For an example of one such possibility, I want to turn to a somewhat implausible candidate: the extreme form of heavy rock music known as black metal, a subgenre defined by repetitious rhythmic patterns, machine-gun tempos, transgressive lyrical subject matter, and piercingly distorted instrumental sounds. Made notorious for acts of violence (murder, church burning) committed in the early 1990s by some of the genre’s founding members, black metal offers a rigid aesthetic of intractable atavism on behalf of a fanatical yet inarticulate agenda. Easily dismissed as a grab bag of Viking nostalgia, Satanic posturing, and dangerous racist fantasy, black metal would seem to epitomize the worst kind of reaction to the dilemmas of modernity: a virulently nihilistic refusal to be contemporary on behalf of an impossible, anachronistic pagan revolt.

Yet its agitation for a return to a past that never was seems to me to chime with Simon’s query about where, in contemporary art making, we might locate the utopian longing for “unrealizable ideas.” Here I want to mention in particular an American band actually called Liturgy, whose debut album, Renihilation (2009), seems to me to play out precisely the question of how to work through, and out of, the melancholy deadlock and cut the Gordian knot of originality/repetition.

Liturgy seeks to simultaneously fulfill and transcend the conventions of its chosen form. The tempos and sounds approximate black metal’s decades-old templates, churning and cycling around tightly cropped guitar and drum figures. Yet the emotional effect of this reenactment of a generic framework is reversed from within: relentless forward movement has been replaced by a spiraling blur of sound. Liturgy’s vocalist and guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix recently published a manifesto titled “Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism” in (again improbably) the psychoanalytic journal Lacanian Ink. Hunt-Hendrix argues that traditional black metal is depressive, alienating, and hollowed out, whereas Liturgy’s music works through the deadness of its own form to reach a place that is “solar, hypertrophic, courageous, finite, and penultimate.” Neither a simple repetition of a past style nor an aggressive assertion of an impossible originality, Renihilation instead performs what the title invokes: the gratuitous, ludic gesture of killing what is already dead as a means of living in, through, and beyond that gesture. What looks like negativity (kitsch/pastiche) turns itself inside out and becomes a transcendent affirmation of potentiality.

Doesn’t this happen and happen and happen, say with street art, graffiti, DJ sampling and scratching, going all the way back to collage’s use of photos, back further to Duchamp’s urinal, etc.? Art exists as a dynamic process with artists acting and reacting to things buzzing by, around, and about them.

Sherrie Levine’s photographs of other photo works don’t look backward. They anticipate. They connect art-world concerns with emerging societal concerns and lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits about copyright, ownership, and intellectual property, concerns that were heating up in the age of the Betamax and have gotten much hotter as we’ve gone digital, open source (or not).

At this point in time it’s a historical, haunted, quaint idea that art is about originality. It’s about contextualizing and recontextualizing, which could but doesn’t have to include breaking the mold. And whatever’s out there in the world is potentially in the toolbox, and some artist somewhere will figure out how to use it.

And finally: picking up on Simon’s invitation to “to think about where else we can observe repetition removed from a thematics of haunting, mirroring, compulsion so to become a mode of celebration, especially celebration of unrealizable ideas.” I don’t know about the unrealizable part, but I’ll mention that among the spate of performative re-creations (some of which I’ve done myself), the ones that make sense to me include those that might potentially be celebratory. Take Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), which re-created a bloody police intervention in a mine strike during the ruthless Thatcher era. It engaged both the same and a new generation of miners, with even some of same police involved. Re-creation told the other side of the story and so validated experience, to some extent righted the wrong narrative, and alleviated frustration and opened some space for hope.

In Vertigo’s bifurcated, mirrored structure, a woman is made over into an image of ideal beauty not once but twice, by two different men. (The “original” woman is seen only for a second or two—as a corpse hurled from a church bell tower.) Regarded as middling when it was first released, Vertigo soon acquired a cult following among filmmakers, critics, and buffs. The film took on a fetishized status as Hitchcock withdrew it from circulation, forcing fans to seek out undercover screenings of privately held 16mm and 35mm copies of “the San Francisco film”—copies that became increasingly degraded by scratches, tears, and fading as the years wore on. In the 1980s Vertigo was legally rereleased, and in the decades that followed, a series of restorations appeared, each an “improvement” over the others thanks to digital technology. Some devotees longed for the damaged prints they first viewed, a material manifestation of Hitchcock’s vision of damaged and damaging love.

The film’s baroque plot has discouraged complete do-overs, but filmmakers from Brian De Palma to Alain Resnais have referenced Vertigo more than once. Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)—another film about fetishism, replication, failed resurrection, and murder—has inspired not only multiple sequels but an entire genre of films about knife-wielding killers, as well as works in loftier contexts. Gus Van Sant convinced Hollywood to finance his shot-for-shot Psycho remake. Yvonne Rainer placed a series of stills of the infamous shower sequence at the center of her Film About a Woman Who . . . (1974). And the artist Douglas Gordon appropriated Hitchcock’s film in its entirety, slowed to a speed of between one and three frames per second, in his 24 Hour Psycho (1993). In an interview Gordon told me that while visiting his parents he had used their VHS player to watch the movie in slo-mo, searching for a nonexistent image of Janet Leigh’s bare breast in the scene where Tony Perkins’s Norman Bates watches her through a peephole. Shall we now press pause to consider the effects of home video on repetition in works of art?

Or perhaps we should roll forward to Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega (2010), which begins and ends in a museum where 24 Hour Psycho is installed. During the course of an unnamed viewer’s musing on his experience, couched in the third person, we have this: “Everybody was watching something. He was watching two men, they were watching the screen. Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind.” Italics mine.