Appropriation

Appropriation is the postmodern practice of making art from pre-existing images and objects with little or no transformation. Its precursor is Marcel Duchamp's readymade, above all Fountain (1917); the strategy crystallized in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation - Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and the veteran Elaine Sturtevant - and with Douglas Crimp's 1977 exhibition and essay 'Pictures'. Re-photographing masterworks, cropping advertisements, or re-staging another artist's signature piece, appropriation artists attacked authorship, originality, and the image-commodity itself. Far from an exhausted 1980s gambit, the strategy has only grown more legible in the age of the copy-paste image, meme culture, and open copyright debate.

Defining characteristics

• Pre-existing images or objects reused nearly unchanged
• Rephotography and copying as the primary 'technique'
• Quotation framing: cropping, scaling, and recontextualizing instead of making anew
• Institutional and copyright critique embedded in the gesture
• Serial presentation that foregrounds repetition and the death of the original

Key figures

• Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Precursor whose readymades defined the strategy (Fountain, 1917)
• Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) — Rephotographed masterworks to attack authorship (After Walker Evans)
• Richard Prince (b. 1949) — Rephotographed advertisements and cowboys for the Pictures Generation
• Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) — Appropriated advertising images lashed with accusatory text
• Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) — Repeated other artists' signature works decades before the Pictures Generation

Example works

• Fountain — Marcel Duchamp (1917)
• After Walker Evans — Sherrie Levine (1981)

Sources

• Appropriation - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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