Appropriation – The action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission.
The idea of appropriation in art, is to use already existing objects and images, and recontextualising them to give them a completely new meaning. It has been a concept used by photographers and artists so that they can give something that has no meaning and give it a meaning by presenting it as art, or giving something that already has a meaning a new one. It allows us to question these pieces, and think to ourselves ‘what is art?’. Are we able to blatantly use someone else’s art, and not change it, but consider it our own?
An example of this is Sherrie Levine’s ‘After Walker Evans’. In 1979, Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evan’s famous picture of a sharecroppers wife and didn’t manipulate or change the image in anyway, and stated that it was her own piece. Talking to Arts Magazine in 1985 she said ”The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts,”. With this mindset, we have to try and think of the truth and fiction behind her work. Some people describe it as innovative, as she was able to take a photograph of a photograph and call it her own photo, because in essence it was. Other people such as the estate of Walker Evans, believed it to be copyright infringement, so bought the whole collection to prevent anyone else from doing so.
Developing on Levine’s work, in 2001, photographer Michael Mandiberg set up the websites aftersherrielevine.com and afterwalkerevans.com and made the photographs from each one of the projects available to download in a high resolution format, so that it is possible to print the images out at exhibition standard. This is to develop the argument on how information, art and a number of other things are becoming easier and easier for us to access within this digital age, and making us think about how easily art can now be created. With this idea of a developing digital world, in 2015 Mandiberg created the project ‘Print Wikipedia’, where he printed out the 7,473 volumes of Wikipedia as it existed on April 7, 2015. Mandiberg says there are two reasons to why he created this project, the first of which was because he had his own personal interest on wanting to know how big it really was. The second reason behind this project was because Mandiberg usually works with found materials, and tries to see what the smallest move he can make that will transform them. So with ‘Print Wikipedia’, it was taking a text form in a database or website, and turning them into books, which Mandiberg felt that the transformation was enough that the meaning of the information became different.
For my project, I’d like to take inspiration from these appropriation artists by using material that is accessible online and incorporating it into the idea of my project. For the project I want to explore the online personas of politicians in Jersey, compared to what they are actually like in real life.