Art History
Renaissance 1400 Italy
Neo-classicism - 1700s
Romantisism – 1800s
Realism – 1850s
Impessionism – 1870s
Expressionism – 1900s
Surrealists – 1930s
Pop art – 1960s
Post modernism – 1980s
Impressionist music (1870s)
Monet
• Debussy
• Mozart
Feminist literature (1960s)
Ursula Le Guin
Surrealist film (1930s)
"To disrupt the mental anxiety
of the spectator“ - Dali
Warning: some nudity & blood
literature as social challenge or
social glue?
Consider art history
- realist – Impressionists – Expressionists - Surrealists – etc
- femism, marxism
Read article
- Novels to uphold social order
Write paragraph about:
‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’ – Picasso
Art and Appropriation
‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’
- Picasso
Development - Appropriation
To appropriate something involves taking possession of
it. In the visual arts, the term appropriation often refers
to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of
new work.
The borrowed elements may include images, forms or
styles from art history or from popular culture, or
materials and techniques from non-art contexts.
Photography & painting
Beginning in the 1960s artists such
as Warhol, Richter and
Artschwager, began making
paintings that translated
photographic images taken from
newspapers and advertisements.
This painting shows how
photography has influenced not
just the content but also the
technique of painting.
Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967.
Gerhard Richter’s Woman with
Umbrella, a moving portrait of a
distressed woman, is in fact
based on a photograph of a
grieving Jackie Kennedy but
could easily be any ordinary
passer-by.
“I did not take it [photography]
as a subsititute for reality but as
a crutch to help me get to
reality,” a quote by him on the
gallery wall explains.
Gerhard Richter, Woman with Umbrella, 1964,
Liu Xiaodong’s “A
Transsexual Getting Down
Stairs” (2001) brings to
mind Marcel Duchamp’s
“Nude Descending a
Staircase.”
Such references interweave
art history in ways that
work for most of us on a
subconscious level.
Liu Xiaodong “A
Transsexual Getting
Down Stairs” (2001)
Nude descending a staircase no2 1912 by
Marcel Duchamp
Music is not exempt from appropriation either. In their music video
for their song Lemon, U2 pay tribute to the photographer
Muybridge.
Rappers & DJs sample and remix
other people’s work…
… painters and poets
do the same!
Pop Art
In the 1950s, a group of artists in
Great Britain and the USA, rather
than despising popular culture,
gladly embraced its imagery and its
methods.
Their audacity at first scandalized
the Establishment, but by the mid1960s their work dominated the
world art scene and names such as
Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and
Robert Rauschenberg were familiar
to many.
Film, art, music, photography,
fashion… They all look to (and steal) from
each other. You can’t detach
yourself from the world, and
the influences, around you.
Why galleries, libraries, museums?
• Artists don’t (often!) work with their eyes closed, and ideas don’t
(often!) come from thin air...
• Galleries, libraries 7 museums are full of original ideas and
inspiration.
• Artists submerge themselves in the culture of their surroundings,
and feed off it for inspiration.
Picasso
Here, Picasso has appropriated (borrowed, and made his own) the form and subject of
Velasquez’s ‘Las Menias’ to create a new work .
Richard Prince
In 2005, a Richard Prince photograph of a Marlboro cigarettes advertisement
was auctioned for over $1.2 million - a world record. He photographed the
Marlboro ad without permission removing the identifying marks. In a 1977
essay, Prince proclaimed that he was "practicing without a license" – referring
to his practice of stealing other people's pictures and publishing them as his
own.
Picasso borrowed from this image more than once
to create new works.
The Chapman Brothers
In 2003, Mark & Dinos Chapman famously bought and then altered a set
of Los Caprichos, - a series of etchings by Goya. Working on top of the original
prints they ‘vandalised’ the original work, by painting on top of it. In doing
this, they literally ‘appropriated’ the work of Goya and made it their own,
placing the original in a different context and creating something new.
The Chapman Brothers
The Chapman Brothers
The Chapman Brothers appropriated
the work of Goya more than once… and
in a number of different ways.
Great Deeds Against The Dead
by Jake and Dinos Chapman
(1994)
Goya Disasters of War, 1810 - 20
The Chapman Brothers didn’t only
‘appropriate’ from Goya, they have
also worked on top of a number of
Victorian portraits, ‘defacing’ the
original sitter, by giving them a new
and ghostly disguise.
They also worked into a number of
Hitler’s original drawings for the exhibition
‘If Hitler was a hippie, how happy would he be?’
Fashion & Architecture
Alexander McQueen & Sydney Opera House (by Jørn Utzon)
Balenciaga & Guggenheim-Museum Bilbao (by Frank O. Gehry)
Emilio Pucci & Finca Güell in Barcelona (by Antoni Gaudí)
Akris & Holocaust Memorial Berlin (by Peter Eisenman)
Anne Klein & Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (by Le Corbusier)
‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’
- Picasso