Page:Principia Discordia (Loompanics Unlimited edition).pdf/97

 SINISTER DEXTER: It's OK with me. Fate is fate. I never much liked "Mad Malik" anyway.

Ignotius: Besides people confused him with Joe Malik in Illuminatus.

Dexter: I sort of enjoyed the confusion part.

Occupant: Doesn't prove anything anyway.

Gypsie: That name sounds familiar. Where is it from?

Hill: ItsIt's [sic] a name I came up with in the old days and never used much. ItsIt's [sic] on page 38 of the Principia referring to Vice President Spiro Agnew. I always thought I invented it but now it sounds like a Stan Freberg name now that I think about it. It may have stuck in my preconscious memory from early TV.

Gypsie: Can you use it without his permission?

Hill: If it is his? I don't know. I hope so. It means "left right" in Latin and is a perfect name for a libertarian anarchist. Actually in my kind of art the question of what can I use freely and what can I not is a very tricky problem.

Gypsie: How do you mean?

Hill: Well, take a collage for example. Like the early one on page 36 of the Principia. Each little piece was extracted from some larger work created by some other artist and published and maybe copyrighted. I find them in newspapers and magazines mostly. Often from ads. With a collage you select and extract from your environment and then assemble into an original relationship.

The Principia itself is a collage. A conceptual collage. All of it happens simultaneously. But visually it is a montage, passing through time, like a book does.

There is a lot of pirated stuff in the Principia, especially in the margins. But also I sympathize with artists who must own and sell their works to earn a living. Art, like knowledge, should be free fodder for everyone. But it isn't. It is perplexing.

Gypsie: Where did all the things in Principia come from?

Hill: Well, a full answer would take a whole book in itself. Most of the writing credited to a name is a true person and almost always a different name means a different person. Most of the non-credited, you know,