In art, appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them.Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 27–28 The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (literary, visual, musical and performing arts). In the visual arts, "to appropriate" means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
Inherent in the understanding of appropriation is the concept that the new work recontextualizes whatever it borrows to create the new work. In most cases, the original "thing" remains accessible as the original, without change.
Definition Appropriation, similar to found object art is "as an artistic strategy, the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images, objects, and ideas". It has also been defined as "the taking over, into a work of art, of a real object or even an existing work of art." The Tate Gallery traces the practice back to Cubism and Dadaism, and continuing into 1940s Surrealism and 1950s Pop art. It returned to prominence in the 1980s with the Neo-conceptual art and Neo-Geo artists, and is now common practice amongst contemporary artists like Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Zhou Tiehai and Jeff Koons.
History
Suggestions of art appropriation in antiquity refer to artworks at least as early as those of the Xiongnu in Central Asia in the first millennium BCE.
19th century Many artists made references to works by previous artists or themes.
In 1856 Ingres painted the portrait of Madame Moitessier. The unusual pose is known to have been inspired by the famous ancient Roman wall painting Herakles Finding His Son Telephas. In doing so, the artist created a link between his model and an Olympian goddess.
Edouard Manet painted Olympia in 1865, inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino. His painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was also inspired by the work of the Old Masters; specifically, its composition is based on a detail of Marcantonio Raimondi's The Judgement of Paris (1515).
Gustave Courbet is believed to have seen the famous color woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai before painting a series of the Atlantic Ocean during the summer of 1869.
Vincent van Gogh shows influences inspired by Jean Francois Millet, Delacroix, and the Japanese prints he had in his collection. In 1889, Van Gogh created 20 painted copies inspired by Millet black-and-white prints. He enlarged the compositions of the prints and then painted them in colour according to his own imagination. Vincent wrote in his letters that he had set out to "translate them into another language". He said that it was not simply copying: if a performer "plays some Beethoven he'll add his personal interpretation to it… it isn't a hard and fast rule that only the composer plays his own compositions". More examples can be found on Copies by Vincent van Gogh.
Claude Monet, a collector of Japanese prints, created several works inspired by these, such as The Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867 inspired by Fuji from the Platform of Sasayedo by Katsushika Hokusai; The Water Lily Pond series Under Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa, 1830-1831 by Hokusai or La Japonaise, 1876 likely inspired by Kitagawa Tsukimaro Geisha, a pair of hanging scroll paintings, 1820-1829.
First half of the 20th century In the early twentieth century Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque appropriated objects 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, is early collage that became categorized as part of synthetic cubism. The two artists incorporated aspects of the "real world" into their canvases, opening up discussion of signification and artistic representation.
Marcel Duchamp in 1915 introduced the concept of the readymade, in which "industrially produced utilitarian objects...achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection and presentation."Elger, D. (2006). Dadaism. Koln: Taschen, pp. 80 Duchamp explored this notion as early as 1913 when he mounted a stool with a bicycle wheel and again in 1915 when he purchased a snow shovel and inscribed it "in advance of the broken arm, Marcel Duchamp."Evans, D (ed.).(2009). Appropriation: Documents of contemporary art. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press, pp. 40Cabanne, P., and Snowdon, P. (1997). Duchamp & Co. Paris: Terrail, pp. 105 In 1917, Duchamp organized the submission of a readymade into the Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym "R. Mutt".Cabanne, P., and Snowdon, P. (1997). Duchamp & Co. Paris: Terrail, pp. 114 Entitled Fountain, it consisted of a porcelain urinal that was propped atop a pedestal and signed "R. Mutt 1917". The work posed a direct challenge, starkly juxtaposing to traditional perceptions of fine art, ownership, originality and plagiarism, and was subsequently rejected by the exhibition committee.Plant, S. (1992). The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age. London and New York: Routledge, pp.44 The New York Dada magazine The Blind Man defended Fountain, claiming "whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.Arturo Schwarz, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Delano Greenidge, 2000 He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—and created a new thought for that object."
The Dada movement continued to play with the appropriation of everyday objects and their combination in collage. Dada works featured deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. Kurt Schwitters shows a similar sensibility in his "Merz" works. He constructed parts of these from found objects,The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993, p6-7 and they took the form of large Gesamtkunstwerk constructions that are now called installations.
During his Nice Period (1908–1913), Henri Matisse painted several paintings of odalisques, inspired by the Women of Algiers paintings by Delacroix.
The Surrealists, coming after the Dada movement, also incorporated the use of 'found objects', such as Méret Oppenheim's Object (Luncheon in Fur) (1936) or Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone (1936). These found objects took on new meaning when combined with other unlikely and unsettling objects.
1950–1960: Pop art and realism
In the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg created what he called "Combine Paintings", combining ready-made objects, such as car tires or beds, with painting, silk-screens, collage, and photography. Similarly, Jasper Johns incorporated found-object imagery into his work, such as in his White Flag. In 1958 Bruce Conner produced the influential A Movie in which he recombined existing film clips.
In the early 1960s the Fluxus art movement also utilized appropriation: its members blended different artistic disciplines, including visual art, experimental music, and literature. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s they staged Happening Events from found objects and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional found objects and materials. Also in the early 1960s artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol appropriated images from commercial art and popular culture as well as the techniques of these industries with (for example) Warhol's Green Coca-Cola Bottles painting of Coca-Cola bottles. Called "Pop Artists", they saw mass popular-culture as the main vernacular in culture. These artists fully engaged with the ephemera produced from this mass-produced culture while distancing themselves from the evident work of an artist's hand. Roy Lichtenstein became known for appropriating pictures from comics books with paintings such as Masterpiece (1962) or Drowning Girl (1963) and from famous artists such as Picasso or Matisse. Elaine Sturtevant (also known simply as Sturtevant), on the other hand, created replicas of famous works by her contemporaries. Artists she 'copycatted' included Warhol, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, Duchamp, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and more. While not exclusively reproducing Pop Art, that was a significant focus of her practice. She replicated Andy Warhol's Flowers in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery in New York City, for example.
In France in the 1960s, a group of artists called the "New Realists" used banal objects in their art. For example, the sculptor Cesar compressed cars to create monumental sculptures, and the artist Arman included everyday machine-made objects—ranging from buttons and spoons to automobiles and boxes filled with trash. The German artists Sigmar Polke and his friend Gerhard Richter, who defined the term Capitalist Realism, offered an ironic critique of consumerism in post-war Germany. They used pre-existing photographs and transformed them into paintings. Polke's best-known works were his collages of imagery from pop culture and advertising, like his "Supermarkets" scenes of super heros shopping at a grocery store.
1970–1980: The Picture Generation and Neo Pop
Whilst appropriation in bygone eras utilised the likes of 'language', contemporary appropriation has become most 'iconic' by using photography for exploring 'semiotic models of representation'. The Pictures Generation was a group of artists, influenced by Conceptual and Pop art, who utilized appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images. An exhibition named The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City from April 29 – August 2, 2009 included among other artists John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman.
Sherrie Levine addressed the act of appropriating itself as a theme in art. Levine often quotes entire works in her own work, for example photographing photographs of Walker Evans. Challenging ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, consumerism and commodity value, the social sources and uses of art, Levine plays with the theme of "almost same".
During the 1970s and 1980s Richard Prince re-photographed advertisements such as those for Marlboro cigarettes or photo-journalism shots. His work takes anonymous and ubiquitous cigarette billboard-advertising campaigns, elevates the status and focuses our gaze on the images' representation.
Appropriation artists comment on all aspects of culture and society. Joseph Kosuth appropriated images to engage with epistemology and metaphysics.
Other artists working with appropriation during this time with included Greg Colson, and Malcolm Morley.
In the late 1970s Dara Birnbaum was working with appropriation to produce feminist works of art. In 1978-79 she produced one of the first video appropriations. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman utilised video clips from the Wonder Woman television-series.
Richard Pettibone began replicating on a miniature scale works by newly-famous artists such as Andy Warhol, and later also modernist masters, signing the original artist's name as well as his own.
Jeff Koons gained recognition in the 1980s by creating conceptual sculptures The New series, a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand-names that appealed to the artist like the iconic Hoover, and in the vein of the readymades of Duchamp. Later he created sculptures in stainless steel inspired by inflatable toys such as bunnies or dogs.
1990s