Updating a parody to make a point

The domestication of digital technology has brought debate over sampling other people's music and copyright above ground, most notably in last year's furore over Danger Mouse's Grey Album, made by combining elements of the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album.

Creating mash-ups of disparate music has become a popular past-time now consumers have the tools to remix songs on their home computers. Retooling existing work is a long-established tradition in art, and conceptual pioneer Marcel Duchamp is probably the most guilty for adding appropriation to the art curriculum.

His 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. extended his use of readymade objects to irreverently pencilling a moustache and goatee on to a Mona Lisa print, questioning the famous painting's sexuality.

American artist Jill Miller's I Am Making Art Too is the video equivalent of a mash-up, taking John Baldessari's 1971 performance video I Am Making Art, adding a Missy Elliot soundtrack and editing herself into the action.

Although Miller had no communication with Elliot, Baldessari gave his enthusiastic consent, even supplying the original footage for her to work with.

"I had many discussions with John about his work," Miller says. "He has so many great stories. He's in a position where he has nothing to lose by being generous to young artists. We talked about some of his older work and he mentioned being a bit embarrassed when watching some of it, particularly I am Making Art. About a year after that, I said to John wouldn't it be funny if he gave me his master to digitise.

"I had no idea how lucky I was at that moment. It was all so casual. After he saw the final cut he laughed and said, 'Do the rest of them, will you?' "

In I Am Making Art, Baldessari makes slow-motion, Tai-Chi style gestures, announcing with each movement he is making art and parodying the earnestness of much performance art.

Although a respected giant of conceptual art, he was well aware of the potential for banality and, in another ironic work from 1971, students repeatedly wrote, "I will not make any more boring art".

Appropriation often works best when it is sympathetic to the original while intelligently giving it a new perspective and, without negating Baldessari's intentions, Miller has extended his parody, transforming the dry, black-and-white aesthetic of early video art into a booty-shaking, hip-hop video.

Miller's understanding of the era of early performance art is romanticised, tinted with nostalgia. "I was not alive in 1971 but when I look at video and performance art from that period, I conjure a time when there were more possibilities, when artists perceived the world as a wide-open place where almost anything could happen."

In the United States, the civil rights movement and burgeoning feminist movement clearly inspired these feelings. "Of course, my knowledge of this is shaped by other people's memories and photographs and stories."

Missy Elliot challenges the way women are portrayed in music videos. Similarly, Miller's work has also questioned gender roles in the art industry.

"Women have clearly risen above the status of some painter's odalisque," Miller says. "But there are still huge, gaping disparities between the percentages of men to women in positions of power, like museum director positions and such."

By editing herself into Baldessari's video, Miller has to negotiate the inherent male-female interactions of dancing.

"I wanted to look like an equal partner, like his contemporary, so I wore studio clothes and considered my own vision of a 70s woman artist - no hair products or makeup or overtly sexy clothes. I didn't bathe for a few days to give my hair a limp, greasy-ish look.

"Dancing, by its nature, is collaborative and playful. But it also reveals subtle negotiations through physical space and partner exchange and general dance floor proxemics. I wanted to preserve the unspoken rules and social codes.

"It was tough to dance with John. He is much taller than I am. He completely dwarfs me. I had to enlarge myself by 10 per cent in post-production just to look vaguely normal next to him - oh, the horror of seeing one's hips grow by 10 per cent!"

Exhibition

*What: I Am Making Art Too, by Jill Miller
*Where/when: Starkwhite Gallery, 510 K Rd, to Saturday