Richard Pettibone (1938–)Andy Warhol. Flowers. 1964, 1965, Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 8 1/4 × 6 1/4 in (21 × 16 cm)
PRESENTING THE WORK OF OTHERS IN A NEW CONTEXT
Appropriation is the act of taking work by another artist and presenting it in a new context as original. The intention is to highlight the radical idea that art is something whose meaning is as much defined by its context as by anything built into, or contained by, an artwork. This process of appropriation and re-presentation is known as recontexualization. It naturally invites questions about the nature of originality, authorship, authenticity, and uniqueness.
Wholesale appropriation of an artwork is very different from quoting another work of art within a new one, a maneuver that goes back through many centuries. It also differs from the appropriation of other objects or images for use as elements within a work of art, as with collage or in many works of the Pop Art era in which advertising and packaging imagery was imported into painting and sculpture. Appropriation is more closely related to the art of the readymade but is different because it involves the reuse of a work that was intended to be an artwork to begin with.
The foremost exponent of what became known as “appropriation art” was Sherrie Levine (1947–), whose output in the 1980s featured several exhibitions presenting the more or less unaltered work of other artists. In a 1980 exhibition in New York titled After Walker Evans, she presented a set of photographs of a printed catalog of photos by Walker Evans, the Depression-era photographer. Other projects by Levine included a series of photographs of images of paintings by Van Gogh and a remake of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (see page 147).
Richard Prince (1949–) made photographs from billboards used to advertise Marlborough cigarettes during the 1970s and ’80s. Many other artists made artworks in which appropriation was accompanied by some physical transformation. Jeff Koons (1955–) made a number of works in which he took an image by another photographer and had it made into a sculpture.
Not surprisingly, artists who engage in appropriation have often been sued by the makers of the original image for copyright infringement. The estate of Walker Evans gained possession of Levine’s photographs to prevent them from being sold.
See also: Quoting on page 144; Readymades on page 146; Collage and Assemblage on page 36; Conceptual Art on page 46
Richard Pettibone (1938–)
Andy Warhol. Flowers. 1964, 1965, Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 8 1/4 × 6 1/4 in (21 × 16 cm)
Pettibone exhibited many miniature versions of famous works of art as his own work.
