Appropriation

Appropriation is everywhere, in some form or another all through history. Dada, cubism, pop art, conceptual art, modern, and contemporary art all contain cultural borrowing. Appropriating is taking someone else’s imagery, usually without permission (other art, photographs, symbols, objects, etc) and making it your own by putting it into a new context. Many artists work is conceptually based around appropriation. Some of the most popular examples are Duchamp’s readymades and Sherry Levine’s appropriation of Duchamp’s readymade.

After artists like Duchamp and Levine, “stealing” images is not the controversy it once was. Still, appropriation always brings up the question of originality, and we keep discussing it even though appropriation has been fairly common for the last century. When is appropriation appropriate? When is copyrighting a problem? What does original even mean?

Enrique Chagoya

Appropriation is especially relevant to printmaking because of the ease at which we can reproduce images. Over the last century artists like Warhol, Rauschenburg, and Robert Prince have become famous for their use of appropriated imagery in a print context. They exemplify a use of appropriated imagery to comment on the cultural environment at the time. I think this is when appropriation is most successful in conveying a message because it allows the artist to more directly comment on and alter something that we are familiar with. Currently in printmaking it is common (and quite acceptable) to remix appropriated images in with a variety of processes and other images to create unique prints. Anytime you take an image off google images, or a photograph from a magazine and use it in you art, you are appropriating. It’s hard to avoid when so much imagery is so easily accessible, but it also makes me think about the reasons for appropriating. Is it better to take my own pictures than to copy and paste off the internet? Does it matter?

I came across an artist in my research who appropriates in a different way. Krzysztof Wodiczko makes large-scale videos, which he then projects on to national monuments and significant architectural sites to explore how these monuments reflect the past and our memory of it. In this case it is the actual monuments he is appropriating.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/

Junior Seminar Investigation: Marks

This is actually Jen O'Neill posting...my account is not working for some reason. But no worries, Erin has generously volunteered to let me use hers for this post.

So...the topic of this blog isss...Marks!

When I drew this word [marks] out of the hat, my mind immediately wandered back to my Florence sketchbook. Over the course of the 4 months we were studying abroad in Italy, we were asked to make fifteen minute sketches everyday using only short marks. We could make our 15 minutes one day be a sketch standing alone, or we could spend 15 minutes on the same sketch for a few days, a week, a month, until we felt it was a complete drawing. These are some of my favorites from the semester.

After spending 6 hours doing perspective drawings in a massive, cold, marble church, I was often relieved to not have to focus strictly on a particular subject. I would start with a certain mark, whatever came to mind at the time, and see where it took me. I didn't have a plan. I played with light and dark marks, accumulation of marks, frantic marks, careful marks, etc. I've always been a perfectionist, which gets frustrating when I'm wanting to sketch something specific like a figure or specific object. I get too stuck in the realistic. This exercise was incredibly satisfying and liberating in that I didn't have to worry about it being a "good" sketch. (and, of course, that shouldn't be what sketchbooking is about anyway). It didn't have to represent anything in particular. Yet, I still liked the end result most of the time.

Marks, I learned, are incredibly expressionistic on their own. A long, heavy mark expresses something completely different than a short, fast mark made by the same pencil or pen. Different media create different marks. In accumulation, I found that the way I made one mark could totally change the end result. I experimented with sketching the same figure using different media. First, I sketched the girl in my default mode, with a nice micron pen. Then, I ventured into markers, pastels, pencils, as well as experimenting with the different ways in which each tool could be used. As a result, each figure conveyed a slightly different feeling.

Sometimes I was slow and careful, and other times I was fast and gestural. My first sketch, done in micron pen, I felt focused mostly on the detail of the figure. The green pastel and the blue marker, on the other hand, were able to emphasize the movement and hint at a narrative. The girl in blue seems to hint at more of a sexuality, where as the gestural brown figure focuses on the twirling, dancing, movement.

Furthermore, the mark is an extension of the artist's hand, of his or her own individual expression. Were I to give this subject to a different artist, it may look completely different. It may not even look like a figure. Klimt's highly sexualized and often emaciated figures certainly convey something different than those anatomically correct (but somewhat idealized) figures of Raphael or Michelangelo. Artists in the past few centuries have learned the power of the mark to emphasize emotion and action, and often to go beyond realism as a means of representation.

The way a mark is made can change the effect of the finished piece. The mark, therefore, serves as a microchosm to the greater image.

diarization

Remember handwriting paper in kindergarten? Those dotted lines that told you exactly where to cross the t? I miss those. It was nice having a guide telling you what to do. Or at least telling you where to do it (stay inside the lines!!). These aren't the greatest prints in the world, but they came out of a nostalgia for the seeming simplicity of the past, anxiety about what the future brings (as evidenced by the third one, obviously), and a general desire for something like a Guidebook To Life.

I used to keep a diary when I was young--it was homework, actually, and I don't know if I wrote in one before I was made to. I didn't even know what a diary was! I asked my teacher what I should write about, but I must have gotten the instructions mixed up because, for my first entry, I wrote a paragraph of facts about butterflies. It's funny now because in all the creative writing classes I've taken here at WashU, they emphasize writing what you know, since you're your own best expert on what you know--and here I was, at six (?) years old, writing, literally, what I knew. I wrote about how butterflies start out as caterpillars that get bigger and then make like a little cocoon that they hatch from, how butterflies come in all different colors, how much I liked them, etc. The next day I wrote a page about dragonflies. And so on until, a couple pages on, I finally learned what I was supposed to write in a diary.

What's interesting to me is that even though I "didn't know" how to write a diary entry, I wrote pretty much about things that occupied my thoughts at the time (obviously, I was a pretty normal kid). Now it seems like keeping a journal or a sketchbook is a completely natural, and even necessary, thing to do. Or writing things down on scraps of paper and keeping them together somewhere. A diary, it seems to me, more than anything is a record of your thoughts. It can be confessional, but it is unavoidably personal. We hesitate to show our sketchbooks at times for this reason. Or we wonder about exposing ourselves in our work, because even our artwork can feel too much like a diary, too confessional or too personal (or at least this is something that applies to me), even though the viewer might not be able to guess at the story beneath the images.

I think a diary, journal, or sketchbook is more than a daily chore or assignment--it's a place for questions and complaints--a place for reflection and exploration. It's a place we sometimes turn to for guidance we can't find anywhere else. I think in our lives we're constantly looking for direction--and as artists, we turn to the blank page, and we make our mark. Our diaries are our personal guidebooks, tailored by our experiences and visions for the future. The blank page is the cosmos. That mark is us. More than affirming our physical presence, it affirms our identity. This is my hand. This is me. This is me, searching.

That's my stance on things, at least. Sorry for the long post! I've been thinking about this for a while...

Delegation

For 'delegation,' I found two general definitions for the word - either to transfer power, or to give an assignment or task to a person. Both of those seem applicable to art-making because giving someone a task transfers the power of responsibility.

Here's a delegation of doodles, starting with the word dream. First, I found a person to draw what they associated with a word on the card, then delegated the topic for the sketch by having them choose a word for the next person. And then repeated several more times. (Since it's hard to read them, the words were dream, paleontology, elephant, rhubarb, and submarine)


Delegation takes many forms in art-making, often transforming the process into a collective operation. We got to experience this first-hand when Allison Smith came to visit, by participating in a range of tasks such as research, dissecting a parachute, or making a pattern.

While thinking about this, I began to wonder what the role of 'delegator' means for the concept of an artist - or how often they are a type of manager for the implementation of their ideas? Also, what about everyone involved in the art-making process compared to the often singular term 'artist' (apologies for all the scary quotes)? Is the focus the participation of a community or reaching some specific end? Or what about delegation of tasks to machines?

Anyways, here's a link to a neat example of delegation by Stephanie Syjuco. http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/p_counterfeit_crochet.html

Archetypes...

One link to a good source is....http://www.crystalinks.com/archetypes.html