quotation, excerptation, framing, re-framing, stagine, re-staging, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, approximation, re-enactment, prequel, pastiche, paraphrase, parody, homage, mimicry, echo, allusion,
said Douglas Crimp,
in his seminal 1977 catalog essay PICTURES, in an attempt to describe contemporary artists' new postmodern relationship to images. An overview of many works from this period in multiple mediums were seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC in 2009 in an exhibition called The Pictures Generation. Their works challenged ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, consumerism, commodity value, the social sources and uses of art, the idea of spectacle over lived lived experience, i.e., the relationship of the simulacra to reality. Appropriation artists use many strategies to borrow or recycle elements of media and human made visual culture. Inherent in our understanding is the concept that the newly created work often successfully recontextualizes whatever it borrows from.
We ended the lecture by watching Dara Birnbaums landmark work in the history of video appropriation Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman from 1978.
The main event this week was our first class critique on the 2D COLLAGE project!
The main event this week was our first class critique on the 2D COLLAGE project!
by Raziel Scher
“Abandoned from context makes things hard to read” by Alicia Ramirez
I began the process by looking
through my bedroom for sources. I found cardboard, purple fabric, some sketches
of mine, an American Cinematographer magazine,
and a HOME magazine. I cut the
cardboard with a knife and with scissors, glued the piece of fabric to a piece
of cardboard and then began flipping through the American Cinematographer magazine. The photos in the magazine were
mostly movie stills so I cut the people/actors out of the stills and began
arranging them with the sketches of people that I had done. I found a mirror in
my room as well and decided I wanted to incorporate it. I used a hot glue gun
for most of the pasting.
The original concept was to
structure the collage from bottom to top as The Home, The Backyard, and The
Heavens. I incorporated a map from LACMA with photos of beds I cut out from the
HOME magazine. The beds represent
dreams, which represent the subconscious, uniqueness or inner being of a
person. The map was cut up, disorganized, and pasted amongst the beds. The idea
was that mapping a person’s inner being, uniqueness, or subconscious thoughts would
ultimately get you lost. One characteristic of modernism is that the artwork
was an extension of the artist or in other words believing in the idea of
authorship and originality. But the postmodern approach is that unavoidably
artists will be too influenced by the other art and ideas around them to claim
complete authorship over the works they create. Therefore, mapping the origin
of the idea, the image, the lyric, or the thought is going to be just as
difficult as trying to map out the origin of a person’s uniqueness. In “The
Ecstasy of Influence” Jonathan Lethem explains how any one creation can have a
complicated ancestry that does not lead back to a specific and certain moment
of birth. Lethem also expresses that
humanity has pooled their ideas into a giant melting pot in which we continue
to consume from making it even more difficult to trace anything back to it’s
rightful birthplace. The only way our consumption has not used up these ideas
is because we do not just walk away once we have consumed them. We digest and
then expel these ideas back into the giant melting pot.
This image influenced my arranging
of The Backyard. I have three figures with different items coming out of their
rears. The woman on the left has hot air balloons below her rear representing
the “full of hot air” expression. Is her “excretion” just an empty
contribution? I placed a woman handing a man what looks to me like her
clothing, but the photo is too nondescript to say, beneath the butt of the man
in the middle. Essentially I wanted it to look as though whatever the woman was
handing over to the man was actually the excretion from the man above. The
woman on the right has sunlight coming out from her butt, which is shining on
the garden below, representing the cyclical process of photosynthesis. This
refers back to the melting pot as a place for us to plant ideas, fertilize
them, and pick them.
The Heavens incorporates the mirror
in which all the figures are going towards or reaching for as a way to show the
importance that the audience and viewer hold in relation to the work. In The Gleaners and I one of the men
interviewed, Jean Laplance, values the anti-ego, the other over the self, and
the connection between the other and the self. It is never just about the self.
I wanted the viewer to see their own reflection in the collage in order to
place them directly in the mess.
On a side note, I now understand what I missed in the
assignment. Appropriation has to do with critiquing the contexts that we are
forced to believe in. I was not considering, but instead ignoring the context
in which my sources began. I was too caught up in the world that I was trying
to create on the cardboard that I just used the figures and images to fit in
with MY story. There was no critique of the original sources that I was using,
but instead just a lot of complicated representations and symbols of ideas
influenced by the class. Overall my concept became too complicated. I was
slightly aware of this while I was making the collage, but ignored the thought
and became highly aware of it once class was over. It’s all a learning process.
by JUDD SCHIFFMAN
This collage is a collection of
images appropriated through scanning and internet searching, which speak of the
sublime experience. The template of Jan
Van Eyck’s altarpiece, “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” was used in order to
bring together works from differing time periods and movements into one
cohesive piece. Various Photoshop techniques were used in the collage, but
mainly the magic eraser and the selection tool.
The concept of “The story of how you don’t exist,” is that abstract
expressionists such as Rothko, figurative artists such as Haring, Chagall, and
Guston, and contemporary artists Cattelan, Turrell, and Nick Cave are all telling
the same story: the story of how you don’t exist. Ironically, the original Ghent altarpiece is
telling the story of how you do exist
as it captures Adam and Eve, Christ’s birth, figures from Heaven, and other
biblical mythologies.
Perhaps no piece of writing better encapsulates the idea of the absence of identity as Roland Barthes’, The Death of the Author. Barthes writes, “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost starting with the very identity of the body writing.” I think that art exists in the same timeless and nameless space as Barthes’ description of writing. The identity of the artist is secondary as is shown by the cohesiveness of the collage despite that the artists lived in different parts of the world at different times. Images and ideas are used over and over again throughout history and belong to nobody in particular. As is proposed by Agnes Varda in the film, The Gleaners and I, “You pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film." Art gives birth to more art, and so on. In 1936 Walter Benjamin spoke about how the earliest art work was made to enable ritual, and that mechanical reproduction in art was a movement away from art’s “dependence” on ritual. Artists such as Nick Cave, whose work is a combination of costume and performance prove that in spite of (and perhaps because of) accelerated mechanical and technological reproduction, ritualistic art is as relevant today as in the early 1400’s, when Van Eyck created the much recycled and appropriated “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.”
Perhaps no piece of writing better encapsulates the idea of the absence of identity as Roland Barthes’, The Death of the Author. Barthes writes, “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost starting with the very identity of the body writing.” I think that art exists in the same timeless and nameless space as Barthes’ description of writing. The identity of the artist is secondary as is shown by the cohesiveness of the collage despite that the artists lived in different parts of the world at different times. Images and ideas are used over and over again throughout history and belong to nobody in particular. As is proposed by Agnes Varda in the film, The Gleaners and I, “You pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film." Art gives birth to more art, and so on. In 1936 Walter Benjamin spoke about how the earliest art work was made to enable ritual, and that mechanical reproduction in art was a movement away from art’s “dependence” on ritual. Artists such as Nick Cave, whose work is a combination of costume and performance prove that in spite of (and perhaps because of) accelerated mechanical and technological reproduction, ritualistic art is as relevant today as in the early 1400’s, when Van Eyck created the much recycled and appropriated “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.”
Judd Schiffman, September18, 2013
Thank you everyone for all your thoughts and works!
Thank you everyone for all your thoughts and works!
PS. Here is our new text RECYCLED IMAGES (1991) written by William Wees,
after which our course is named. Please read and maybe pay special attention to the interview with Bruce Conner!
PPS. new book alert!!!
