Cut&Paste: Appropriation Art

Editor's Notes

• #2: Appropriation is another significant Postmodernist idea. The thought being that if nothing is original, then why not just steal shamelessly? Pastiche, collage, deliberate reworkings of reworkings of other people's words, art and ideas. Appropriation is an important historical practice in art-making, in which the artist uses a previously existing form, image or sound in new ways. The creative effort is defined by the inspired selection and manipulation of found materials. The end result is a strangely familiar, yet an altogether new creation.
• #4: Theme of the day: Translation Roland Barthes essay “the Death of the Author’ For example who is the ‘author’ of the image that Shepard Fairey used as the source for the Obama HOPE prints? So in this talk I will be looking at some of the exponents of appropriation art and how they have translated the ideas and images of others.
• #5: What is Appropriation art? Some defining factors include: It is the deliberate reproduction of another artists’ work. Artists ‘copying’ artworks for their own artistic expression. Involves adopting intellectual property from elsewhere This ‘movement’ evolved in the 1960s and peaked in the 80s. The borrowed elements may include images, forms or styles from art history or from popular culture, or materials and techniques from non-art contexts
• #6: Among the diverse, often contestatory strategies included under the heading "appropriation" are the readymade, d eto urnement, pastiche, rephotography, recombination, simulation and parody. Scavenging, replicating, or remixing, many influential artists today reinvent a legacy of "stealing" images and forms from other makers. What they have in common is a synthesis of visual material, both historic and current, and references to a wide range of sources from fine art and popular culture.
• #7: One important theorist Douglas Crimp wrote in his 1985 ‘ Ap propriation, pastiche, quotation - these methods can now be seen to extend to virtually every aspect of our culture, from the most calculated products of the fashion and entertainment industries to the most committed critical activities of artists … ’ CRIMP, DOUGLAS. Appropriating Appropriation, in HERTZ, RICHARD. (ed) Theories of Contemporary Art, Prentice Hall Inc, USA, 1985
• #8: The practice of copying another existing artwork is often identified with the formative years of an artist. Copying old masters has traditionally been part of the training to become a fine artist. You could therefore assume that Appropriation Art merely widens this good practice to contemporary or at least modern artworks.
• #9: There is a clear distinction between Appropriation Art and forgery. Forgers intend to deceive, Appropriation Artists openly show their authorship and the fact that the work is a copy of another artists work.
• #10: As a term in art history and criticism refers to the more or less direct taking over into a work of art of a real object or even an existing work of art. Some art historians regard Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as the first modern artists to appropriate items from a non-art context into their work. In 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the canvas. Subsequent compositions, such as Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913) in which Picasso used newspaper clippings to create forms, became categorized as synthetic cubism. The two artists incorporated aspects of the "real world" into their canvases, opening up discussion of signification and artistic representation.
• #11: The notion of appropriation, in the fine arts, was progressed by Marcel Duchamp, who took everyday objects like a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack or a urinal and turned them into artwork - ‘Ready made art,’ as he called it. By taking these objects and placing them in an art context, Duchamp made us question the definition of an art object and how an object is influenced and determined by its surroundings.
• #12: Later, Surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dali's Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in Pop art.
• #13: The great exemplar of the appropriationist painterly attitude was Andy Warhol, with his use of existing commercial and media images in the early 1960s.
• #14: Richard Pettibone During the early 1960s, Richard Pettibone began appropriating Paintings of important Pop Artists such as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. It was at this time that Richard Pettibone began creating his signature Miniature constructions on tiny, handcrafted stretcher bars. By miniaturizing iconic Works of Pop Art, Richard Pettibone created a new way of looking at well-known Post War and Contemporary Art Masterpieces. Most of the time Appropriation artists refer to the artist they are copying in the title of their work. For example when Pettibone copies Andy Warhol he adds his initials to the Andy Warhol signature.
• #16: However, the term seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group particularly Jeff Koons.
• #17: Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet, Egon Schiele and Kasimir Malevich. Her aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image.
• #18: Appropriation art raises questions of originality, authenticity and authorship, and belongs to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Appropriation has been used extensively by artists since the 1980s.
• #19: Appropriation is and exploration of signification, originality, appropriation, authorship and deconstruction. The term ‘simulacrum’, drawn from the writings of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, is often used to signify this idea of representation as reality. For Postmodernists nothing we can say or do is truly ‘original’, for our thoughts are constructed from our experience of a lifetime of representation, so it is naive to imagine a work’s author inventing its forms or controlling its meaning. Instead of pretending to an authorities originality, postmodernism concentrates on the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’), revealing (‘deconstructing’) the processes by which meaning is constructed.
• #20: In her ‘Photographs After’ series, Levine pushes the envelope on the notion of appropriation. She takes photographs of well known photographers and presents them as her own work without bringing any modifications or alternations to the original artwork. Levine takes a photograph of the original artwork from publications and exhibition catalogues, thus, she reproduces a reproduction. Through her work, Levine questions the notion of originality as being essential to the creation of an artwork. Such strategies were underwritten by post-Structuralist conceptions of the artist/author as someone who shuffles existing texts and signs, renouncing the possibility of creative originality. The issues surrounding postmodernist appropriation, and critiques of authorship and aura, are central to Levine’s daring, seminal deconstruction of the modernist myths of originality in many of her refabrications of well-known works by a gallery of male artistic eminences. Levine’s After Walker Evans (1981) is controversial because its principal conceptual strategy goes beyond simple appropriation: it bluntly challenges the authenticity of a work of art, the nature of authorship itself, and the sanctity of copyrighted material. Levine’s rephotographing of Walker Evans’s Farm Security Administration images was a deliberate provocation, both in its straightforward archival referencing, confounding likeness and resemblance, and, more profoundly, in the silent power of its analysis of the somber fetishization of impoverishment. Produced by Evans in the American South among white rural tenant farmers during the 1930s Depression. In a single cut, one is able to go from Evans’s documentary photographs, with implications of their ethnographic content writ large, to the very nature of their treatment by Levine as so much archival artifact. In other words, Evans may be the photographer of these works but not the singular author of the social and cultural phenomenon that engendered them.
• #21: There is a strong feminist content of her work since Levine, through a series of overtly appropriated works of famous male artists had challenged the hegemony of the modernist cannon and its exclusive Men’s club. Levine used feminism as a theoretical base to deconstruct the dominant ideology of the white, male artist/author. With reference to Roland Barthes, we begin to understand that the appropriation of mass-culture imagery offered a useful tool for examining various codes of representation, including gender. OWENS, CRAIG. The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism. In FOSTER, HAL. (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, The Bay Press, USA, 1983
• #22: French philosopher Roland Barthes' canonical manifesto, ‘The Death of Author’ (1967), demonstrates that an author is a socially and historically constituted subject. He emphasizes that an author does not exist prior to or outside of language. In other words, it is writing that makes an author and not vice versa. He extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity, he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.
• #23: Richard Prince's work should be seen in the context of the ideas of French philosopher Roland Barthes. In the age of multiple meanings and mechanical reproduction, Barthes argued there are no more authors, just editors working with existing ideas to create a new voice. Prince's habit of rephotographing existing photographs, initiated in the late 1970's, helped spawn the appropriation craze of the 80's. The artist himself is best known for his deadpan recycling of magazine and newspaper images that range through the highs and lows of popular culture. References to sex, drugs, rock-and- roll, alcoholism and the movies frequently give his efforts a dark and familiar undercurrent. But his relentless replication of found images also has its esoteric side and continually questions definitions of art, originality and artistic technique. Creating a new cultural understanding Marlboro Man’s ever self-reliant cowboy, Prince understood that isolating and removing mass-culture imagery offered an opportunity to examine various codes of representation including gender and class. By re-contextualizing them by severe cropping or removing any ad copy or simply by re-photographing a black and white image on colour film, the artist found ways to blur meaning and to create a critical dialogue with the objects created to satisfy the perceived needs of the expanding American consumer.
• #26: Appropriation artists embraced the undermining of authorship, making free play with the vast repertory of images and styles available to them through reproduction. With the concept of originality becoming hackneyed and outmoded they built their practice around quotation and appropriation. This work fits comfortably within a tradition of Appropriation art that probably started a long time before Braque’s and Picasso’s Cubist collages of 1912 and 1913.
• #27: Julian Schnabel’s paintings served as a focus for an already burgeoning art world debate about authorial intent. His imagery is as quotational as the appropriators. One work which exemplifies this is ‘Exile’. in which the young man holding a basket of fruit is a copy of a figure in Carravaggio, the other figure is from a child’s comic’. Schnabel self consciously plays along with the notion of the death of the author, by revising the myth of the ‘world-historical’ individual and the inherent force of progress. He illustrates that there is no personal language only a personal selection of language with work which is layered, shifting and elusive His work questioned the assumptions behind meaning and art’s borrowing. It was not, as his critics claimed, merely an art of surface, lacking substance and cynically cobbled together from elements seized because of their superficial visual appeal. Schnabel’s approach to style refuted the assumption that the history of art is a narrative of progress, and that the artists role is to rebel against the immediate past. His combinatory approach became his overriding mode, he found ways to integrate previously opposed media and styles in his work from and since the 1980s. He began to use quotations eclectically and to bring more opposites into play, regularly introducing highbrow and lowbrow subjects and formats. He experimented with combinations of past styles, as opposed to rejecting the art of the recent past. This was part of a general move towards a relativistic position, no longer seeing past styles as obsolete or mutually exclusive.
• #30: Biblo is another artist who uses appropriation of existing imagery and ruptures it from the original antecedents.
• #31: Glenn Brown Glenn Brown presented large, meticulously wrought oils inspired by sci-fi imagery and paintings by Salvador Dali and Frank Auerbach. Some critics referred to Brown as an appropriation artist, and he has faced copyright infringement litigation mounted by a number of detractors ranging from pulp novel illustrators to the Dali Foundation. It seems that his strategy runs closer to sampling than appropriation in that his goal is not proximity to source material, but rather mixing sources as a DJ does to create combinations of words, images and even types of brushstrokes.
• #32: Glenn can definitely be counted as a second generation appropriationist, the twist being his interest not in establishing truth to or a critique of originality, but rather his sense that sources are available for quotation, decontextualising, stretching, reorientating, morphing and re-situating in his own work. Appropriation is at the heart of Brown's work. He painstakingly recreates images borrowed from both high art and popular culture. Favourite subjects remain the work of Frank Auerbach, but also Salvador Dali, Rembrandt and the apocalyptic Northumberland painter John Martin. But the pieces are far from mere reproductions. Brown stretches distorts and manipulates his chosen image – colours are amplified, turned putrid or rendered kitsch by the "callous use of lime green and pink" creating an entirely new visual and emotional experience for the observer. Also, Glenn appears to have moved away from the critical aura surrounding appropriation art of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the way his work does not seem born out of a desire to comment politically upon or critique his subject matter (as was the case with first generation artists such as Sherrie Levine). Instead, his motivation to appropriation seems more born out of lovingly fetishising his sources, whether obscure or iconic art works. He carries the appropriationist torch to a next level – further blurring the cultural status of original and copy, traditional methods and avant-garde gestures.
• #33: Déjà vu: Reworking the Past was major investigation of appropriation in the visual arts held in 2000 For some of the artists in Deja Vu, the translation of a master's work or paying tribute is the object of the exercise. For others, appropriation is a means of commenting on the restrictive nature of Western art history. Some appropriate imagery to create metaphorical autobiographies: they insert their own bodies into Old Master figurative compositions, or push poses and extravagant props to the extreme. Others use irony, or reinterpret established motifs and re-enact or re-write history, pointing out the discrepancies between what is recorded in history and what is left out. "And some employ easy recognition of a style or image to trip up audiences whose viewing is cursory," notes Bloemink.