Skip to main content

APPROPRIATION

"Appropriation in art and art history refers to the practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original,"
Appropriation can be tracked back to the cubist collages and constructions of Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. The practice was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men’s urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí’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.
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. Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Her aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image.
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.
Salvador Dalí, ‘Lobster Telephone’ 1936
Salvador Dalí
Lobster Telephone 1936
My recent artwork exhibited in the 'Pink exhibition' has very strong connections with the term of appropriation. The use of a pallet which is a pre-exisiting object with the materiality of it changed due to the addition of colour and the deconstruction and then construction of the object. A subversion of the original form and function of the object.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CORNELIA PARKER - THE STORY OF COLD DARK MATTER

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View  is the restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist Cornelia Parker. The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls.  In an interview with Tate curator Michaela Parkin, Parker suggested that an explosion was something she had wanted to do for a long time. To her, an explosion is an ‘archetypal’ image, familiar to us from childhood to adult life:       Somehow the idea and imminence of the ‘explosion’ in society seemed such an iconic thing. You were being constantly bombarded with its imagery, from the violence of the comic strip, through action films, in documentaries about Super Novas and the Big Bang, and least of all on the news in never ending reports of war. Parker liked the idea of something that happened...
Post a Comment
Read more

CLAIRE BISHOP - COLLABORATIONS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Claire Bishop’s short paper begins with a curious quote from Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art” (60) . A brazen comment, this generalisation gives Bishop’s discussion a provocative start. It also anticipates her assumption that all “real” art is necessarily concerned with aesthetics. This helps to explain her interest in discussing “the social turn” as Art—or, more accurately, a lack thereof . After briefly describing both the recent proliferation of publicly engaged art practices and their value as therapy for repairing the social bond , Bishop maps prevailing perceptions of this art as polarized. There are the “non-believers,” the aesthetes who dismiss the art as uninteresting, and there are “the believers” the zealots, the activists who, according to Bishop, “…reject aesthetic questions a s synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy ” (61). Curiously, Bishop fails to identify a third ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REFLECTION ON PUBLIC COLLABORATION !.

For this piece the initial artwork wasnt documented digitally by film or phtograph, i wanted to let the objects and the piece exist on their own within the space and allow the interactions and participation to happen without there being any sense that it is an art work. I feel like the results are completely different by just writing about the interactions as a reflection and a time lapse done in the simplest form by using text.  I found that the audience were rather confused about the obejcts as they were so precariously placed and people are used being informed about the art works or public art pieces. Knowing this the first investigation of this project was a success, i was able to gather an understanding of how people would interact with my art work and how it would display my concept.  After this investigation I do feel as though i need to reconsider how i document these installations, I still want them to be discrete and have a sense of the unknowing but also wo...
Post a Comment
Read more