Exercise 2.4 Is appropriation appropriate?

Read the following:

Geoff Dyer's article on photographers using street view;
Article on photography meets textiles on weareoca.com;

Article on Who's afraid of appropriation? on weareoca.com;

Dyer's article points us to the work of Wolf, who has combed through Google Street View to find images taken by the street cars: 'altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities.' And people reacting to the cars as they passed with a single finger salute - one of Wolf's works is called FY). 

Rafman also used  Street View to generate some more random images. Rafman insists that "it's the act of framing itself that gives things meaning". He probably has to say this as his art is created entirely in his home - he needs never step to of his front door as Google Street View has done the hard lifting.

The OCA articles are on a slightly different tack: the appropriation of art work by other artists. Tapestry as an Art Form has been popularized by Grayson Perry among others. Perry's Vanity of Small Differences is especially well known:

Grayson Perry: Vanity of Small Differences Avaialble from http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCeZtW9_BFXE2M6iN3bpKLADaVraX5WOJIcrHTa2dp3yzwhM5u. Accessed on 17 May 2016

 Marc Quinn used a photograph of a rioter to create a tapestry thereof. 

The final article focuses more specifically on the professionalism of appropriation by artists very directly of other artists' work. The article mentions the case of Cariou v Prince. Prince created Canal Zone, a series incorporating Cariou's photographs of a Rastafarian community. Prince transformed the photographs as below:

Available from http://greg.org/archive/canal_zone_collage_rprince.jpg. Accessed on 17 May 2016

After an appeal, the two settled. The Second Circuit judged that 25 of 30 images were  'transformative' to a 'reasonalbe observer' and therefore fair use. Prince was not obliged to say he was commenting on the previous work as his work presented a new aesthetic.

That is the background. The second part of the exercise is to look at artists who appropriate and respond.

I discussed this subject at length, including six examples, in Assignment Two Understanding Visual Culture. Revisiting the assignment, and reading the above, it seems the key variables are type and degree of appropriation:

Type of appropriation

Using photographs of Google Steet View seems to me to be qualitiatively different from appropriation the work of other artists; the former is publicly available and, crucially, was not designed to be an art work. Empty Room and Beyond The Pleasure Principle both used props that were generally available - the former as a trompe l'œil, the latter as a suggestive sculpture. Similarly, images from Google Street View ('GSV') may be copied and pasted. Below is a GSV of my street - note how the camera itself features as a shadow in the image, and the blurring of number plates so as to protect IDs:




Whatever the merits or demerits of these works as art (and Claire's comment on Empty Room is apposite in this respect), it seems to me that it is difficult to see these as any more appropriation than the use of cameras by photographers or brushes by  painters; they are props.

Degree of appropriation

 

There is a difference between the appropriation demonstrated by  Glenn Brown's Death Disco and Sherrie Levine's La Fortune and that by Sturtevant's Bicycle Wheel. Sturtevant's is an exact copy of Duchamp's work; she claims that, despite this, her work is a 'leap from image to concept, whatever that means. Perhaps she is almost cocking a snook at Duchamp cocking a snook at the Art Establishment - if she can copy Duchamp, what is so clever about his work? Levine and Brown, on the other hand, seek another aesthetic. Brown adduces strong reaction - complete bullshit. It's not art, it's tracing to quote one tweet - but he defends himself by saying that he has an idea of what art he wishes to produce and then uses art by others to create a reproduction along the lines of his concept. Levine's work creates an altogether reality - one stripped of the dreamy context of Man Ray's original. Quite simply, one concludes that the further the appropriation is from the original, then the more the appropriating artist can justify his or her work. 

 

It is difficult to know quite why artists appropriate; probably a variety of reasons. Sturtevant was evasive on the question, Lucas openly said she was broke so used what was available to her. The difficulty for those whose appropriations deviate little from an original is to answer quite what they seek to achieve. Appropriations challenge the notion that defining a work as art requires that it:

"...is done so superlatively well that we all but forget to ask what the work is supposed to be, for the sheer admiration of the way it is done" (Gombrich 1974, p477).

Reference:

 
Gombrich (1974) The Story of Art 12th edition Phaidon Press London.