“Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction: the issue is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among those that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific intention.” (Bourriaud N. in Postproduction p.22)
This book provides a plurality of voices by various artists and writers internationally that relate to the theme of ‘Appropriation’. It offers an overview from the 1970s to date, conveying the diversity of appropriation strategies in the last four decades.
Contemporary practice is divided into seven categories:
1)Agitprop: refers to the term for agitation and propaganda historically associated with the dissemination of communist ideas. Connecting thread is the deployment of appropriated imagery to make explicitly political work that is intended o operate mainly outside of the usual art institutions;
2)The Situationist Legacy: (1957-1972) neo-Marxist Organisation, revolutionary politics, Metro Pictures, copy-and-paste aesthetics of punk;
3) Simulation: 1980 J.Baudrillard, Sherrie Lavine’s Statement that re-works Barthes death of the author and birth of the reader);
4)Feminist Critique: (A) visual culture is one of the principal sites where gender relations are produced and reproduced( B) the mainstream accounts of the modern author or artist inevitably foreground men of genius (B. Kruger, C.Sherman et al.);
5)Postcolonialism: The retaking of what was possessed without authority ;
6) Postcommunism: mid 50's;
7)Postproduction.
8)Appraisals: more recent texts that engage critically with that legacy, either to offer revisionist histories, or to identify a post-appropriation art for a different era.
“one of the most fundamental distinctions between appropriation art in the 1980s and post-appropriation art today revolves around history itself. A recurrent theme in postmodernist debates of the 1980s was the supposed death of historical meaning, but major events like the implosion of Soviet Union resulted in the ‘re-emergence of a multiplicity of histories in the moment of the 1990s’. The challenge for the appropriationist artist now is to discover new ways of dealing with these ‘unresolved histories.” (Evans.D. p.22)
