearly all
of their work, with the exception of Without Room, and says
that these appear to be surface-level similarities that don’t diminish
her opinion of their work overall.
Her take on the difference between the two cases is not what you’d
expect. Given the relative obscurity of Neudecker and the relative fame
(especially in Seattle) of McMakin, Brown said, Lead Pencil can be
excused for not knowing about Neudecker’s windows, but they can’t be
excused for not knowing about McMakin’s gray furniture.
It boils down to this: They don’t have to subject their ideas to a
Google search before they make them—although that might be an
easy way to avoid a controversy like this—but they do have to
take into account a reasonable person’s expectation of their most
attentive audience’s base of knowledge.
Back to Bill True’s double assertion that something felt wrong, but
that no one did anything wrong. The catch is in how wrong is defined.
What did Lead Pencil do wrong, according to Brown?
It was not going to the McMakin show in the first place, especially
since he is a leading artist-architect in Seattle, working in territory
adjacent to theirs. And it wasn’t exactly wrong, but certainly
inadvisable, she said.
When I put the idea that artists are unaware of context at their own
risk to Bill True, he put his head in his hands. “I do want to think of
artists slaving away alone in their studios!” he said. “I don’t want
them to have to run everything through the filter of what’s out
there!”
It’s what Sellars said: “If artists had to worry about what was out
there in the world, they wouldn’t do anything.”
Then again, Sellars and Darling do agree on one point: When they see
things that look similar to other things, they stop paying attention.
Last year, the artists Hadley + Maxwell had the same reaction to their
own work. They made a white flag at half mast for an installation at
the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, B.C., and when they saw it
repeated, coincidentally, by other artists around the world, they
considered their own idea weaker for it, something less well-authored
because it was more likely to pop up.
It seems fair to say that some resemblances can be avoided by
knowledge, and some can’t. It also stands to reason that if artists
should be held responsible for what they see and don’t see, so should
commenters on their work. 
