In 1938, Le Corbusier painted murals directly onto the walls of E.1027, Eileen Gray's modernist masterpiece on the French Riviera, without her permission. She never returned to the house. He later claimed credit for the site in photographs and writings. Artist Lorna Bauer is now building a body of work that reclaims E.1027's memory, insisting on Gray's authorship against the weight of architectural canon. The story is nearly a century old. It is also happening right now, in different clothing.
Authorship as a Site of Contest
The Midjourney vs. Hollywood legal standoff, the Google AI ad ventriloquizing the Founding Fathers, and the ongoing debate about AI training data all run on the same underlying tension: who gets credited for a creative act when a more powerful party enters the process. Le Corbusier had institutional prestige and a camera. AI companies have compute and venture capital. The mechanism of annexation differs; the structure is identical. A Hyperallergic piece on Charles Seliger this week noted how the Abstract Expressionist charted an independent path that was consistently overshadowed by louder contemporaries, another version of the same erasure dynamic.
Reclamation as Practice
What Bauer is doing at E.1027 is not nostalgia. It is a methodology: use art to restore contested attribution, to make visible what institutional power obscured. The 1970s art survey currently staged at Helene Bailly Marcilhac in Paris frames that decade as a radical reinvention precisely because artists that era insisted on new forms of authorship, process-based, conceptual, anti-market. Tom Marioni's argument on why AI cannot make art lands differently in this context: the issue is not capability, it is accountability. Art requires someone who can be held responsible for the choices made. Le Corbusier was accountable, in the end, to history. AI is not accountable to anyone yet.