I have decided to explore the ideas of all three applications to photography. I feel there can be some exploration to do with my personal study: the concept of love. Love can be appropriated, performed and conceptualised, and I wish to explore that aspect in a greater depth.
“The deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art.”
Here is an example of the ‘Girl With The Pearl Earring’, which was re-worked using an image of her grandmother. The artist states: “The painting represents youth and beauty, but youth doesn’t last forever, and just because you’re getting older, that doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful.”
Appropriation in art and art history refers to the “practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original”. Appropriation can be tracked back to the cubist collages and constructions of Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. The practice was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men’s urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in pop art.
Robert Rauschenberg, Skyway, 1964, oil and silkscreen on canvas
However, the term ‘appropriation’ seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group. Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Levine’s aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image.
Appropriation in art raises questions of originality and authenticity belonging to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” and “Other Modernist Myths”.
Conceptualism: Alexandra Bellissimo
“The theory that universals can be said to exist, but only as concepts in the mind.”
A conceptual art piece by Alexandra Bellissimo, Los Angeles
The Conceptual Art Movement is probably the of the most radical and controversial planes in modern and contemporary art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the “essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation”. Many examples of conceptual art (well-known works or statements) questions the notions of art itself. Some conceptual artists believe that art is created by the viewer, not by the artist or the artwork itself, for example Bellissimo (pictured above) connotes that the eye of the reader is there to manipulate the subject, in any way shape or form. Ideas and concepts are the main feature of art: aesthetics and material concerns have a secondary role in conceptual art. For example, Conceptual artists recognise that all art is essentially “conceptual“. In order to emphasize these terms, they reduce the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum, for example, a tendency that some have referred to as the dematerialisation of art, counts as one of the main characteristics of conceptual art. As many conceptual art examples show, the conceptual art movement itself emerged as a reaction against the tenets of formalism. Formalism considers that the formal qualities of a work, such as line, shape and colour, are “self-sufficient for its appreciation”, and all other considerations, such as representational, ethical or social aspects and are secondary or redundant.
Performance Photography: Tom Pope
“The action or process of performing a task or function.”
Tom Pope’s work ‘Untitled’ from the series, ‘Curious Search for Nothing’
A collection of images to show the performance side to Pope’s work.
What are the connections between Marcel Duchamp‘s gesture of painting a moustache on the iconic painting of Mona Lisa?
“L.H.O.O.Q.”
Simply, Duchamp’s gesture nominates The Mona Lisa as a male figure. Arguably, Duchamp created an iconic sort of ‘mask’ that reads instantly as male but does not even pretend to conceal the woman behind the mask. In a sense, “L.H.O.O.Q.” is an artificial hermaphrodite, an image of a woman with that most superficial and nonfunctional characteristic of maleness, a moustache. (The beard is superfluous to the effect of L.H.O.O.Q., and in one version of the piece does not appear at all.) Both, however, acts as backward- looking in that their most immediate effect was to redefine the Mona Lisa itself. At the same time, both are prophetic in the way they project major shifts in the grounds of art as a system of knowledge. Duchamp uses appropriation in order to ridicule and radicalise the history of art, in a contemporary light which changes the normal social representations of women. This also suggests women as various role reversals – women are usually depicted as the ‘weaker‘ sex, and Duchamp toys with this idea possibly to lift female and male equality
What are the connections between a photograph of a cup of tea by Martin Parr and Andy Warhol‘s paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans?
Martin Par: “Cup of Tea”Andy Warhol’s series of ‘Soup’
Martin Parr’s series is a good example of contemporary Pop Art as it depicts an everyday object. Everyday objects were often used as subject matter for Pop artists such as Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ as he was able to manipulate mundane objects in his widely elaborated prints.
